Going Bananas – one woman’s adventure on the high seas
Did you know that the European Union is the largest consumer of bananas on the planet? Ever wondered where those bananas come from and how they get here? Or what their true price is?
Author Pauline Isobel Dowling from Lismore found out when she began her unexpected trailing career.
It all started when she decided to take a ship to New Zealand rather than face another 30-hour ordeal on a long-haul flight.
That ship was the ACT 7, a Blue Star Line container ship, travelling from Tilbury to Auckland.
The journey should have taken four weeks, but the ship lost its steering gear in Botany Bay and was tied up in Darling Harbour in Sydney for almost three months, and for much of that time she was the only female on board.
It’s genetics. It’s fate. Whatever it is, she now trails, going to work with her mariner husband like a breathing, talking, additional piece of luggage, challenged daily to be dignified, sane and fulfilled.
It’s a strange life, not without its merits and certainly not without interest.
My Trailing Career (Volume 1) is the story of Dowling’s first, and last, journey on a banana boat – one four-month tour on the MV Avelona Star when Dowling went to work with her husband.
Pauline’s husband, Captain Stuart McCormick Ross, writes: ‘Going Bananas is a travel book with a difference: while it will certainly entertain you, it will also show you how Europe’s number one fruit reaches our shops, and what its true price is.
‘The price paid by the growers, the pickers, the land in the plantations, the ships and crew who deliver them, and the drug smugglers who hide with this cargo.
‘Many people have written about banana boats, but none have been travelling wives. Or as the author calls her life at sea, ‘My Trailing Career’.
‘Few have told the political story of not only bananas, but the dramatic and undocumented decline of the merchant navy, as well as the huge effect of transferring British ships to foreign flags leaving only ferries – and losing armies of highly trained, skilled mariners.’