The Best Australian Sea Stories: Our land is girt by sea

By Jim Haynes

A dazzling collection of writing about the sea - from first-hand accounts of ocean voyages to stories by Banjo Paterson and Mark Twain - from Australia's most successful Australiana author.

The deep blue sea has been an endless source of inspiration, wonder and imagination for explorers and writers alike. Australia's history and national character have been defined by the fact that we live on an isolated island continent girt by sea.

The Best Australian Sea Stories is full of fascinating history, drama, and surprise. These stories trace the maritime history of Australia from the earliest times to today. From first-hand accounts of voyages from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to modern accounts of refugee 'boat people', the book is a dazzling compendium of the famous and obscure, the brave and the jinxed, human achievement and tragedy.

From the mystery of the mahogany ship and the Dieppe map, which point to Portuguese discovery of Australia's entire east coast in 1522, to the poignancy of Matthew Flinders' wife waiting nine years while he charted the coast of the land he named 'Australia', survived shipwrecks and became a political prisoner of the French, this book is full of amazing stories of bravery and endeavour, war and salvation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781743432426

Book preview

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Before becoming a professional entertainer, songwriter, verse writer and singer in 1988, Jim Haynes taught writing, literature, history and drama in schools and universities from outback New South Wales to Britain and back again. While teaching he gained two masters degrees in literature, from New England University and the University of Wales (UK). A descendent of British immigrants who made their own sea voyage to Australia in 1929, Jim is the author of many great Australian titles including books on railways, the trucking industry, aviation and horse racing. He is one of our most successful and prolific Australiana authors.

The Best

Australian

Sea Stories

JIM HAYNES

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First published in 2012

Copyright © Jim Haynes 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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ISBN 978 1 74237 125 2

Set in 12/15 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

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This book is for Wenda McMillan—who spent a good deal of her life at sea on the Lauryn G.

Contents

Introduction Jim Haynes

‘The Ocean Beach’ Wilfred Mailler

Timeline Jim Haynes

‘The Days When The World Was Wide’ (excerpt) Henry Lawson

It’s out there . . . somewhere Jim Haynes

‘Captain Cook—A Limerick’ Jim Haynes

Voyage to Sydney Mark Twain

‘The Bonny Port of Sydney’ Henry Lawson

Star of the southern seas Jim Haynes

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (excerpt) Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The ablest seaman in the French navy Ernest Scott

‘Explorers’ Jose-Maria de Heredia

The surgeon’s journal John White

‘Sydney Cove, 1788’ Roderic Quinn

The boy who read Robinson Crusoe Jim Haynes

‘The Ships That Won’t Go Down’ Henry Lawson

The Voyage of the Janet Nicoll Robert Louis Stevenson

‘Requiem’ Robert Louis Stevenson

The ones that got away Jim Haynes

‘The Cyprus Brig’ Frank McNamara

Cecil Rhodes and the shark Mark Twain

‘Sharks Are (Relatively) Harmless’ Jim Haynes

Passage to Melbourne Jim Haynes

‘Break, Break, Break’ Alfred Tennyson

Full up: The voyage of the Palapa David Marr and Marian Wilkinson

‘At the Tide’s Will’ Roderic Quinn

Mystery of the Venus mutineers Anthony Brown

‘Unknown Seas’ (excerpt) George Horton

A harbour full of bodies Jim Haynes

‘Dunbar’ Henry Kendall

Coming across Henry Lawson

‘Sydney-Side’ (excerpt) Henry Lawson

To war with The Banjo Banjo Paterson

‘There’s Another Blessed Horse Fell Down’ Banjo Paterson

Hurrah for old Ireland: The Catalpa rescue Jim Haynes

‘The Catalpa’ Traditional

A day on a lugger Banjo Paterson

‘The Pearl Diver’ Banjo Paterson

Ringed with menace Jim Haynes

‘Lost With All Hands’ Peter Mace

Zaimis Jim Bendrodt

‘The Sea and the Hills’ (excerpt) Rudyard Kipling

One way ticket Jim Haynes

‘How Australian Are You?’ Jim Haynes

The pilots of Port Phillip Bay Matt Stirling

‘Sea Fear’ Charles Souter

Acknowledgements

THANKS TO DAVID MARR and Marian Wilkinson for permission to include the Palapa story from their book Dark Victory and Peter Mace for permission to use his poem ‘Lost With All Hands’,

I also want to thank Rosalind Stirling, from Heritage Australia magazine, for her help and support and Matt Stirling and Tony Brown for their co-operation and permission to use their stories.

Thanks to the team at Allen & Unwin for their enthusiastic support of this project, especially Foong Ling Kong, Stuart Neal and editors Laura Mitchell, Katri Hilden, and Jo Lyons; and to Lisa Macken for proofreading.

Thanks also to Dennis O’Keeffe for his local knowledge and friendship and, as always, to Robyn for listening when I needed an opinion.

AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man—who has no gills.

Ambrose Bierce

Introduction

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.’

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In 2008 I received a letter from an Afghan refugee, Asif Raza.

He wrote to thank me for a random, small act of kindness.

After a performance at a folk festival, someone mentioned they were helping Asif learn to read English, so I gave them an anthology of 1000 Australian poems to give to him, a book I compiled a few years back.

Asif’s letter expressed far more gratitude than my small gesture deserved. He was astounded, he said, at the kindness he had received since arriving in Australia.

As a young man from a desert country which has no coastline at all, he chose an old short poem to express his feelings about his new homeland. This is it.

‘The Ocean Beach’

Wilfred Mailler

I weary of the sun-scorched plain,

Its yellow, sere monotony;

I want the whisper of the rain;

I want the great, blue, surging sea.

Oh just to wash away the stain

Of dust eternal and be fanned

By winds that sing the strong refrain

Of crested wave and cool, wet sand.

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Timeline

15th century

16th century

17th century

18th century

19th century

20th century

21st century

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‘The Days When The World Was Wide’

Henry Lawson (excerpt)

The world is narrow and ways are short,

And our lives are dull and slow,

For little is new where the crowds resort,

And less where the wanderers go;

Greater, or smaller, the same old things

We see by the dull road-side—

And tired of all is the spirit that sings

Of the days when the world was wide.

When the North was hale in the march of Time,

And the South and the West were new,

And the gorgeous East was a pantomime,

As it seemed in our boyhood’s view;

When Spain was first on the waves of change,

And proud in the ranks of pride,

And all was wonderful, new and strange

In the days when the world was wide.

They sailed away in the ships that sailed

Ere science controlled the main,

When the strong, brave heart of a man prevailed

As ’twill never prevail again;

They knew not whither, nor much they cared—

Let Fate or the winds decide—

The worst of the Great Unknown they dared

In the days when the world was wide.

They raised new stars on the silent sea

That filled their hearts with awe;

They came to many a strange countree

And marvellous sights they saw.

The villagers gaped at the tales they told,

And old eyes glistened with pride—

When barbarous cities were paved with gold

In the days when the world was wide.

’Twas honest metal and honest wood,

In the days of the Outward Bound,

When men were gallant and ships were good—

Roaming the wide world round.

They tried to live as a freeman should—

They were happier men than we,

In the glorious days of wine and blood,

When Liberty crossed the sea

The good ship bound for the southern seas

When the beacon was Ballarat,

With a ‘Ship ahoy!’ on the freshening breeze,

‘Where bound?’ and ‘What ship’s that?’—

The emigrant train to New Mexico—

The rush to the Lachlan Side—

Ah! faint is the echo of Westward Ho!

From the days when the world was wide.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Winston Churchill

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It’s out there . . . somewhere

JIM HAYNES

MY FRIEND DENNIS O’KEEFFE knows where the ‘mahogany ship’ is. In fact, he even showed me!

Dennis and his wife Anne are lucky enough to live on the outskirts of Warrnambool on the southwest coast of Victoria—one of my favourite places and home to one of the greatest jumping races left in Australia, the Grand Annual. Their enormous kitchen window overlooks the coastal dunes and bay, down towards the town of Port Fairy, where Australia’s premier folk festival is held every year.

Dennis is a folk singer, erstwhile historian, and the world’s leading authority on the history of the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’; he wrote a book about it.

We often perform together at the Port Fairy Folk Festival and I’d called in for a visit, as I was passing through Warrnambool a few weeks before the festival.

I happened to mention my interest in the sixteenth-century Portuguese exploration of Australia’s coast as we sat discussing our coming performances . . . and horseracing.

‘Oh,’ said Dennis casually, ‘I can show you where the mahogany ship is.’

I was stunned into silence for a full thirty seconds and sat, trying to consider the significance of the statement. Why hadn’t he claimed the reward offered by the Victorian government? Was he part of some secret local group intent on keeping the knowledge hidden?

‘I’ll show you where it is,’ he added nonchalantly, standing up and heading into the kitchen.

I followed.

We stopped at the large picture window and gazed out across the miles of windswept dunes, along the coast to where Port Fairy sits at the end of the bay. Dennis waved his hand grandly across the horizon framed by the window . . . sweeping it slowly left to right over the coastal vista spread before us.

‘It’s out there . . . somewhere,’ he said.

I should have known.

It’s sad that, at my age and having known Dennis for so long, I could be fleetingly gullible enough to believe he could offer any new revelations about the oldest and possibly most annoying puzzle in Australia’s history!

The riddle of the mahogany ship, the Dieppe maps and the Portuguese discovery of eastern Australia will remain unsolved until the long-wrecked vessel—which is very likely not made of mahogany— is rediscovered.

The big questions are:

• Is the wreck still out there in the sand dunes, or has it rotted away, or been burned—as reported by some nineteenth century sources?

• If it still exists somewhere in the sand dunes between Warrnambool and Port Fairy, is it a sixteenth-century Portuguese caravel?

• Are the Rotz and Dauphin Maps, and the other so-called ‘Dieppe maps’, derived from an accurate chart of Australia’s east coast from Cape York to near Warrnambool, made by Cristovao de Mendonca between 1521 and 1523?

• Did James Cook have copies of the Dieppe maps on the Endeavour? Or had he consulted them before he set out?

• If Mendonca made a series of maps from which the Dieppe maps were derived, what happened to them?

• If Mendonca explored our coast and charted it, why don’t