Goodbye Girlie

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  I had been on board the Sheerwater several times but when we tied up I rarely went out on deck or made a spectacle of myself in the port. But one day I heard a woman’s voice calling from the wharf ‘Gel! Gel! Come out here, gel!’ – a most refined accent. Pete, one of the crew, came into the saloon and said ‘There’s an old tart out there, very posh, wants to see you.’ I knew by her voice she was no ‘old tart’. As I hesitated, she called, ‘Gel! Do you want a bath?’ I leapt over the coaming and rushed on to the deck. ‘I’d kill for a bath’ I said to the elderly woman on the wharf. ‘Well, hop in’ she said, and I hopped into her car. Violet was Mrs Hay, and she belonged to the well-known Kelly family. (Kelly was one of the legendary eleven men who played and won the euchre game at Broken Hill for the shares in one of the richest mines discovered in Australia.)

  And why was this very comfortably-placed lady in such a harsh, hard labouring area as the Furneaux Islands? She owned an island property and it was up for sale and she, in her seventies, was there to see it was prepared well for the auction.

  I wallowed in the bath until the water went cold. I ran more. I never knew how utterly gorgeous was hot water. ‘Feel like a gin and tonic?’ she called. Did I ever! And so began a long friendship until Violet’s death.

  I never had trouble with the wives. They sometimes came down along the wharf to have a quick look at me but seemingly realised I was no threat. But if I were a wife of an engineer I’d watch out for him. All engineers are in love. And I don’t think they tell their wives about it! They all adore their ‘donks’ engines, to the exclusion of everything else. There are no half-way engineers – they are either dedicated or on shore. They get their pleasure in watching the ship’s engine, the pistons thumping up and down in harmony, and knowing the exactitude and precision of this big heart-beat will take this ship over still waters that landlubbers have never known and amid storms no landlubber would risk.

  We rarely berthed at Whitemark, the ‘capital’ of Flinders Island. The rise and fall of the tide at this port was such that when the tide went out the ship lay on her keel with the result that the cargo could not be off-loaded until the ship again rose up with the incoming tide to the level of the wharf.

  One day, while waiting for the tide to come in, I put the rope ladder over the side, climbed down and walked out quite a distance on the sea floor without getting the uppers of my shoes wet. From there I took a photograph of three ships lying on their sides: the Sheerwater, Margaret Twaits and Prion. At one time or another Les Jackson’s family had owned each of them and by now I had sailed on all three of these wooden vessels, but most often on the Sheerwater.

  At last it was time to join the Naracoopa. Like all men on small ships, I was a jack of all trades and the old Captain of the Naracoopa taught me a great deal about ships and the sea. It became my task to man the telegraph when going in or out of port or in tricky waters. The telegraph was a simple thing, a manner of sending messages down to the engineer below. There was ‘Slow Ahead’, ‘Half Ahead’, ‘Full Ahead’ and the same in the other direction for going astern. And the last signal of any voyage was ‘Finished with Engines’, the best signal of all. Like all other seamen we had an unmarked signal ‘Give Her all She’s Got!’. The Captain also encouraged me to study on shore and get a radio officer’s certificate, which meant I could man the radio morning and night and any other time when necessary. The rest of my tasks were much the same as that of the crew – loading, unloading, tallying timber as it came on board, loading the sheep or cattle, and cooking if the cook was ‘on the turps’, as Mick, the engineer, explained it to me.

  Little ships become figures of fun in big ports precisely because of the funny, off-the-beaten-track landfalls they must make, and take to the people there everything they need to turn their isolation into home. The Tasmanian Government had bought the Naracoopa to provide for these people, cut off from other forms of transport provided by the State. Few of the places we visited had access by road; for some we were the only link with the world.

  To get to the east coast of Tasmania we had the choice of two routes: ‘the long way round’, going south past Cape Raoul and round Tasman Island, or ‘through the ditch’, the canal at Dunalley. This canal route was not only shorter but it was through smooth, sheltered waters. ‘Round the Raoul’ was never smooth and was mostly rough to very rough. ‘Taking her round the Raoul’ was synonymous with ‘having the guts rolled out of you’ in Naracoopa language. But the canal had its moments also.

  The first time I went ‘through the ditch’ I nearly said ‘Jeez!’ like Pete, the deck hand. The actual cut is through only half a mile of land, a narrow isthmus over which the old-timers used to drag their small boats. Near the Hobart side entrance there is a bridge for road traffic to cross. As the ship neared the canal, old Jack pulled the whistle cord and the mournful hoots went whoop-whooping across to the bridgeman who wound the bridge open by hand. I thought there must be a mistake. Was that tiny gap all the space we had? The closer we got to it the smaller it looked and the larger our ship seemed to become. Old Jack called down from the flying bridge (Monkey Island to us) ‘Full Ahead’ and it was rung through on the telegraph. Speed wouldn’t get us through that strongly timbered opening, I was thinking. Then Jack called, ‘Half Ahead’ then ‘Slow Ahead’. Ah, that’s better. He must be going to turn her round and head back to the nice big paddock of sea behind us. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked a seaman who was scurrying by. ‘Terrible strong tides come through such a narrow cutting,’ he said. ‘Big bay on either side. They sweep through like fury.’

  I looked over the side. The water was charging along, carrying us with it at a speed faster than our motors could ever have taken us, closer and closer to the shrinking gap. The boys on the focsle were hanging motorcar tyres tied on to ropes over the bow as fenders and were standing by to adjust them if necessary. They’ll be needed for sure. The mate was standing by to let the anchor go if need be, the wheel behind me in the wheelhouse now being ‘ghost driven’ by the wheel above on the flying bridge which was swinging first one way then the other as old Jack, alone on the wheel, fought the surging tide.

  And then we were into the gap. ‘Full Ahead’ Jack yelled, his voice strained and panting. The tide was now running against us from the bay on the other side of the cut and he was countering it. Even as we slid through the gap I still didn’t believe we could make it. Crowds of tourists, on their way to and from the ruins of the convict settlement of Port Arthur, hung over the gate on either side of the bridge opening but as we came closer they began to run and were well back as we reached the bridge. Only the bridgeman remained. He smiled through the wheelhouse window at me, but I was too startled to return the greeting. Up on the focsle the boys were hauling in the fenders. We were through. Pete came back to tell me. ‘There’s six inches of clearance when we go through the bridge,’ he said. ‘Jeez!’

  Going to sea on small ships did not mean one was tied to the job as are ‘land lubbers’. Crews signed on and off in their home port when they so chose and, as well, we were often ‘on the beach’ when the ship was held up in port for any or many reasons. Once a year, ‘she’ went up on the slips in Hobart for annual overhaul and the whole crew signed off. Once the Naracoopa was held up for four months during a refit, and sometimes because of odd repairs. For many months she lay in the docks because she was under arrest. The very thought of a ship being arrested excited me and I attended all the court hearings.

  The AMV Naracoopa was unique in her day: she was the last of the ships in Australian waters to be arrested in the time-honoured way of having her crime nailed to the mast – her being a wooden ship.

  The owners were accused of taking the ship to sea in a dangerous condition. What had happened was this: we never, at any time, had loaded beyond the plimsoll line, but often a very heavy load was on deck and this cracked a beam and a disgruntled seaman reported it to the harbour master and he sent a man down with hammer and nails and the accusatory document,
and so our ship was arrested, banned from going to sea.

  Three men sat in judgment on the lovely ship, none of them, we believed, having qualified to so adjudicate, none of them having been small-ship men and therefore ignorant of the various seas around the coast, and only one of them having been at sea and that on a ship during the war. Some ludicrous things occurred during the hearing – one of the three had difficulty in learning the nautical terms such as focsle. To read the word on paper is one thing, but to speak it is another. Seamen pronounce it ‘folk-sul’ (the focsle is merely the front part or bow of the ship).

  Each day of the hearing I sat with old men in the court, each day lunched with them, and every day I was enchanted. These expert witnesses, called by the ship’s owner (the Tasmanian government) were, every one of them, old men who knew wooden ships, knew how they handled, sailed, responded to heavy seas, knew the difference between heavy seas and the dangerous currents in the Straits, knew how to load their cargo, what stresses their ship could take. They sat stonily staring at the three, expensively-suited men sitting in judgment, but outside the court they laughed at the three of them. Their stories were the stuff of life as it is led on the sea – and no landsman can know of it.

  In a long break during the hearing the children and I drove north to Launceston and there, on the banks of the River Tamar, the man who built the Naracoopa and many of the now-old wooden ships spent a day with us walking around the areas where he had built ‘our’ ship, showing us the impression on the long-dried mud where the cradle had been shaped, the remnants of timbers he had gone into the forests to choose for the keel that had once been a single tall tree and was now shaped to be her backbone, the stem rising from that shielding and joining her side planks like a breastbone, the planks (strakes, as seamen call them), from the garboard strake to the sheer strake on the gunwale (or ‘gun-ul’ as seamen say), and the ribs, the keelson, the sister keelsons, butts and stringers.

  ‘The ship must work for the same reason that a tall building must sway in the wind so that the strain will not cause it to snap,’ he told us. ‘The harder the sea attacks, the more the ship works, groaning and moaning as her timbers take up the stress and strain.

  The sea can’t sink a good ship. Only the land can do that,’ this fresh-faced old man assured me.

  Back at the court, the ship’s own witnesses were at last called. One witness, ‘the professor of stresses and strains’ as the boys called the in-truth professor, demonstrated with a box of matches that the crack in the beam had been caused by the cargo on deck, not by any weakness in the ship itself.

  The ship, already repaired, was, after a long period of time, released and we set sail in rage at the long period of being out of work, and we never mentioned it again.

  Not that the lay-off periods worried me financially. I had my portable sewing machine on board and was paid for repairs to the ship’s upholstery, sheets, covers etc., and once – a real bonanza – the making of black-out curtains for the wheelhouse with three layers of material. (We were to get the latest equipment, including radar, but of course it didn’t work for our rock-hopping, dog-barking type of navigation, so the curtains ended up as decoration.) I made shirts for the crew – never asking where they got the bolt of material – and, as well, I cleaned out all the storerooms, scrubbed and then with the victualler, restocked the ‘hard’ stores for six months. It was a nine-to-five job and I found it aggravating to hear the five o’clock bell warning the workers to leave. In my life I had been used to working ‘until I dropped’ as the saying goes – and I learnt that a fixed timetable did not suit my inner clock, and it never has.

  With all these long ‘holidays’ I also learned that growing children don’t care to be smothered by their loved ones. They want to be fed, watered, sympathised with, advised (only to a degree!), sometimes chastised if for good reason – and loved. It is the loving that counts, the bonding.

  I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

  Milton

  * * *

  In November 1993 the Australian National Maritime Association at the maritime technology conference quoted these words which appeared in my book There Was a Ship. These words of encouragement had been sent to me by the artist Russell Drysdale, who was aware of the social disapprobation I might be suffering in my determination to become a seafarer. Thirty years after I had left the sea, the executive officer of the association presented a paper titled ‘Women at Sea, a Background Paper’ which included records of my journeys at sea. The records seem to show I was the first woman in Australia to sign Articles on a merchant ship in Australian waters.

  John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charlie ‘When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man and the road away from here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.’ If it is necessary for a man to present a good reason for heeding the urge to be somewhere else, then it is certain that a woman must invent an even more foxy excuse.

  If wanderlust has set its seal on you – like in the sign of an anchor coming up – you may be sure, man or woman, it has also been tattooed into your reflexes. It is a hereditary disease in our family. If my Mother were to hear a train whistle on a cold night when all the house slept, the banshee wail crept up and over her and passed on into nowhere just at the moment she was catching her breath. I saw it happen often: the stare, without focus, that to an outsider seems vacant, the slight lift of the head, as though she were listening for some faint, eerie melody. She told me she had once found her Father in this attitude, never realising that she herself behaved in the same way. They were living deep in a forested valley in Gippsland, Victoria. It was late at night and frosty; high above them on the hills the cloppity-clop of a horse’s hooves picking their way on the flinty stone track died away in the distance. ‘I think I’ll have to go to Queensland to try to get some shearing’ my Grandfather said. And go he did, all to keep his family in food and shelter while the struggling cow cockies around him were fending for their families by staying at home.

  All this made me aware it was no use wasting my Mother’s time with excuses for my going anywhere. ‘Off again?’ was the extreme of her curiosity about my sudden departures.

  When I went to sea I was still in my late twenties, had two children, and belonged to the Country Women’s Association, the Mother’s Club, the Red Cross – the lot. In 1954 to go to sea on a merchant ship, where I would be the only woman in a crew of men would not only shock the residents of a small (two-pub) town, but the rest of Australia. I struck it lucky; although my years at sea were sailed in the most dangerous waters of Australia it could not be said that they were boring – or domestic. Now I’m able to say ‘Wouldn’t I have been a fool not to go to sea, to miss a chance in a million?’ I was the first Australian woman to be articled on a coastal trading ship, to be taken on as an equal by men, to have a freedom few women ever achieve, and to be judged by one standard, the criterion by which everyone is judged on small ships: the ability to work hard and pull your weight and shut up about it.

  I was obviously not living, as one society columnist of the day gaily reported, as ‘Raven-haired Pat, away from the madding crowd, soaking up the sun on a sea-going cruise.’ (The crew didn’t see that; they rarely saw a newspaper, thank God.)

  Two brothers were engineers on the Naracoopa. When I told them I had all my expensive photographic gear in Hobart but had no printing machinery, they immediately saw this as an exciting challenge. Before I knew it there were bits and pieces spread around the small area of the engine room. They made a developing and printing machine as good as any such, and perfectly adequate for all my needs. They used a Glaxo baby food tin as a lantern case. The weight to move the machine up and down was an eighteen-inch solid steel cylinder, three inches in
diameter (which came from God knows where and I didn’t ask). By removing the back of my Linhof camera when I needed to print, they made slides for me to slip the major part of the Linhof on to this frame and there I had the best lens money could buy and a bellows that extended to twelve inches long, so all my problems were solved. They erected it in my kitchen on shore and I had great difficulty stopping the children playing with it because they could push it up and down and it seemed to be more fun than the meccano sets of the day. The camera and its accoutrements I carried everywhere. Even beneath the waters east of Bass Strait when our boat sank off Babel Island.

  When I was a child I had learned morse code from my Mother, the old station mistress, but I couldn’t fathom the plugs on the ship’s ancient radio. It was a gargantuan museum piece that had originally been on an early aeroplane. I counted thirty knobs, dials and buttons on the wretched thing (modern sets have two), but within three months I had mastered it, had my radio operator’s ticket after coaching from Hobart Radio ashore. ‘VLQD’ I would call up in the periods when the shore station took messages. ‘VLQD’ was our ship’s radio code, Victor Love Queenie Dog. Like your army number you never forget your ship’s call sign.

  I ‘stood by’ for fourteen hours the day the Willwatch sunk. I’d turned on my radio to ‘warm up’ at 6.45 am and heard Mac calling. I roused the Captain and he and the crew crowded round the door of my cabin, which doubled as the radio shack. Mac was our friend, we’d often sheltered with him when storms drove us to run. But now we knew he was gone. I’d written down every call he made including the last. ‘This is it – cheerio. See you later,’ and we never heard his voice again. He and his crew of four disappeared with all the other ships that have been lost in Bass Strait including, in time, the Sheerwater and the Naracoopa.