by Jim Haynes
As they passed through Suez, at Port Said, my grandmother bought a cheap paper fan, which we still have today. It was the only souvenir she could afford.
They arrived in Fremantle on 25 November 1929 and in Sydney around 10 December. The new liner attracted quite a bit of attention, but Bert and Nell were just glad to arrive. They had only just scraped in as migrants: with the Great Depression biting deeply, Australia stopped migration at the end of 1929.
The Orontes must have been one of the last—if not the last—ship to carry sponsored migrants to Australia for a number of years. She continued to service the London to Australia route throughout the 1930s as a luxury liner, and carried the English cricket teams to Australia to contest the Ashes, including the infamous ‘bodyline’ team in 1932.
Bert found himself on unemployment relief—building a retaining wall at Banksmeadow to keep Botany Bay from eroding the local parks and houses. Their son, Albert, found work in a tannery. Their staple diet was bread and dripping. Bert could fix anything that broke and Nell could make all their clothes, curtains and furnishings.
Slowly, things improved. In 1933 Bert and Nell rented a house on a double block in Botany and established the Bonnie Doon Nursery, raising seedlings to sell in Paddy’s Market every Friday. It was hard work and our mother was taken out of school at age thirteen to help out. By 1940, Bert and Nell could afford such luxuries as an electric sewing machine and a pianola.
Apart from my mother, who made several trips to Britain as an adult, none of the family ever returned, or showed any desire to do so. Bert and the three children loved Australia, but my grandmother never felt at home here and lived out her days to a very old age as a stranger in a strange land.
World War II put pressure on women, and men past recruitment age, to take up jobs in factories. Bert gave up the nursery and went to work in a fabric factory. Our mother worked in a factory during the day making radios, and was a waitress at night.
Bert enjoyed having British servicemen to dinner and showing them around Sydney. In June 1945, daughter Sylvia brought home three British sailors from HMS Formidable, an aircraft carrier that had been hit by a kamikaze between Japan and the Philippines, and was in Sydney for repair. One of them was to become my dad. When the Formidable returned to Sydney with freed Australian prisoners of war, he chose to be demobilised in Sydney and they married in January 1946.
While this was happening, the Orontes was also at war. In 1940 she was converted to a troop-ship, landing troops in North Africa in November 1942, Sicily in 1943 and Salerno, during the re-conquest of Italy.
When her wartime duties were completed, and all prisoners of war had been carried safely home, Orontes resumed her civilian duties, after being reconditioned as a single-class ship carrying 1370 passengers.
Times had changed. Australia had been shocked out of complacency by the war. The Japanese had bombed Australia over a hundred times, and sunk our shipping with relative impunity. There was a growing threat of communism and nations developing to our north. It was ‘populate or perish’.
Displaced Europeans were encouraged to come; our former allies the Greeks were encouraged to come; our recent enemies the Italians, who had been here in thousands as prisoners of war, were encouraged to come back; most of all, however, we wanted Poms! So the Labor government set up a scheme allowing the British to migrate to Australia almost for free. Migrant hostels were waiting to acclimatise them, and there was the promise of a much better life than post-war Britain could offer. However, as a token of their commitment to their new home, the Australian government made them pay £10 each! ‘Ten Pound Poms’ needed to be healthy and under 45 years of age, and there were no skill restrictions at first.
The Orontes resumed the London to Australia service in June 1948 and continued until March 1962. She was the busiest migrant ship on the ‘Ten Pound Pom’ run from 1948 to 1960, as over a million British migrants flocked to Australia.
When not undertaken out of desperation or the simple need to survive, migration—even to a place with the same language and a similar culture—is still a major life upheaval and requires a certain amount of bravery and sense of adventure.
I collected many stories from Ten Pound Poms from my weekend segment on Sydney radio, and most had a poignant or funny element that highlighted the changes these migrants experienced.
Doug Ashdown came as a six year old in 1948 and became one of our best loved singer-songwriters. He remembers his mum, who had lived through the Depression and a war and over a decade of rationing in England, bursting into tears when she saw the amount of fresh food available in a market at Fremantle.
One listener remembered the shock of waking one morning with the ship moving and seeing an Arab leading a camel when he looked out of the porthole; the ship was in the Suez Canal!
The scheme, which reached its peak in 1969 when more than 80,000 Ten Pound Poms arrived, was not a total success. Many were disappointed or homesick, and about a quarter returned home— but there was also a not-uncommon syndrome, which I call the ‘double return’. This occurred when disappointed British migrants decided to return home, did so—then realised life was better here, and came back again!
Many prominent and successful Aussies were Ten Pound Poms, including Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Bee Gees! Assisted migration schemes were later extended to include migrants from countries such as the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, West Germany and, much later, Turkey.
Typical of the success of the scheme were the Hammonds from Yorkshire. Their story was sent to me by their only child Sheena, who remembers coming as an eleven year old with her Scottish mother in 1960.
Sheena says all she knew about Australia before leaving the UK was that there were sheep stations and a bridge. She has vivid memories of the voyage out, leaving Tilbury Docks in the middle of winter and arriving in Sydney six weeks later to a January heatwave. She, too, remembers Arabs and camels walking beside the ship through the Suez Canal. She remembers the posh cabin that had been First Class before the ship was converted to a migrant vessel, the elegant dining room and seasickness in the Bay of Biscay.
Sheena’s childhood memories of the voyage must be typical of the hundreds of thousands of Ten Pound Poms:
When the ship went over the equator, there was a party and King Neptune came with seaweed for hair. This took place up on deck all around the pool. We were all given a certificate celebrating the occasion. I still have mine too, somewhere.
This is how she remembers crossing the Great Australian Bight:
It was very, very rough but we had our sea legs. The roll was sideways there. I remember being in the dining room, our table was in the middle of the room, and looking to the port hole to see sky one minute and sea the next. There was a big swell and everything was tipping off the tables and breaking. That was the first and only time that I wondered about the ship’s ability to cope with the ocean.
Sheena told me she admired her parents’ bravery at migrating in their late 30s and starting all over again in a new country. My sister and I feel the same way about our grandparents; it’s a common story. Often the parents do it tough as migrants and the kids derive the benefits of a better life.
When the assisted migration schemes ended in 1982, inflation had taken the cost from £10 to $75. Times had changed again by then, and more migrants were being welcomed under family reunion, special skills and refugee programs, many from Asia.
Many Aussies retain the imprint of the migrant experience from their not-too-far-distant past. There’s a certain flexibility, resilience and willingness to have a go at something new in the Aussie character, along with a willingness to travel and move around. There’s also an understanding and appreciation of those who take risks to give their children a better life, and gratitude to a country that provided the opportunity.
Maybe we should have a national day to celebrate our migrant heritage and the hybrid vigour it gives our nation. Aussies might like to drink a toast to a man who liked
a drink himself—good old Phillip Schaffer, soldier of fortune, farmer, and the first foreigner, i.e. ‘non-Britisher’, to come to Australia of his own free will.
After all, not many people living in Europe back then wanted to go and live 12,000 miles away on an unexplored continent at the bottom of the world . . . and we should give some credit to those who did.
‘How Australian Are You?’
Jim Haynes
How Australian are you?
Can you play the didgeridoo?
Could you go naked in the bush and still survive?
Can you cook a kangaroo?
Spear a barramundi too?
Do you know which plants to eat to stay alive?
Was dad a shearer or a drover?
Or did your family come over
From Europe or Asia just last year?
How Australian can you get?
Can you ride a surfboard yet?
When we beat the Poms at cricket do you cheer?
How Australian are you?
Can you make a wallaby stew?
Did your great-great-granddad come on that First Fleet?
Was he a convict? Is it true?
Was he a red-haired bloke called ‘Blue’?
Did he hop around with chains upon his feet?
How Australian am I?
I’ll drink a beer and eat a pie
And me granddad owned some cattle, and some sheep.
How Australian was yours?
Did he fight in any wars?
Did he die at Gallipoli or in his sleep?
Was your granddad true blue?
Was your dad a Digger too?
Any explorers in your family tree?
A pioneer or two?
Just a bushranger will do.
Does that make you more Australian than me?
What’s your Aussie claim to fame?
Do you have an Aussie name?
‘Oodgeroo Noonuccal’, ‘Namatjira’, oh, they’re easy.
But ‘Victor Chang’ and ‘Jenny Kee’,
They sound Australian to me.
Like ‘Ettingshausen’, ‘Dipierdomenico’ and ‘Campese’.
So how Australian are you?
Are you Aussie through and through?
If you can’t do all these things are you an Alien?
Well maybe we should start
With how you feel, inside your heart,
’Cos there are twenty million ways to be Australian.
Anybody can pilot a ship when the sea is calm.
Navjot Singh Sidhu
The pilots of Port Phillip Bay
MATTHEW STIRLING
THE TREACHEROUS WATERS AT the entrance to Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay are among the most dangerous in the world, and more than 700 vessels have met their end at the entrance and within the bay. Since 1839, it has been the responsibility of the Port Phillip Sea pilots to steer ships safely through the labyrinth of rips, reefs and unpredictable tidal currents as they enter and leave the bay.
Just four years after the European settlement of Port Phillip, George Tobin, a young ship’s master in search of a new career, sent a testimonial to Governor Gipps in Sydney, requesting permission to commence piloting operations for shipping into Port Phillip Bay. Tobin had arrived in Australia in 1836 and was, for two years until it was stolen, master of a small sloop, the Childe Harold.
Having gained a detailed knowledge of the waters of Port Phillip Bay, Tobin began a piloting service and was recommended to the government by local customs officials, merchants and mariners. The licence was granted on the condition that it incur no expense to the government.
Tobin operated his piloting business from the beach at Shortlands Bluff just inside the Rip (the narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay between Point Lonsdale and Point Nepean). Living in tents, he and his crew of five would launch their open whaleboat to row out and meet incoming ships. For a fee, Tobin would board the ship and navigate it through the hazardous channel to the safety of the port. Five months after Tobin’s pilot service began, another seaman, Thomas Sutton, obtained a second pilot’s licence. Thus it was that the township of Queenscliff was born at Shortlands Bluff as a ‘property and life-saving settlement for the Port of Melbourne’.
Sturdy though they were, the whaleboats could not handle the rough open waters beyond the bay’s entrance and usually could only assist incoming ships once they had navigated the Rip. Despite the best efforts of the pilots and their crews, the shortcomings of the service became all too evident when, in November 1839, the Prince Albert was wrecked with the loss of all four hands. Two years later, the William Salthouse was lost after striking Corsair Rock, a submerged rock just off Point Nepean that would claim many more victims.
Other tragedies occurred in the approach to the bay. With no lighthouse or pilot to guide them, incoming ships faced as much danger from the reef off Point Lonsdale outside the Heads as they did in the Rip.
By 1841, as shipping to Melbourne increased, the number of pilots grew to six, still operating in whaleboats. Appreciating the need for a sailing pilot boat, the government allocated the 46-ton cutter, Ranger, to be used in conjunction with the whaleboats, although she was also the Custom’s revenue cutter and survey vessel, among other duties, and it is not known how often she performed pilot-cutter duties.
In 1843, the first lighthouse was built at Queenscliff to assist navigation of the approach to the Rip. However, between 1849 and 1852, as shipping to Melbourne increased, the number of wrecks at the entrance to the bay also grew. Life for the pilots was adventurous and dangerous, often requiring them to take to their boats at night and in dreadful conditions.
In April 1852, George Tobin exemplified the bravery frequently required of pilots when he went in his whaleboat to the aid of the emigrant ship Isabella Watson that had struck Corsair Rock in rough conditions and been swept onto the Nepean Reef. Unable to reach the ship, Tobin and two others landed their whaleboat at Point Nepean and Tobin swam to the wreck with a lifeline. Sixty passengers were hauled to safety, although six women and three men drowned when the ship’s mizzen fell on the lifeboat in which they were attempting to escape.
Shortly after, the newly formed Victorian government was finally persuaded that stronger and faster sailing pilot ships such as brigantines and sloops were needed. Accordingly, a new brigantine, the Boomerang, was purchased, and at the same time the government took control of the pilot licences, making the pilot service publicly owned for the first time in its history.
As the gold rush took hold, the number of ships entering through the Heads soared. In 1853, on average six vessels arrived each day, and there were days when more than 20 vessels needed the pilots’ services. By now, there were over 50 licensed pilots and costs escalated. A collective known as the Pilot Board was formed to oversee piloting in Victoria, comprising five men from commerce, marine industries, underwriters and the government. They were granted independence by the government, and three piloting cooperative companies of eleven pilots each were established, each purchasing a cutter and operating as a partnership. Thus the Port Phillip Sea Pilots was formed, operating as it does to this day as a private collective.
The days of the open whaleboats were over, and an expanded pilot service that operated sailing ships outside the Heads began. It was a condition of their charter that a pilot cutter must always be on station outside the Heads, with pilots available at all times.
Perhaps no-one describes the life of a pilot in those days better than Captain Henry John Mollet Draper, a young Englishman who kept a diary about his experiences in the pilot service. Arriving in Melbourne at the height of the gold rush, he was offered a commission as a pilot with a generous salary, and began an illustrious career that spanned 47 years of service in Port Phillip.
In his diary, Draper tells of the arrival of the Ticonderoga, in November 1852. Carrying 1000 passengers and crew, the vessel had been stricken with an outbreak of typhoid on its journey from Liverpool.
Ca
ptain Draper boarded the ship, even after the crew urged him to stay away for his own safety. To avoid coming into contact with any of the afflicted crew, he scaled the mizzen-mast and shouted his directions to the helmsman. The ship was safely sailed into quarantine anchorage. By the time the Ticonderoga was cleared some seven weeks later, and Draper piloted her into Hobson’s Bay, 187 of her 1000 passengers and crew had died from the disease. Draper remarked in his journal:
I shall never forget the deep grief that sat on all; some young people had lost father and mother, others sisters and brothers, whilst many had lost relatives and friends. It was not uncommon to meet one survivor out of a large family. The ship was as clean as hands could make her but on the passage up the scene of cleanliness changed to that of dirt and filth. The poor creatures seemed to have lost all cleanliness and self-respect.
The following year, the barque Sacramento, with more than 300 emigrants and crew on board, was caught in a gale and dashed on the Point Lonsdale reef at 3 a.m. Draper and his crew rowed a whaleboat to the floundering vessel and set about saving all the panic-stricken souls on board. After they had been safely landed, Draper left to attend to another ship—one of 23 that required pilots’ assistance on that day. Meanwhile, a fellow pilot learned that the Sacramento was carrying 60,000 gold sovereigns. The pilot and his crew moved quickly to secure the precious cargo, managing to offload the gold into the whaleboat ‘at great risk and danger’ before the Sacramento finally slipped beneath the waves. For his efforts, the pilot was awarded the massive sum of £5000 and his crew an extra amount to divvy up between themselves.
In a series of articles published in the Queenscliff Sentinel in 1892, the local light-keeper, Patrick Fanning, who had arrived in the colony aboard the Ticonderoga, told of the swashbuckling, and often ill-disciplined, ways of the pilots and their crews. Like many occupations, piloting in Port Phillip Bay attracted a good smattering of larrikins who took authority with a grain of salt and helped to colour the history of the service.