by Jim Haynes
At Camperdown cemetery Captain Steane was buried first. The remaining coffins were then buried in a mass grave as Reverend Kemp conducted the service by candlelight. Some victims of the tragedy who were identified had been privately buried earlier in the day.
There are many reasons why the wreck of the Dunbar had such a devastating effect on the people of Sydney, apart from the obvious reason that many citizens of the city were on the Dunbar, and Sydney was still a city small enough for everyone to know just about everyone of consequence.
The colony had recently achieved self-government; transportation was a distant memory, having ended almost twenty years before. There was a feeling that Sydney was a ‘real’ city, and the colony was ready to take her place in the world. The city, however, depended entirely on the sea for contact with the outside world and the ‘mother country’. The sea was also her link to the other major towns and cities of the colony. The last ship into port before the Dunbar was wrecked was the Shoalhaven steamer SS Nora Creina, and the first ship in after the wreck was the Grafton paddle-steamer Grafton. The sea was Sydney’s lifeline; her safe harbour was her greatest pride and joy.
The Dunbar had been the toast of the town the previous year. Indeed she was the best ship of the best shipping company in the world, and Captain Green was a respected and experienced seaman who knew Sydney Harbour well.
‘Here was a vessel built as strongly as teak timber and honest English shipwrighting could make her,’ the Sydney Morning Herald declared, ‘commanded by a cautious, vigilant and experienced sailor who, both as mate and master, had frequently entered the port before and knew it well. If we had dared to predict a safe voyage for any vessel it would have been the Dunbar under captain Green.’
If it was not safe for the Dunbar to enter the port, then perhaps Sydney was not the city of the future that her citizens had imagined her to be.
At the time Melbourne, mainly due to gold, was seriously challenging Sydney as the main city of Australia. Victoria had become a separate colony in 1851 and the rivalry between the two cities was already intense. Melbourne was a prosperous and wealthy city that would overtake Sydney’s population size within a decade. Sydney’s self-esteem and confidence were shaken by the shadow of doubt suddenly hanging over her famous harbour—the one thing she had that Melbourne could never match.
The conjecture as to whether Captain Green thought he was too far north or south of the harbour entrance when he lost his ship was soon forgotten and replaced by a tidal wave of self-analysis, finger-pointing, guilt and recrimination as the city of Sydney turned on itself and debated the efficiency, practicality and modernity of the way it ran its harbour.
Critics came out of the woodwork to attack Sydney’s inadequate and antiquated harbour facilities. A letter appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on the Wednesday after the calamity, from a retired seaman, ‘D.P.’, challenging the supposed safety of the harbour entrance: ‘with a strong wind blowing on the land, the ship scudding and thick showers of rain—the characteristic of our east winds—making the darkness impenetrable, there is perhaps not another port in the world more terribly confusing to enter than the loudly lauded one of Sydney.’
This was the first of many letters criticising the way the harbour was run and suggesting improvements, saying the Dunbar was merely a tragedy waiting to happen.
The Macquarie Lighthouse was in a bad position as it was so far south of the entrance, and could not be seen at all if a ship was under the high cliffs on which it stood. The conditions in which the Dunbar was wrecked were not uncommon in winter, yet the pilot station was inside the harbour, and the signal station was useless in the dark and in stormy weather. The pilot boats were small man-powered boats that could not operate in bad conditions. The Gap was deceptive, the Heads were unlit, and a floating light inside the harbour was the only other reference point apart from the poorly situated lighthouse.
In parliament, the questioning and finger-pointing began even before it was known that the wrecked vessel was the Dunbar, led by the leader of the opposition, Mr Charles Cowper. The main target of the criticism was the Premier and Colonial Secretary, Henry Parker.
Hadn’t the government agreed a year before to install a telegraph line from South Head to the city? Why had it not been done?
Wasn’t the Macquarie Lighthouse poorly situated for ships wishing to enter the harbour? Shouldn’t there be a light on North Head, or South Head, or both?
Did the government consider that a small light on a floating barge at Sow and Pigs Reef inside the harbour was sufficient to guide large ships into Sydney?
Were there enough pilots, and did they do their job well enough? Were the pilot boats modern enough to cope with the demands of a busy harbour in safety? Why couldn’t there be a pilot station at Botany Bay so ships could be brought in safely from there?
Just nine weeks after the loss of the Dunbar, on 24 October, the clipper Catherine Adamson smashed onto the reef inside North Head in a southwesterly gale. Twenty-one lives were lost and the ship completely wrecked; once again the harbour was full of wreckage.
Cowper was now Premier and questions were asked of the new government as Sydney again wallowed in a pit of shame and recrimination. Just four days later the detailed plans were announced for the building of a lighthouse at South Head, and it began operating the following year. In true colonial fashion, Governor Denison named it after his father-in-law, Admiral Hornby.
The telegraph between South Head and the city was operational by February 1858 and a complete overhaul of the pilot system followed, with the practice of pilots boarding ships outside the harbour becoming standard, and better vessels being bought for the purpose.
Sydney has never forgotten the Dunbar: church services are held annually at St Stephens in Camperdown to this day. The mass grave was badly vandalised in the 1970s, but has been restored. There have been other tragedies in and around the harbour since, but none has produced an effect to compare to the shock and horror of the event that changed Sydney forever—when the Dunbar was lost at South Head, and the finest harbour in the world was filled with bodies.
‘Dunbar’
Henry Kendall
Gloomy cliffs, so worn and wasted with the washing of the waves,
Are ye not like giant tombstones round those lonely ocean graves?
Are ye not the sad memorials, telling of a mighty grief—
Dark with records ground and lettered into caverned rock and reef ?
Oh! ye show them, and I know them, and my thoughts in mourning go
Down amongst your sunless chasms, deep into the surf below!
Oh! ye bear them, and declare them, and o’er every cleft and scar,
I have wept for dear dead brothers perished in the lost Dunbar!
Ye smitten—ye battered, splintered and shattered cliffs of the Sea!
Restless waves, so dim with dreams of sudden storms and gusty surge,
Roaring like a gathered whirlwind reeling round a mountain verge,
Were ye not like loosened maniacs, in the night when Beauty pale
Called upon her God, beseeching through the uproar of the gale?
Were ye not like maddened demons while young children faint with fear
Cried and cried and cried for succour, and no helping hand was near?
Oh, the sorrow of the morrow!—lamentations near and far!—
Oh, the sobs for dear dead sisters perished in the lost Dunbar!—
Ye ruthless, unsated, hateful and hated waves of the Sea!
Aye, we stooped and moaned in darkness, eyes might strain and hearts might plead,
For their darlings crying wildly, they would never rise nor heed!
Aye, we yearned into their faces looking for the life in vain,
Wailing like to children blinded with a mist of sudden pain!
Dear hands clenched, and dear eyes rigid in a stern and stony stare,
Dear lips white from past affliction, dead to all our mad despair,
When we turn to all those loved ones, looking backward through the years!
The fathers and mothers, the sisters and brothers—drowned at sea!
Nil desperandum, cras ingens iterabimus aequor.
(Do not despair, tomorrow we shall set out again on the vast ocean.)
Horace (Ode 7, Book One)
Coming across
HENRY LAWSON
WE WERE DELAYED FOR an hour or so inside Sydney Heads, taking passengers from the Oroya which had just arrived from England and anchored off Watson’s Bay.
It seemed a pity that the new chums for New Zealand didn’t have a chance to see Sydney after coming so far and getting so near. It struck them that way too.
We had a yarn with one of these new arrivals, and got talking about the banks. It turned out that he was a radical. He spat over the side and said:
‘It’s a something shame the way things is carried on! Now, look here, a banker can rob hundreds of wimmin and children an’ widders and orfuns, and nothin’ is done to him; but if a poor man only embezzles a shilling he gets transported to the colonies for life.’ The italics are ours, but the words were his.
We explained to this new chum that transportation was done away with long ago, as far as Australia was concerned, that no more convicts were sent out here, only men who ought to be; and he seemed surprised.
He did not call us a liar, but he looked as if he thought that we were prevaricating. We were glad that he didn’t say so, for he was a bigger man.
When we got through the Heads someone pointed to the wrong part of the cliff and said:
‘That’s where the Dunbar was wrecked.’
Shortly afterwards another man pointed to another wrong part of the cliffs and observed incidentally:
‘That’s where the Dunbar was wrecked.’
Pretty soon a third man came along and pointed to a third wrong part of the cliff, and remarked casually:
‘That’s where the Dunbar was wrecked.’
We moved aft and met the fourth mate, who jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the cliffs in general, and muttered condescendingly:
‘That’s where the Dunbar was wrecked.’
It was not long before a woman turned round and asked, ‘Was that the place where the Dunbar was wrecked, please?’
We said ‘Yes,’ and she said ‘Lor,’ and beckoned to a friend.
We went for’ard and met an old sailor, who glared at us, jerked his thumb at the coast and growled:
‘That’s where the Dunbar went down.’
Then we went below; but we felt a slight relief when he said ‘went down’ instead of ‘was wrecked.’
It is doubtful whether a passenger boat ever cleared Sydney Heads since the wild night of that famous wreck without someone pointing to the wrong part of the cliffs, and remarking:
‘That’s where the Dunbar was wrecked.’
We travelled second-class in the interests of journalism. You get more points for copy in the steerage. It was a sacrifice; but we hope to profit by it some day.
There were about fifty male passengers, including half a dozen New Zealand shearers, two of whom came on board drunk—their remarks for the first night mainly consisted of ‘gory’. ‘Gory’ is part of the Australian language now—a big part.
The others were chiefly tradesmen, labourers, clerks and bagmen, driven out of Australia by the hard times there, and glad, no doubt, to get away.
One commercial traveller shipped with a flower in his buttonhole. His girl gave it to him on the wharf, and told him to keep it till it faded, and then press it. She was a barmaid. She thought he was ‘going saloon’, but he came forward as soon as the wharf was out of sight. He gave the flower to the stewardess, and told us about these things one moonlight night during the voyage.
There was another, a well-known Sydney man, whose friends thought he was going saloon, and turned up in good force to see him off. He spent his last shilling ‘shouting’, and kept up his end of the pathetic little farce out of consideration for the feelings of certain proud female relatives, and not because he was ‘proud’—at least in that way. He stood on a conspicuous part of the saloon deck and waved his white handkerchief until Miller’s Point came between. Then he came forward where he belonged. But he was proud—bitterly so. He had a flower too, but he did not give it to the stewardess. He had it pressed, we think (for we knew him), and perhaps he wears it now over the place where his heart used to be.
When Australia was fading from view we shed a tear, which was all we had to shed; at least, we tried to shed a tear, and could not. It is best to be exact when you are writing from experience.
Just as Australia was fading from view, someone looked through a glass, and said in a sad, tired kind of voice that he could just see the place where the Dunbar was wrecked.
Several passengers were leaning about and saying ‘Europe! E-u-rope!’ in agonised tones. None of them were going to Europe, and the new chums said nothing about it. This reminds us that some people say ‘Asia! Asia! Ak-kak-Asia!’ when somebody spills the pepper. There was a pepper-box without a stopper on the table in our cabin. The fact soon attracted attention.
A new chum came along and asked us whether the Maoris were very bad round Sydney. He’d heard that they were. We told him that we had never had any trouble with them to speak of, and gave him another show.
‘Did you ever hear of the wreck of the Dunbar?’ we asked. He said that he never ‘heerd tell’ of it, but he had heerd of the wreck of the Victoria.
We gave him best.
The first evening passed off quietly, except for the vinously excited shearers. They had sworn eternal friendship with a convivial dude from the saloon, and he made a fine specimen fool of himself for an hour or so. He never showed his nose for’ard again.
Now and then a passenger would solemnly seek the steward and have a beer. The steward drew it out of a small keg which lay on its side on a shelf with a wooden tap sticking out of the end of it, out of the end of the keg, we mean. The beer tasted like warm but weak vinegar, and cost sixpence per small glass.
The bagman told the steward that he could not compliment him on the quality of his liquor, but the steward said nothing. He did not even seem interested, only bored. He had heard the same remark often before, no doubt. He was a fat, solemn steward, not formal, but very reticent—unresponsive. He looked like a man who had conducted a religious conservative paper once and failed, and had then gone into the wholesale produce line, and failed again, and finally got his present billet through the influence of his creditors and two clergymen. He might have been a sociable fellow, a man about town, even a gay young dog, and a radical writer before he was driven to accept the editorship of the aforesaid periodical. He probably came of a ‘good English family’. He was now, very likely, either a rigid Presbyterian or an extreme freethinker. He thought a lot, anyway, and looked as if he knew a lot too—too much for words, in fact.
We took a turn on deck before turning in, and heard two men arguing about the way in which the Dunbar was wrecked.
The commercial travellers, the jeweller, and one or two new chums who were well provided with clothing undressed deliberately and retired ostentatiously in pyjamas, but there were others, men of better days, who turned in either very early or very late, when the cabin was quiet, and slipped hurriedly and furtively out of their clothes and between the blankets, as if they were ashamed of the poverty of their underwear.
It is well that the Lord can see deep down into the hearts of men, for He has to judge them; it is well that the majority of mankind cannot, because, if they could, the world would be altogether too sorrowful to live in; and we do not think the angels can either, else they would not be happy, if they could and were they would not be angels any longer, they would be devils.
We turned in feeling comfortably dismal, and almost wishing that we had gone down with the Dunbar.
> The intoxicated shearers and the dude kept their concert up till a late hour that night—or, rather, a very early hour next morning; and at about midnight they were reinforced by the commercial traveller, who had been visiting acquaintances aft. This push was encouraged by voices from various bunks, and enthusiastically barracked for by a sandy-complexioned, red-headed comedian with twinkling grey eyes, who occupied the berth immediately above our own.
They stood with their backs to the bunks, and their feet braced against the deck, or lurched round, and took friendly pulls from whisky flasks, and chyacked each other, and laughed, and blowed, and lied like . . . like Australian bushmen; and occasionally they broke out into snatches of song, and as often broke down.
Few Englishmen know more than the first verse, or two lines, of even their most popular song, and, where elevated enough to think they can sing, they repeat the first verse over and over again, with the wrong words, and with a sort of ‘Ta-ra-ra-rum-ti-tooral, ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-rum-ti, ta-ra-ra-rum- tum-ti-rum-rum-tum-ti-dee-e-e,’ by way of variation.
Presently—suddenly, it seemed to our drowsy senses, two of the shearers and the bagman commenced arguing with drunken gravity and precision about politics, even while a third bushman was approaching the climax of an outback yarn of many adjectives, of which he himself was the hero. The scraps of conversation that we caught were somewhat as follow. We leave out most of the adjectives.
First Voice: ‘Now, look here. The women will vote for men, not principles. That’s why I’m against women voting. Now, just mark my . . .’
Third Voice (trying to finish yarn): ‘Hold on. Just wait till I tell yer. Well, this bloomin’ bloke, he says . . .’
Second Voice (evidently in reply to first): ‘Principles you mean, not men. You’re getting a bit mixed, old man.’ (Smothered chuckle from comedian over our head.)