Great Australian Journeys

by Seal, Graham;

  No more was heard of this group but in 1898, 23 Romani arrived in Adelaide. They claimed to be from Greece, although they are thought today to have actually hailed from the Balkans. The group camped at the booming town of Largs Bay, 15 kilometres north-west of Adelaide, where a journalist tracked them down and asked questions. Were they Greeks, possibly refugees from the conflict between Turkey and Greece? Or were they Gypsies who happened to depart from Greece? How would they support themselves in Australia? The answer was ‘Oh, any way. We will go from town to town.’

  The Greek Gypsies, as they became known, were clearly in dire straits and there was an initial flow of charity from local people. This soon turned into a desire to assist them to leave the colony. Apparently the Romani had originally paid their fare for a longer journey but had for unknown reasons disembarked at Adelaide with the intention of walking overland to their original destination. They clearly had little understanding of the distances and hardships involved. Nevertheless they were moved on from Largs Bay by the police.

  Their journey took them through the Adelaide suburbs, then to Gawler, Williamstown, Mannum and Murray Bridge. The men walked while the women and children travelled in a dray. Wherever they camped a local subscription was taken up to help them along their way.

  When they finally reached Victoria the then-small Greek population of Melbourne was quick to disassociate itself from the new arrivals. According to a letter to the editor published in The Argus, the Romani were not Greek nationals, even if they held Greek passports. Two days later the leader of the group replied in the same publication:

  The Greek people of Melbourne, according to your paper, say we are not Greek subjects. Well, we hold our passports from Greece and we speak their language. We make no claims to be Greeks. We are a distinct people, known as gipsies the world over, and claim our descent from Abraham and Hagar: something before the Greeks were heard of. Those people who doubt our words can examine our passports at the Victoria Hall, Burke Street, during the coming week.

  Their presence in Melbourne sparked a debate in the Legislative Assembly. The Romani were described as ‘vagrants’ and legal grounds to move them on were sought, eventually resulting in legislation banning ‘any person being a pauper or likely to become a public charge’ from entering the colony.

  By December, and now joined by another nomadic group, the Romani were camped at St Kilda and making a living by performing to noisy crowds, upsetting local residents. Efforts were made to have them removed but it seems that they moved on of their own accord. One group made for Sydney, though when they reached the border at Albury around mid January 1899, they were refused entry into the colony of New South Wales. Some later left Australia to continue their travels in America, New Zealand and Canada, but many remained, finding work in travelling shows and circuses. Their descendants still live in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland today.

  TO AUSTRALIA BY SUBMARINE

  In March 1919 six British submarines (J 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7), valued at around 1.5 million pounds and known as J-boats, were commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy. Although both the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy were short on men, preparations began to ready the submarines and volunteer submariners from both navies for the long journey to Australia. The plan was for the J-boats to arrive in Australia in time for the Peace Day celebrations scheduled for July 1919.

  The history of the J-boats during the war had not been a happy one. As well as technical problems and collisions, J6 was lost towards the end of the war when it became the victim of a mistaken attack by a Royal Navy decoy ship. She was sunk with the loss of sixteen crewmembers on 15 October 1917.

  Life aboard a J-boat was a cramped and dangerous affair. Leading Torpedo-man Tom ‘Taff’ Jones had been among the landing boat crews at Gallipoli. Jones subsequently served aboard J2 and in 1935 published a rare account of the experience. After some brief but intense training, including just one practice dive, he was posted to the submarine. It was crewed by five officers and 40 men. Jones described the inside of J2 and the living and working conditions as they were in 1916:

  it is divided into eight compartments separated by means of strong bulkheads with watertight doors. The first compartment, as we come from the bows, is the torpedo room, or ‘Fort End’, as we call it. In it are four torpedo-tubes, each containing a torpedo; and on each side of us there are two more spare torpedoes, in all eight ‘tin fish’. All round us are dozens of pipes and valves, polished to perfection. The valves are for flooding the tubes and the hundred and one controls for operating the torpedo-tubes. At the back of the tubes are four tanks containing the air-charge for firing the ‘fish’. Leaving Fort End we step through a bulkhead door to the ward-room. The captain and officers feed and sleep in the wardroom. Here again, we find all valves and pipes polished. On one side are the officers’ bunks; on the other the wireless cabinet. At the after end of this compartment is a tiny officers’ pantry.

  Jones goes on to describe the operating hub of the control room, crammed with pipes, levers and gauges. ‘Just abaft the control room are two beam or broadside torpedo-tubes, with two spare fish on top ready for loading.’ The diesel engines made a ‘terrific din’ and air compression equipment was just as noisy.

  The final compartment was the crew space ‘where we ate, slept and played patience’. Half the crew would eat their meals here at any one time, ‘otherwise the other half would have had to stand on their eyebrows as we termed it’. On deck was a three-inch recessing gun and a telescopic wireless mast. The J-boats were notorious for rolling and pitching, with seasickness afflicting even the hardiest submariners. It was not considered good form to show that you were seasick and so Jones, like many others, suffered silently.

  In these confined quarters, the submariners worked, ate, slept and socialised as best they could. Some played cards, some read, some talked about their girlfriends or wives. ‘The air seems thick, even in the morning,’ Jones wrote. ‘After a very long day of diving, about eighteen hours, breathing becomes very hard, and a sort of mist can be seen over the deck-boards, indicating that the fresh air is diminishing fast.’ Smoking was officially banned but officers and men secretly smoked pipes and cigarettes, no doubt contributing to the breathing difficulties. Jones says that the only air supplies on board were used for the operation of the submarine, although he did see engineers occasionally open the airlines to ‘put a little kick in the stale air’. Apart from this occasional assistance, the only pleasure was the daily ration of rum, in the tradition of the British navy.

  It was not until early April 1919 that the six submarines and their crews, including seven Australian sub-lieutenants, were able to leave Portsmouth, escorted by the light cruiser HMAS Sydney and depot ship HMAS Platypus. They were followed by three more support craft, an oiler Kurumba, the battle cruiser HMAS Australia and another light cruiser, HMAS Brisbane. As with the earlier voyage of AE1 and AE2 from Britain to Australia, the J class boats suffered breakdowns and other disasters. In poor visibility, J5 collided with a French sailing ship; the ship later sank as a result. As one experienced submarine captain put it, ‘If you could drive a J-boat you could drive a bath.’ The submarines were frequently under tow. One of J2’s engines failed as soon as she left Gibraltar and the submarine had to be towed by HMAS Sydney. The tow wire broke twice over the next few days before they were able to repair the submarine’s engine and continue their slow passage to Malta. The other submarines suffered engine problems on this voyage as well; J7 was also towed for some days by HMAS Australia between Aden and Colombo.

  The flotilla limped on through the Suez Canal and reached Colombo, Sri Lanka, by mid May. The heat and cramped conditions were causing the crews great distress and there they paused for a much-needed few days of rest, including leave. From Colombo, the fleet split into smaller groups and sailed at various times for Singapore, which was ‘another very welcome port’, as Torpedo-man Jones recalled. Again they rested and obtained vital supplies of fre
sh food. The submarines had all left Singapore for Thursday Island by 18 June.

  During this final stage of the voyage tragedy again struck the J-boats. Due to the oppressive heat of the tropics, the crews had taken to sleeping on the casing. But on the morning of 20 June, the men of J2 discovered the empty blankets of Sub-Lieutenant Larkins. All the submarines immediately conducted a search of the area until late in the afternoon, but without success. J2’s captain held a burial service with all the crew mustered. ‘They were a band of downcast men who stood there bareheaded,’ Jones wrote.

  On reaching Thursday Island on 28 June, their luck did not improve. There was already dissatisfaction among the crews about the quality and quantity of the food supplied by the ‘tin pot’, as they called the poorly prepared HMAS Platypus, and rations were no better at Thursday Island—‘a few tins of corn dog and a few old biscuits’. But soon after reaching the island the crews were also exposed to the pandemic scourging the postwar world, Spanish Flu, which would ultimately kill more people than the war itself. All the submarines were quickly quarantined, but the influenza claimed Stoker Henry Haggis of J7, who was buried on the island.

  The flotilla sailed for Moreton Bay on 5 July, where they again rested for three days. However, when they were denied leave to go ashore, even though they were keen to spend their ‘tons of spondulix’, J2’s crew ‘voiced our protest by staging a mild mutiny’. Their officers talked the crew around, however, holding up a vision of the tumultuous welcome they would receive when they reached Sydney. ‘This made us quite a band of good boys again,’ wrote Jones.

  Most of the submarines finally arrived in Sydney on 15 July 1919. J5, still under tow, had already arrived in June. They were welcomed by the governor-general and a huge crowd as well. As Jones remembered the scene, ‘We received a great welcome: hundreds of boats met us; the ferry steamers cock-a-doodle-dood themselves hoarse.’

  The 19 July Peace Day celebrations had been planned as a day of national large-scale thanksgiving to mark the end of hostilities. Among the events that day, there was a march through Sydney’s streets by the sailors of the warships anchored in the harbour, the crews of the J-boats among them. Jones wrote: ‘After the impressive march, we returned to our ship, where we “spliced the main brace”’ (they were given an extra ration of rum).

  The J-boats and their crews enjoyed the peaceful postwar years conducting exercises and taking part in ceremonial duties, including the visit of the Prince of Wales in mid June 1920 and the Hobart Regatta of 1921. The submarines were enormously popular with the public. As a reporter for the Hobart Mercury wrote: ‘Interest in the submarines, novel to the Hobart populace, is widespread and many people made their way to the wharf yesterday and indulged in respectful and fascinated inspection from the wharfside.’ Large numbers clamoured to go abroad the submarines when they were opened to the public a few days later.

  But the rising costs of maintaining the submarines and continuing navigation accidents led to their gradual mothballing. By 1930 they were all out of commission. HMAS J1, HMAS J2, HMAS J4 and HMAS J5 are now recreational training sites for divers in the ship’s graveyard, as the area off Port Phillip Bay is known. HMAS J4’s conning tower was placed on St Kilda Pier and used as a starting tower for the local boat club until the demolition of the pier in 1956. HMAS J3 was scuttled as a breakwater off Swan Island in Port Phillip Bay in 1926. The upper deck and superstructure of the submerged hulk are visible from the sea at low tide, and the location was marked by a plaque onshore erected in the 1980s. Finally, HMAS J7’s hull also appears above the water at low tide near the Sandringham Yacht Club, a ghostly reminder of an almost forgotten voyage.

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  SURVIVING

  ‘Who in the name of wonder are you?’

  Edwin Welch to lone survivor John King, 1861

  WITHIN A FEW HOURS OF ETERNITY

  Even before convicts arrived at Port Jackson they began to fantasise about escape. Folk beliefs circulated aboard transport ships and, wild though they seem to us, in those days these myths were believed by many.

  One belief was that China was just across the Blue Mountains and convicts who managed to find their way there would be free. Another was that a colony of white people lived somewhere to the south of Port Jackson. Here, too, successful absconders would be liberated from their bondage. Many attempted these hopeless journeys, sometimes carrying magical ‘compasses’ scribbled on scraps of paper that would supposedly show the way to liberty. Most of those who made these desperate attempts either died, or limped back to the settlement starving and exhausted.

  In May 1803, the English convict John Place, together with fellow convicts John Cox, William Knight and John Phillips, decided to act on the rumour of nearby China they had first heard while aboard their transport ship the previous year. Two of the men were married and were anxious to return to their families.

  The small band set out from Castle Hill to the Hawkesbury area, and then, on 7 May, set out with one weeks’ rations to cross the not-yet-traversed Blue Mountains. After seventeen days lost in the wilderness, their food was gone and they were forced to turn back:

  After they had eaten their provisions they found nothing to subsist on but wild currants [and] sweet-tea leaves, and had been oppressed with hunger for twelve days. Before they set off to return, John Phillips left them to gather some berries and they saw him no more; they heard him call several times, but could render him no assistance, they being so reduced by hunger and concluded he perished.

  . . . they travelled the whole of the seventeen days with the sun on their right shoulder, and found great difficulty in ascending some of the Mountains, and also attempted to return by the direction of the sun. After travelling for upwards of Twenty-days, all (except Phillips) reached within five miles of Richmond Hill, when William Knight, unable to proceed any further, lay down, where Place says he must have died. On the same day Place and Cox made the river above Richmond Hill, and in attempting to cross the Fall the current carried them down. One was carried to one side of the river, and the other to the opposite side, with difficulty [they] pulled themselves ashore by the branches of the trees. Cox had only his shirt and shoes on. Place saw him lain along the bank, where, being very weak, and the night extremely cold, he supposes he died. Place also lay down, despairing of life, and was found on the day following by a man, who, with some of the natives, was in quest of kangaroos: he was then too weak to walk alone, but was led by the natives to the nearest hut, where he remained all night; in the morning he was taken to Hawkesbury, and from thence sent to the Hospital at Parramatta.

  Governor Hunter was concerned to stop convicts trying to escape in search of mythical freedom. The experience of Place and his companions was held up as an object lesson in the colony’s only newspaper:

  None can read the above account without pitying the ignorance, and commiserating the sufferings of these deluded prisoners; and it is fervently to be hoped, that the inconceivable hardships they have endured from hunger and cold, with the almost constant prospect of death before their eyes, will deter all other prisoners from either advising any of their companions or from making a similar attempt themselves. It is well known, that those are not the only unfortunate men who have perished in this wild attempt, many others have never returned to relate the hardships they underwent, and must therefore have perished under every accumulation of misery by their rashness and folly. Place, who appears to be the only survivor, resigned himself to despair and death, and was found within a few hours of eternity. He seems to have been preserved by a particular providence, to give the above awful admonition to all others who now do or shall in future, entertain any idea of regaining their liberty by a similar act, in which nothing but inevitable death must be the final event.

  Place recovered from his ordeal but five months later made another escape bid with two other convicts. A month later, one of his fellow escapees had died and Place and the other survivor returned to the settlement. For this second break
out, Place was sentenced to 500 lashes. This harsh punishment probably spurred him on to join a group of mainly Irish convicts in the disastrous Vinegar Hill uprising the following year. John Place’s date with eternity came soon after it was suppressed. He was hanged at Parramatta on 8 March 1804.

  UP, UP AND AWAY!

  A very short but intrepid journey was taken over Sydney by an early ‘aeronaut’, Mr C.H. Brown. On the night of 17 January 1859, assisted by his partner Mr Dean, the aeronaut boarded his gas-powered balloon in the Domain and cast off ‘with about twenty-eight pounds weight of fireworks attached my car’. The fireworks—perhaps ill-advised for a contrivance powered by combustible hydrogen—were for a publicity stunt promoting the delights of ballooning. Mr Brown’s troubles began almost immediately, when he found the balloon had ‘but little ascension power’: it would not rise. He quickly threw the anchor overboard, and then a bag of ballast. Still dangerously low, he threw a second bag of ballast overboard while above Hyde Park, ‘by which means [he] ascended gently to a height of about a mile as [he] judged from the expansion of the balloon’. Hopefully there was nobody taking the evening air in Hyde Park at that moment.

  Despite these early troubles, Brown flew on and discharged the fireworks, at which ‘deafening shouts reached [his] ears from the thousands of people assembled in the Domain and Hyde Park’:

  I hailed the crowd in Hyde Park, some of whom inform me that my shouts were heard by them. I heard distinctly the sounds of a band of music at the Rotunda, Woolloomooloo, over which I passed. From the time of my leaving the Domain, until my descent, the shouts of the people and the barking of dogs did not become inaudible.