IT’S ODD THAT AUSTRALIA’S iconic stories, landscapes, images and characters are mainly portrayed as being from the inland, where only a tiny percentage of the population has ever lived.
We have a strong and distinctive national character, and we are the only nation of any reasonable size that has no borders with any other nations. Our homogeneity of culture is a quirk of fate, history and geography, but it has little to do with the outback, or with rural pursuits. Australia ranks in the top 5 per cent of the most urbanised nations in the world and our population hugs the coast.
The distinguishing factor that shaped our history and our national character is actually the fact that we are surrounded by ocean.
Before the European invasion, the vast majority of Aboriginal people lived on the coast or within easy reach of the sea. When Europeans arrived they, too, clung to the coastal areas of the continent, for obvious reasons.
Firstly, that’s where most of the fertile land was, and easy access to fresh water.
Secondly, the sea was the primary means of transport until quite recently. It was the major link for Australians travelling to other parts of the country, and indeed it was Australia’s only link to the rest of the world.
It is true that railways eventually linked the inland to the coast, but each colony had a different rail gauge, so the only expedient way to get to other major cities in Australia, or even to towns within each colony, was by sea.
We became a wealthy nation not because we produced wool, gold, beef, coal and iron in vast quantities, but because clipper ships and steamers carried our wool, gold, coal, iron and frozen beef to the world.
It was not only international shipping that made us a great seafaring nation. In our brief European history of 225 years, with a small and scattered population, our coastal sea-lanes have been home to more than 5000 ships, operated by at least 300 Australian-based shipping companies.
These are ships that plied Australian waters, operated by Australian companies as huge as the Adelaide Steamship Company and the Australian National Line, or as small as my favourite: the Humpybong Steamship Company of Brisbane, which operated the steamers SS Pearl, Beryl, Garnet, Emerald and Olivine between Woody Point and Sandgate from 1891 to 1907.
Australia relied on coastal trade from the earliest days of the colonies until the 1960s. There were no interstate roads to speak of until the twentieth century—and air travel was only a novelty until World War II.
The greatest labour struggles in our nation’s history were fought between maritime unions, shipping companies and governments on Australian docks and ships, although the shearer’s strikes seem to get all the attention, and all the songs and stories.
The drama and romance of long inland treks seem to appeal to Australians more than daring ocean voyages. Many Aussies still believe the fairytale about the first Melbourne Cup winner walking from Nowra to Melbourne to compete in the race!
Archer went by steamship from Sydney to Melbourne three times to compete in Victorian Spring races, in 1861, 1862 and 1863.
Trainer Etienne De Mestre’s horses usually boarded the steamer at Adam’s Wharf near his property at Terara, on the Shoalhaven River on the New South Wales south coast. Floods in 1860 altered the course of the river channels and made navigation dangerous. So, from 1860 to 1863, horses were walked to the wharf at Greenwell Point thirteen kilometres to the east. This may be the origin of the ‘walking to Melbourne’ myth. There is no doubt Archer went by steamship to Melbourne or Sydney or Newcastle to race; all racehorses did the same.
In 1876 the steamer City Of Melbourne ran into a savage storm taking the Sydney horses to Melbourne for the Spring Carnival. All the horses, except one, were washed overboard and drowned. The one surviving horse had already won the AJC Derby but was, strangely, as yet unnamed. He was appropriately named Robinson Crusoe and became a champion and a great sire.
A brief look at any newspaper archive from the earliest colonial times to the 1960s will reveal the daily ‘shipping section’, showing which ships arrived from which ports and which ones were leaving; it also noted which ships were expected, and when mail could be accepted on board, and so on. The shipping news was a major section of every city newspaper and usually occupied a good part of one of the leading pages.
Our nation was not only ‘girt by sea’—it was sustained, supplied and kept informed by sea!
I would have loved to include more stories about our coastal trade in this volume, as it has been such an important part of our nation’s history and is rapidly being forgotten. The stories that are included, however, concentrate on voyages to or from our shores.
It seems European voyages to our shores began as early as 1520, and the visitors were Portuguese. There is evidence of Spanish visitors, too: artefacts found in mangroves and on reefs suggest the Spanish made their way to our shores from the east, not long after their rivals, the Portuguese, arrived from the west.
There is also no doubt that many Dutch sailors and explorers visited, intentionally or accidentally. Willem Janszoon explored the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Duyfken in 1606, and Dirk Hartog was on the Western Australian coast ten years later.
Pieter Nuyts explored our south coast as far as Ceduna in 1627, and Abel Tasman landed in Van Diemen’s Land in 1642. Quite a few Dutch vessels were wrecked along the west coast, including the infamous Batavia in 1629 and the Gilt Dragon in 1656. The Dutch regularly called in for water and to repair their ships.
An English ship, the Tryall, was wrecked off our coast as early as 1622, but the English first arrived on shore in the guise of adventurer William Dampier in 1688. In 1699 the British government was interested enough to finance an expedition for Dampier to take a second look. The French were sailing in our waters before the eighteenth century—and then along came James Cook.
All these stories are fascinating and, although most have been told many times, they all deserve to be told again. I simply ran out of space to retell them all.
This is not a history book or a comprehensive reference book. It is a collection of stories that will hopefully entertain and inform readers who like a good yarn, but they are all true stories.
I have included a timeline so that the stories can be referenced against each other and to enable the reader to put the individual stories into chronological order. Perhaps they make more sense if the flow of history that connects many of them can be checked easily.
I certainly enjoyed researching and retelling some of the great stories from our maritime past. They are ripping yarns indeed— better than any fictional tales a scriptwriter could dream up. Some are tragic, others are thrilling and inspiring, many are all that and more.
The more I delve into our past, the more I am in awe of our colonial pioneers, and the more admiration and respect I have for the ordinary—yet extraordinary—folk who came before us and got on with building a nation. They often demonstrated a stoic acceptance of hardship, perseverance and a basic will to survive. They didn’t think they were building a nation—they were usually just following orders, or making the best of what life handed them.
Of course there are the heroes, too: men and women whose courage, sense of adventure and actions in the face of danger are difficult to comprehend by anyone living in a modern, affluent nation like ours.
Men like James Cook, La Perouse, Arthur Phillip, Matthew Flinders and that stoic brave Scot John Hunter shine like beacons from the dim historic fog of our past.
Stories of women with the daring, courage and endurance of Mary Bryant and Charlotte Badger take my breath away. What amazingly admirable characters they were, with their fierce determination to live as they wished in spite of all that nature, fate and a male-dominated, unfair, class-ridden society could throw at them.
While I love retelling these stories, it is wonderful to be able to include other stories from the pens of such great story-tellers as Henry Lawson, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson and Banjo Paterson. Their reflections on ocean travel to or from Australia are full of wit and observations that give us a real insight into their time and the way of life at sea back then.
The various snippets of verse interspersed between stories is an indulgence that allowed me to give the flavour of the sea and its many moods as felt by some of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Tennyson, Coleridge, Henry Kendall, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Lawson, Roderic Quinn, Charles Souter and, of course, Banjo Paterson. Each piece of verse is intended to capture something of the events, mood or flavour of the story it follows.
I was also keen to include stories from our more recent past. Jim Bendrodt’s dramatic story of how a boy and a horse survived a cyclone aboard a freighter is a long-time favourite of mine, and I also had a great time researching and retelling the story of assisted migration to our shores.
David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s beautifully told tale of the Tampa rescue brings our migration history graphically up to date.
Between the voyage of Cristovao de Mendonca’s caravels and the mercy mission of Arne Rinnan, captain of the Tampa, lies a maritime history that spans five centuries.
It is the fascinating history of a continent—or the planet’s largest island if you prefer—called Java la Grande, Terra Incognita, Terra Australis and New Holland . . . until, finally, a rather remarkable man named Matthew Flinders, annoyed at all the confusion over names, wrote simply:
‘I call the whole island Australia.’