MV Loatta Being Loaded with Muttonbird Oil at Babel Island
Lantern Slide by Sidney Charles Brammall
From the time I first heard of that place I knew I would go. There was never any question about it. It was as though I had always known that one day I would leave my conventional life, my treadmill of the Arts Society, repertory, music, ballet, and domesticity, and step directly into a world which the most reticent historian must record as swashbuckling…
There could be no mistake: no one ever went to the Furneaux thinking them to be the islands of romantic fiction. The men who told me about them never mentioned palm trees, romance and golden beaches, dancing, feasting and island belles. Instead they talked of adventure the like of which I had not known existed in the twentieth century, the like of which I’d never given up hoping would some day come my way.
It is no easier today for a young woman to desert the formal structure in which we must tread our measure if we are to remain in and enjoy the benefits of the society in which most of us choose to live, than it has been at any time throughout history. Because the social columns in our newspapers daily tell of young women travelling (the poor are ‘overseas on a working holiday’; those who can afford it ‘go abroad’) it is not to say that women are emancipated, that they have the same freedom within our social structure as men; it means only that travel within this structure has been made easier and cheaper.
When I stepped outside my own back door on Tasmania’s north coast and went over to the Furneaux I had no illusions. I would cease to be ‘demure and dainty, flying to Melbourne to the ballet premiere’…‘talented and charming, drove to Hobart for the reopening of the Theatre Royal’… ‘a new and becoming hair-do on raven-haired Pat’…‘popular secretary of the Red Cross ball in stiffened pink organza.’ I became a member of the crew of an 80-ton coastal trader and for six years sailed the waters of the Furneaux Islands in this and another ship—cooking, taking my ‘trick’ at the wheel, and helping in any way ordered on these the toughest ships afloat today…
To live this life I had to relinquish many things, the price of which and the value received in return being of interest to me alone. At the beginning, had I known the cost, had I known the return, it would have made no difference. I should still have gone. From the time I first saw a trader ease her way out of the swell in Bass Strait, her masts and rigging festooned with birds, her deck awash as she wallowed, leaky, old like the ship in Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’, and I heard her men talk of the sand shoals that shifted almost as they escaped them, of the mazes of reefs, of wrecks…; from the time I smelt the oil oozing through the staves of the great wooden casks and listened to the folk-history of the islands, from this time I was without reason. The islanders have a saying for it. ‘The islands have got a holt on yer,’ they say…
There is no easy way to see the Furneaux, as I found when I politely inquired of a sea captain if I could travel to the outer islands on his ship. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I need a cook.’ In the first place an 80-ton island trader cannot afford to carry a full-time cook—this position must be filled by someone able both to cook and either load cargo or do a ‘trick’ on the wheel. In the second place the improved conditions gained by seamen since the days of ‘Two Years Before the Mast’ haven’t yet percolated to the little traders.
In the galley of the Sheerwater was a very elegant slow-combustion stove, brand sparkling new. It was four feet long by two feet wide and stood out from the wall to allow a water tank to be fitted at the back so that in the ten-foot by six-foot galley its presence was distinctly noticed but not necessarily felt, as it never warmed sufficiently to boil a kettle in much under two hours.
Because the galley was also an alley-way used constantly with doorways in either end, the wind whistled past, through, in and around this edifice.
‘It’s no good,’ Pete, the boy, told me cheerfully. ‘Look. Watch this.’ He sat on it. ‘See?’
The captain was enamoured of it. He had bought it himself for this, his own ship.
‘You have to follow the instructions with a thing like this.’
When I asked if anyone else had managed to cook on it he looked at me almost sternly.
‘I’ll get it going full blast and cook you a batch of scones.’
He confidently set to work. As a young seaman he had also cooked for a crew, working to earn money to buy his first ship…
He rescued the instruction book from a big airy gap behind the stove and read from it, tapping the relevant parts with an iron poker as he went. When he got to ‘fuel may be either wood or coke’ he said with certainty, ‘Well, we’ve got that okay.’ But I couldn’t help wondering whether the manufacturers had in mind the sort of wood that found its way on to the Sheerwater—bits of sodden swamp gum that had been lying on the bank of a river, driftwood, tea-tree branches, old bits of decking, waterlogged flotsam, and odd pieces of scrub that the crew had dragged down from one of the islands.
‘Now to get it going full blast.’
Pete, who was watching us, scratched his head. ‘If you bottled up a bushfire in it it’d make no difference,’ he said. ‘I’d still be able to sit on it. We call it Old Cold-Bum.’
The captain took no notice of him, just went on stoking the fire. After a while he announced that everything would be right now, so his scones went in the oven, light, feathery, and creamy white. They came out three hours later, still creamy white but no longer light and feathery. There was a slight firmness round the edges—inside was dough.
‘It’s the way she’s set in,’ the captain said, without suggesting doing anything at all to remedy the fault of the stove. So I learnt to add two to three hours to my cooking time of everything on top of the stove, and I threw away my oven recipes and began using the oven as a store cupboard.
On the deck beside the stove there was a frying pan, alongside a saucepan in which a pup was fast asleep. The bottom of the pan was so dimpled from age and heat that not a tenth of its surface touched the hot plate, making it and Old Cold-Bum a highly ineffectual combination.
I ousted the pup from the saucepan and it sat on the floor and made a puddle, but that didn’t matter as the boards of the floor were covered with debris, dirt, gear, and old clothes, and hadn’t been on view for many a day.
‘Is this all the equipment?’ I asked. ‘A saucepan and a frying pan?’
The captain looked surprised. ‘If you’re not going to use the oven what other way can you cook except to fry and boil?’ (He’d already taken the new baking dish that came with the stove down to his engine room to catch oil that was dripping from a pipe.)
I’d read about the Spartan life lived on board ship and now I knew what it was like at first hand. Only one pan and one pot on board! Well, I’d have to buckle down and show that I was capable of adjusting to anything. I wanted to see every corner of these islands. One pot and one pan!
‘Why!’ I said aloud. ‘I could do with just the pot if it came to a pinch. Boil in it first and fry in it afterwards.’
‘Pity it wasn’t the other way round,’ the captain said. ‘If you could do with just the pan I could use the pot in the dinghy as a bailer.’
I tipped the pup out of the pot where it was again curled up and hid pot and pan in the oven. Then I turned my attention to the provisions.
There were two spaces for storage: one a box built on the deck, the other a corner cupboard, and both so small that one day when Pete was hotly denying to the police that we had game out of season he said, ‘We’ve got no skeletons in our cupboards.’ A policeman replied, ‘A skeleton wouldn’t fit in your cupboards’—and neither would it.
There was no need for me to look twice in the Lilliputian closets to see there was no food. I cried again. ‘Is this all the food there is?’
‘What!’ the captain called back. ‘Is there food there? We are in luck.’