Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Of ships, seamen & counter-revolution

A few days ago I was looking through one of my books, with the 
unpromising title Ships in Australian Waters. Compiled by 
Peter J Williams and Roderick Serle for Angus & Robertson, it is 
subtitled A Pictorial History from the Days of the Early 
Explorers to the Present Time and was published in 1968.

Printed throughout on heavy art paper, it is essentially a 
collection of photographs divided by type of vessel: "Coastal 
Windjammers", "Early Steamboats", "Coastal Liners", even "Royal 
Yachts".

One of the more interesting sections, "Inland Navigation", deals 
with the Murray-Darling river-boat trade, taking goods up river 
and bringing the wool bales out. Henry Lawson wrote about the 
river-boats of the Darling, making their way cautiously across 
vast but shallow "lakes" when the river was in flood.

Right now, a group of commercially-minded enthusiasts are getting 
ready to unveil a carefully-restored old river-boat on the Murray 
in South Australia. The restored vessel is presumably intended 
for the increasingly popular river tourist trade, a spokesperson 
noting that around a score of hand-made quilts had been specially 
produced for the restored passengers' bunks.

As with all books about old ships, Ships in Australian Waters 
contains a staggering litany of disaster and loss of life: 
"wrecked near Cape Willoughby 15th June 1890", "capsized and sank 
in Apollo Bay 1932", "wrecked near Bundaberg 1898", "wrecked on 
Strahan Bar 1898", "run down by SS Dilkera off Point 
Nepean and sunk during a rain squall on 8th April 1924", and so 
on and so on, page after page.

This gives added poignancy to the fact that there are so few 
photographs available for a book like this of the men who 
actually worked these ships. Ship-owners would proudly commission 
photos and paintings of their ships, and newspapers and 
enthusiasts alike would photograph ships, great and small, at 
every opportunity.

But photos of rough seamen, like photos of most other workers, 
were not deemed to be nearly as interesting as the thing they 
were working on. Consequently, the section on seamen in Ships in 
Australian Waters takes up only three pages.

It is headed "Iron Men" and does include a splendid photo of 
seamen who have posed while manning the capstan on the foredeck 
of a sailing ship (believed to be the composite clipper ship 
Sobraon) in 1881.

The composite clippers had iron frames planked with hardwood. 
They carried passengers and goods outwards from the UK to 
Australia and wool, passengers and tallow on the return trip.

The Sobraon, the largest composite ship ever built at 317 
feet (almost 10 metres) long with a 40-foot (12-metre) beam, was 
solid teak with iron beams and frames.

As the text accompanying the photo of the Sobraon seamen 
says: "Sailors in the wind ships had to be tough to survive. 
Apart from the dangers of being swept overboard and drowned, or 
the perils of shipwreck, they had much to contend with.

"The authorities laid down an allowance of food referred to 
generally as the 'pound and pint scale'. This was to be a 
minimum, but too many owners made it the maximum.

"So semi-starvation was often the sailor's lot." [Shipowners' 
attitudes haven't changed much, by the sound of things.]

Ships don't just carry passengers and cargo, however, and there 
are four sections in Ships in Australian Waters dealing with "Sea 
Power", "Colonial Navies", "Visiting Warships" and "Ships At 
War".

The section on "Visiting Warships" reminds us that quite early 
the Yanks had an interest in asserting their military 
relationship with Australia. The arrival of the American Fleet 
(known as "the Great White Fleet") in 1908, comprising pre-
Dreadnought types of battleships, provided "the greatest 
example of sea power that Australia had seen".

This must have rankled with the Royal Navy, but presumably 
Britain felt confident of its colony's loyalty, for they did not 
try to match the US effort. In fact, the spectacle of 1908 was 
not surpassed until 1924, when it was once again a seemingly 
never ending line of grey US warships that came steaming out of 
the morning haze.

The American Pacific Fleet, all modern battleships, light 
cruisers and destroyers, had come for a visit, half going to Port 
Jackson and half to Port Phillip.

One of the more interesting accounts of an Australian vessel 
engaged in military action abroad occurs, incongruously, in the 
section "The Coastal Liners". It concerns the SS Nairana, 
built in 1915 for the run across Bass Strait.

She was taken over by the Navy in 1917 and used in support of the 
British occupation of the Russian port of Archangel in August 
1918. The British claimed that they had landed there to prevent 
"war supplies from falling into the hands of the Germans".

Their real aim was to strangle the Revolution and back the 
counter-revolution, while securing some imperial booty for 
themselves (they also seized the Baku oilfields at the same 
time).

An extract from the Nairana's war record reads as follows: 
"Flying the flag of Rear Admiral T W Kemp, CIE [Companion of the 
Indian Empire], the Nairana was instrumental in the 
capture of Archangel in August 1918, engaging the six-inch 
batteries at the mouth of the river with her guns and seaplanes, 
and anchoring off the city after destroying the Bolshevist forts.

"By means of bombs and gunfire from a seaplane sent up from her 
decks, she destroyed an armed vessel in which the Bolshevik 
Chancellor of the Exchequer was escaping with the Bolshevik 
Treasury on board.

"Until October 1918 she patrolled the northern coast of Russia, 
engaging the enemy with guns."

So that pesky Red Revolution even intrudes into a book about 
Ships in Australian Waters!