Bass strait ferries

In last week’s story I got well off the track. This week I will stick to my decision to write about the Bass Strait ferries, I promise.

The first real Bass Strait ferry, as I think of them, ie passenger, vehicle and container ships operating on a regular route to the App[le Isle, was the Princess of Tasmania.

Before I go on there is obviously a long history of shipping between Tasmania and the mainland, obviously, but roll-on roll-off ferries are a relatively recent phenomenon. One day I’ll come back to those earlier boats where cars were picked up by cranes and loaded as cargo, sometimes with a few additional bumps and lumps. It worked, in a manner

We were all excited about the Princess of Tasmania, the “Pot”, bringing a new era of holiday travel. The glamour of a cruise, a destination that was beautiful and a fairly cheap fare made her very popular indeed. She was built in Newcastle (our Newcastle), Launched Nin December 1958 and at nearly 4000 tons and 372 feet long she was the biggest ship built in Australia at the time and only roll-on roll-off ferry in the Southern Hemisphere. She could carry 334 passengers and 142 vehicles.

The Australian National Line sent her on her maiden voyage on September 23, 1959 and she plied back and forth between Melbourne and Devonport until 1972, bringing the trade name Searoad to our language. It was a great experience to drive your own car onto the boat, leave your gear safely in it, climb up to the upper decks for a meal, a stroll around as she slipped down Port Phillip, have a comfortable sleep and wake up in Tasmania. Accommodation ranged from overnight chairs through single, two- and four-berth cabins up the more or less luxurious suites right up near the bridge. These even had their own stewards and I can still remember making my first crossing in one of those. For my second crossing I was in a four-berth cabin because I had to pay my own fare.

In 1972 she started moving from owner to owner and she had 12 new owners before being scrapped in India in 2005. That was rather a sad ending for this Australian ship, but a worse fate awaited her successor.

The Empress of Australia was a bigger ship, of 12,000 tons and a length of 440 feet. She was built in Australia for the Australian National Line, at the Cockatoo Docks in Sydney, and launched on 18 January 1964. She was designed for the SydneyHobart service, making three return trips a fortnight from January 1965. Back then we had a real shipbuilding industry… In fact, Hobart was only the ‘headline’ destination. She went once a fortnight to Hobart, once a fortnight to Bell Bay and once a fortnight to Burnie.

I’m still wondering how a ship that size could dock at Burnie, but it was obviously possible. In 1972 she came to Melbourne to replace the Princess of Tasmania and underwent something of a rebuild. Another deck was added toward the rear of the ship - sorry, the stern – and a large lounge was converted into an overnight reclining-chair space ‘sleeping’ 190 people. This was over and above the 250 travelling in her cabins. Below were 91 cars, 16 trucks and a 160 containers. On June 28 she took her first Melbourne passengers down the bay and over the strait to Devonport and she maintained the service with very few problems until 1986, when she was replaced by the even bigger Abel Tasman.

I said she had a sadder end than the Princess of Tasmania. When the ANL sold her off she was bought by a Cypriot company and refitted fully as a cruise ship. She was renamed Royal Pacific. In the Malacca Strait on 23 August 1992 she was hit by a Taiwanese fishing boat of 800 tons, travelling at full speed, and sank, with the loss of thirty lives. It is said that the crew were the first people off her as she went down, hardly the ‘Birkenhead drill’. The ‘Birkenhead drill’ was the protocol of letting women and children into the lifeboats first and it became the proper practice,. She was a Royal Navy troopship that sank in 1852 on the way to South Africa, and the troops stood fast on the deck as she went down. Nearly all were lost. Rudyard Kipling made the term famous in his 1893 poem “Soldier an’ Sailor Too”. On the other hand, “ït is also said” that only nine people died. The ship was only twelve miles from Singapore and those waters are full of shipping, so help came quickly, but the Royal Pacific rolled over and sank very quickly. She had been struck from behind on the left (port) side.

The roll-on roll-off boats, used all over the world now because of the ease and speed of loading, have a sorry record of safety and many people have blamed the basic design, with large doors opening close to the waterline. I spent some time on the computer checking more than fifty maritime ‘íncidents’ involving such ships and very few involved failings of the watertight loading doors.

One exception was the sinking of the Straitsman in the Yarra River in 1974. She carried vehicles and sheep and was reversing into her berth when a crewman opened the rear cargo doors. Two crewmen died.

The Empress of Australia, a.k.a. Royal Pacific had undergone a major rebuild and the vehicle deck was now largely used for accommodation, all fitted and constructed to the proper standards. She was used mainly for offshore gambling cruises, fitted out as a floating casino.

There was another Empress of Australia, too, I found. She is not the point of this story, but you might be interested. She was built in Germany during the Great War for the Hamburg-America line, served then with P&O as a war prize, then Canadian Pacific. She never actually came to Australia, so far as I know, but she did have an interesting adventure in Yokohama in 1923, when the Kanto earthquake struck, one of the worst ever recorded.

Part of the dock, crowded with people farewelling the passengers, collapsed, and many of the dock buildings caught fire. The Captain needed tugs to get away from the pier but they were not available. He had a freighter tied up close behind him, so to get room to move his ship he reversed gently into the freighter and forced her astern. Unfortunately her anchor cable fouled one propeller but he was able to swing the ship away from the dock far enough to save her, and during this time the crew were hauling people aboard from the pier and the water. When she was able to move clear she had more than 2000 refugees aboard.

That was a fair way from Bass Strait, though, and I did promise to stick to the point. Perhaps I’ll do better when I finish this next week.