Critical link across Bass Strait

Alright, in talking about the modern era of roll-on roll-off ferries between Melbourne and the Apple Isle we’ve looked at the Princess of Tasmania and Empress of Australia, both built in this country, both fine ships, and both operated by the Australian National Line.

Those two ships went off overseas but the ANL had the Australian Trader built, to operate between Melbourne and Bell Bay, Burnie and Devonport. She was launched in early 1969 and her maiden voyage was on June 24 1969. She, too, was roll-on roll-off, but she had limited passenger capacity and didn’t capture the popular imagination.

In 1976 she was withdrawn from service and replaced by the cargo-only Bass Trader. There was a little kerfuffle over this and the ship lay at Bell Bay for two months as the crew went on strike. Eventually she was released, sailed to Sydney and sold to RAN as a training ship.

The ANL announced that it was giving up the ferry business and would concentrate only on cargo, and in 1998 it was effectively bought out by a French company, CMA CGM. As a subsidiary, it is still a major player in moving containers around the world.

This left Tasmania more isolated than it deserved to be (slightly) and the Federal Government agreed to buy a ship for the newly-formed TT Line, owned by the Tasmanian Government. Some people say that was part of the deal to preserve the Gordon River from damming for hydro-electricity.

That brings us to the current stage, beginning with the TT Line buying the Abel Tasman, at 19,000 tons rather larger than the Empress and a little faster.

She was 13 years old and named Nils Holgersson, working in the Baltic. She was renamed, refurbished a little and entered the Bass Strait service in July 1885. Interestingly, part of the refurbishment was building new crew quarters on the stern of the ship because originally the crew were housed under the vehicle deck, not allowed in Australia.

She’d been held up in Germany by industrial action and the Tassie government sent some policemen to put an end to that, except that they had, of course, no authority in Germany. New laws had to be made, and were.

She came straight to Devonport, arriving on June 20, 1985, and started on the “Melbourne shuttle” on June 1, 1985. Not only was she bigger, she was faster. She could carry 1800 passengers and 470 vehicles, and she could carry them at a healthy 21 knots.

In 1993 the Spirit of Tasmania arrived for the TT Line and the Abel Tasman was sold off. Just to make this all a little confusing the TT Line was now trading as the “Spirit of Tasmania”. The new ship arrived in Devonport on November 12, 1993 and made her first crossing to Melbourne only 17 days later. TT Line was not slow to move. They had the Abel Tasman up for sale the next day.

In 1997 the TT Line tried the significant experiment of using a multi-hull fast boat (Tascat) while the Spirit of Tasmania was in dry dock. In 1997-98 and 1998-99 they used the Devil Cat during the peak season

They also kept up the tradition of naming things in as confusing a way as possible. There were about to be four Spirits of Tasmania, the company itself and three ships, Spirit of Tasmania 1, Spirit of Tasmania 2 and Spirit of Tasmania 3, none of which were the original Spirit of Tasmania (I think…)

Spirit of Tasmania 1 and Spirit of Tasmania 2 came to Hobart on July 29, 2002 for some minor fitting-out and for the Tasmania Government to show them off. They were much bigger than any of the ferries they were replacing, at just over 29,000 tons and more than 600 feet long. They could each carry 1400 passengers and 500 cars and they could carry them at nearly 30 knots, very fast indeed.

The number of cars is not so important, really. All the ferries I’ve mentioned carried trailers for trucks, with containers of all sort of cargo. The prime-movers that loaded them would stay at one end of the voyage and another primemover would collect them at the other end. It was fast, it was efficient and it greatly boosted Tasmania’s economy. Mind you, a few thousand tourists a week did not harm the economy too much, either.

Think back two weeks my wandering off into our honeymoon voyage on the Princess of Tasmania and – for our 50th anniversary in 2017 we repeated the trip, almost identically, but this time we went on the Spirit of Tasmania 2. OK, back to the story.

The two ships than started a reciprocal service, literally two ships passing in the night, one headed north and one headed south. The reciprocal service started on 1 September and on that day the Spirit of Tasmania (no number – the first one) arrived in Melbourne for the last time, having made over 2800 crossings and having carried more than 2.3 million passengers. She’d also moved almost 200,000 containers, not something that captures the news media but crucial to that little island at the bottom of our map.

Now it was clear a third (well, really a fourth) Spirit of Tasmania was needed to complicate the issue even further. This one was to serve the Sydney-Devonport route and she was Spirit of Tasmania 3. She started the Sydney-Devonport run on January 13, 2004 but the Tasmanian government ended that service on August, 28, 2006.

The Sydney service had never been terribly successful. The Australian Trader retired from it in 1976. The Empress of Australia had been taken from that route earlier to run from Melbourne, and Spirit of Tasmania 3, while larger and faster, still did not get the business it needed. It went off the Mediterranean as a cruise ship, the Mega Express Four.

Now Spirit of Tasmania 1 and Spirit of Tasmania 2 operate as a critical link between Australia’s two biggest islands, but they, too, are on a short string. The Government has said it was building two bigger, faster ships in Germany. The first was expected next year, but the COVID 19 virus that has so focussed our attention led to those contracts being cancelled early this year. A new contract was signed with a Finnish shipbuilder, but that, too, has fallen through.

One reason was the realisation that we could perhaps build the new ships here in Australia and that would create post-COVID jobs. I hope that comes to pass.

Now it seems the service will run from Geelong, rather than Melbourne, because the largely-privatised Port of Melbourne has become too expensive. The ships will sail from and to Geelong instead. That will probably work about as well as the Avalon airport has worked.

Some time soon we’ll look at the Oonah, the Loongana, the Rotomahana and the Taroona, among others. These were almost as fast as the modern ships, but much smaller, so the waves looked much bigger.