WHAT do you do when your working life is over?
Live another life, of course, as was the case for some once graceful, cargo-carrying 19th century square riggers no longer roaming the world's oceans.
Recycling sturdy old iron and steel sailing ships is not easy, but a few surviving windjammers, once modified, were ideal in about 1900 for transporting coal.
Largely de-masted, these former greyhounds of the sea, became mere hulks hauled around by a tugboat. Usually they hauled coal cargoes to deep water jetties, or were anchored offshore, where steamships waited.
In their new coal bunkering role in the emerging era of steamships, the ageing hulks, like long, floating barges, might service a steamship requiring, say, 600 tons of coal. They were also versatile, with a hulk sometimes called upon to deliver hundreds of sacks of wheat to a waiting steamer. But coal was most needed.
This now vanished phenomenon of coal hulks (also using retired steamers with their big cargo holds) was common for decades in may ports from Fremantle, to Port Adelaide, to Sydney, Geelong and Melbourne.
Not surprisingly though, the use of coal hulks in Newcastle Harbour was not common. This was because of the great number of specialised coal loading wharves fed by a big onshore rail network.
The outstanding exception was a hulk operated by a short-lived Tomago coal company. Its brief role was described as unique in the colony of NSW. Introduced in 1859 and called a 'drop ship', it was moored permanently in one of the deepest parts of Newcastle Harbour. Fed by coal-laden barges towed by tug down the Hunter River from the Tomago colliery site, this hulk, formerly a 300-ton sailing ship, was a barque aptly called Anthracite. It was an unorthodox enterprise, with an onboard crane to fully load large waiting ships more efficiently. This eliminated the usual double-handling of coal cargoes. But more on that later.
My interest in the fate of these once sleek sailing vessels, now reduced to shabby, over-sized coal storage barges, was sparked by an article in the magazine Light Railways. In it, Western Australian State Records Office archivist David Whiteford outlined the unusual role of light railways at sea involving hulks in his state. Coal carted around in the old ships was familiar in ports for decades, but probably died out in most places by the 1920s.
That's why it was surprising to read that Whiteford discovered that some hulks existed for an amazingly long time in WA. The era of coal hulks in the WA port of Fremantle, near Perth, didn't end until 1950. That's when the former windjammer Bankfields went to the bottom at sea to a ships' graveyard. The hulk, despite a long, productive life, had finally outlived her usefulness. By 1950, coal-powered ships were on the way out anyway.
The iron lighter Bankfields had been a former three-masted barque built overseas in 1876, acquired by Adelaide SS Co in 1911, then hulked. She'd been taken to Fremantle in 1918 to toil another 32 years as a coal storage vessel, Whiteford wrote.
I originally suspected the hulk would have been towed to Rottnest Island and scuttled like so many others. However, her end was far more dramatic. Sold to a metal dealer and stripped of anything of value, the Bankfields was attacked by RAAF Mustangs training at sea. After an initial rocket attack, aircraft raced in again with machine guns blazing to finish the job.
She had been the only hulk left in Fremantle since April 1948 when another vessel, the Concordia, was simply towed out to sea to be sunk.
Down the WA coast, the port of Albany's last hulk was the former clipper ship Sierra Colonna (built in 1878) which also suffered the same fate as the Bankfields. Cast adrift in the Southern Ocean by a tug in October 1952, she then came under a heavy attack for more target practice involving rockets, bombs and machine gun fire from RAAF Mustangs.
Thus ended a highly unusual chapter in coal haulage in Australia's maritime history.
But why the focus on Albany and Fremantle in WA for early 20th century coal loading? Before the development of Fremantle's safe inner (Swan River) harbour for ocean going ships in 1897, Albany was WA's main port. This was despite the inconvenience of being almost 400 kilometres south-east of Perth.
Author Whiteford also reveals the hazardous practice of coal hulk tramways in WA. With a hulk and waiting collier moored on either side of a port's long jetty, this method involved linking both vessels using a temporary elevated tramway some three metres to six metres high above the wharf. Baskets of coal were then transferred from the hulks, put on tramways and pushed across to drop into the bunker hatch of the waiting ship. Worker injuries were common. This dangerous ship-to-ship loading practice persisted for at least 50 years.
Let's return to Newcastle harbour's solitary coal hulk. About 400ft (121m) long, the 'drop ship' Anthracite was once moored in deep water of the Hunter's North Channel opposite Bullock Island (Carrington). Research by the late Hunter coal mining historian, John Shoebridge, published in the Light Railways magazine last year shone a light on the neglected story of the Tomago coalfield (1854-1873).
Shoebridge said the drop ship was the first of its kind in the colony and it was also referred to as "Williamson's Derrick" after the Tomago Colliery's owner.
The rate of coal loading was said to be 300 tons a day, serviced by a small steam tug shuttling coal barges back and forth to the hulk from the mine's wharf at Tomago. The first vessel to load in the river was US merchant ship Matilda in late 1859.
But within two years, the experiment had left Williamson well out of pocket. In March 1861, the Tomago mine was up for sale. Bad luck continued to dog the venture even after it secured new owners.
Shoebridge reported that the development of cranes on the Newcastle waterfront finally led to the drop ship's redundancy. By 1869, the hulk, said to be in need of extensive repairs was removed from the harbour.
Thus ends the forgotten saga of Australia's coal hulks, although a few windjammers defied the breakers' yard. These include Sydney's James Craig, the legendary Cutty Sark now berthed at Greenwich, England, and the mighty Moshulu.
One of the largest sailing ships to ever transport grain and a reminder of the famous, last grain race in 1939, Moshulu could easily have also ended up as a coal hulk in a harbour backwater. Instead, from memory, the four-masted steel barque lives on as a floating restaurant in Philadelphia, US.
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