MARITIME HERITAGE ASSOCIATION JOURNAL Volume 19, No. 3. September 2008 Website: www.maritimeheritage.org.au A quarterly publication of the Maritime Heritage Association, Inc. C/o: The Secretary (Nick Burningham), 78 Forrest Street, Fremantle, W.A. 6160. Editor: Peter Worsley. 12 Cleopatra Drive, Mandurah, W.A. 6210 Ross Shardlow and Richard Knox discussing the history of the ship Byramgore over a glass of Byramgou Park’s finest red. See article by Ross Shardlow on page 12 The Maritime Heritage Association Journal is the official newsletter of the Maritime Heritage Association of Western Australia, Incorporated. All of the Association’s incoming journals, newsletters, etc. are now archived with Ross Shardlow who may be con- tacted on 9361 0170, and are available to members on loan Please note that to access the videos, journals, library books, etc it is necessary to phone ahead. (If you have an unwanted collection of magazines of a maritime nature, then perhaps its time to let others enjoy reading it. Contact the Association; we may be interested in archiving the collection.) Material for publishing or advertising should be directed, preferably typed or on disk, to: The Editor, 12 Cleopatra Drive, MANDURAH, Western Australia, 6210. Except where shown to be copyright, material published in this Journal may be freely reprinted for non-profit pur- poses provided suitable acknowledgment is made of its source. www.maritmeheritage.org.au NOTICE All members of the MHA are invited to join in a gathering to visit Rolly Tasker’s Australian Sailing Museum Meet before at: 12 Cleopatra Drive MANDURAH 9.30 am, 12 October 2008 For morning tea. We will then move on in a group to the museum. We anticipate that a viewing will take about 2 hours, and those who would like to can join in lunch afterwards. This will provide a good opportunity for all members to get together, new members are especially welcome. Things They Would Rather Have Not Said I am to acquaint you that I never once was able to make use of the compass in a troubled sea, and the reason for this, I could not make the brass box keep a horizontal plane; the motion of the ship always made it incline one way or another, from which it would not of itself return; I think it is far too complex an instrument ever to be of general use at sea. Lt. James Cook to the Admiralty, 12 July 1771 Cook is considered one of the greatest navigators and chart surveyors in Royal Navy history. 2 The Diy Bag An occasional collection of nautical trivia to inform, astound, amuse and inspire. (The inspiration could take the form of contributions to this page!) The Russian battleship Suvarov which took part in Pensioner, who had recently arrived in Geraldton, the devastating Battle of Tsushima in 1905 had a with his family, from the Falkland Islands conning-tower just below the bridge. Protected by 10-inch thick armour the ten-foot diameter, seven- The Coast Radio Station in Geraldton started oper- foot high tower contained everything necessary to ations on 12 May 1913. direct the ship in battle: wheel and compass, en- gine room telegraph, speaking tube, electric con- When, on 31 March 1910, the steamer Pericles hit trols linked to the gun batteries, duplicated tele- a rock and sank within a very short time off Cape phones, range finders, signalling apparatus, a navi- Leeuwin, the survivors were taken ashore by gator’s chart table, and sixteen men. It must have ship’s lifeboats. Mr Frank Smith, third class stew- been a bit cramped during use! ard, related one of his experiences with a survivor: “I had barely landed with a boat load of passengers The first armoured battleship ever to have been on the Flinders Bay beach, and was up to my very sunk by gunfire was the Imperial Russian battle- eyes in work when an excitable Jewish youth, with ship Oslyaba at 3.30pm on 27 May 1905 during much gesticulation, seized hold of me in a vice- the Battle of Tsushima. like grip and in loud tones demanded his ticket back”. Sir Isaac Newton, then president of the Royal So- ciety, was asked to serve as an ex officio member The tunnel under the English Channel has been a of the Board of Longitude, the organisation set up possibility for many years. A short article in the in 1714 for “finding the longitude at sea”. He ac- West Australian for Friday 29 June 1880 reported cepted, but in doing so stated (tongue in cheek) that the British Parliament had rejected the Chan- that he had not realized that it had been lost! nel Tunnel Bill earlier that month. In January 1847 the Swedish Consul in Melbourne The first anti-ship mine was invented in 1855. It offered to bring out 600 Swedes to settle and farm consisted of a zinc cylinder 2 feet long and 18 at Augusta. The proposal was rejected. inches in diameter filled with gunpowder. The charge was set off by breaking any one of a set of Western Australia was exporting railway sleepers tubular glass detonators filled with acid. These to India before there was a railway in the State. mines were initially called torpedos, while self- propelled torpedos (as we now know them) were On 20 December 1886 the sailing ship Kapunda, called locomotive torpedos. en-route to Western Australia, collided with the iron cargo vessel Ada Melmore 600 miles off the The first incident in which a steam driven ship was coast of Brazil. One third of the 268 passengers involved in a battle occurred in 1824 when the were young people, and many of these were young Royal Navy paddle-wheel tug Diana under the women. Some of the male passengers, who had command of Lieutenant Kellett attacked a Bur- been sleeping on the upper deck because of the mese flotilla during the First Burmese War. heat, were saved, but there was great loss of life as many were trapped below decks. Strain bands. Extra bands of canvas, usually only seen on large square sails, to give the same support The first lighthouse keeper at the Point Moore to the bunt of the sail as the bolt-ropes do to the light in Geraldton was Joseph Wright, an Enrolled leeches. 3 Montevideo Maru—1 July 1942 In the last edition of this journal I wrote a short article on fate of the Montevideo Maru and over 1,000 Australians who were lost when she was torpedoed during World War II. I believe this disaster needs to be much more widely known. Per- mission has been obtained to reproduce two articles first published in Una Voce, the Journal of the Papua New Guinea Association of Australia Inc., in June 2008. The first is by Maxwell R. Hayes, R.P.N.G.C. and is titled: 66 YEARS ON - RECOGNITION FOR THE MONTEVIDEO MARU t last the fate if the 1,053 unfortunate pris- After years of trying, along with others, to get oners of war on this ill fated vessel has some publicity for this tragic event, I managed to stirred the interest of many Australians get a lengthy letter printed in the Melbourne Age Awho have never heard of this vessel and its sink- and an edited version in the Melbourne Herald ing on 1.7.1942. Previously it was as if the fact Sun on 13.04.2008, though I feel this only came that the Australian servicemen and civilians lost in about by linking it, as I did, with the loss of the defence of the hopelessly indefensible obscure HMAS Sydney. This seemed to cause considera- locations of New Britain and New Ireland didn't ble interest and I had many enquiries. As a result matter. After the war, in late 1945, details of the considerable public interest appears to have been sinking of the Montevideo Maru were released but created by events which follow below. were only of concern to the grieving relatives. To the rest of the Australian population it didn't mat- At this stage I must state that I am only one of ter, after all, it was only one of many Jap ships many who have had the fate of those on the Mon- sunk by American submarines during the war. So tevideo Maru at heart but in the absence of others what? The battle on the Owen Stanley Ranges not writing an update for Una Voce, I feel com- was much more important and was closer to home pelled to do so. with survivors to return and tell their stories of unparalled hardship, courage and defeat of a much The publishing of several books on events about larger Japanese force. the Japanese capture of Rabaul and Kavieng in January 1942, ‘Rabaul 1942’, Aplin 1980; For many years family members and survivors of ‘Coconuts and Tearooms’, Boys 1993; ‘Hostages the ‘Lark Force’; 2/22nd battalion, soldiers and to Freedom’, Stone 1995/1999; ‘Betrayal in High civilians captured in early 1942, have been seek- Places'’, McKay 1996; ‘Masked Eden’, McCosker ing answers to the absence of information due to 1998; ‘A Very Long War’, Reeson 2000; ‘Yours the secrecy still surrounding Australia's greatest Sincerely, Tom’, Henderson 2000; ‘Uncle Joe's maritime loss of life due to an appalling lack of Story’, Osley 2002; ‘Yours Sincerely, Tom Revis- interest and insensitivity on the part of successive ited’, Henderson 2005; ‘He’s Not Coming Home’, Australian governments over the last 63 years Nikakis 2005; ‘The Lost Women of Rabaul’, Mil- since the end of WW2.