Category: photographs

 

 

The pictured vessel was dumped in the Garden Island Ships’ Graveyard between 79 and 115 years ago.

My hunch (which could be dead wrong) is that it once worked as a barge in Port Adelaide, and that its hull was mostly wooden.

The greater portion of its former mass is now gone.

However, it is likely that this wreck directly supports a larger number of living organisms than it ever did – several generations ago – as an “intact”, “working” ship.

If you zoom in and look closely, you’ll see evidence which supports this assertion.

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You are looking at the most readily-recognisable of the Garden Island Ships’ Graveyard’s 25 wrecks.

Most of this one has either corroded away, become enshrouded by mangroves, or been submerged in silt, but the remnants of its sternpost and rudder still stand tall.

The screw steamer Glaucus was built in Sunderland, England in 1878.

From the 1880s until the early 1930s it worked in Australian waters – initially as a very accident-prone coastal trader, then as a grain storage hulk.

Glaucus’s final accident led to its beaching in a ships’ graveyard, rather than it being broken up and its iron salvaged.

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Port Adelaide has five “abandonment sites”, aka “ships’ graveyards”.

They contain the remains of at least 40 vessels, all dumped in the first half of the 20th century, in various arms of the Port’s mangrove-rimmed tidal creeks.

25 of those abandoned wrecks are in just one “gravesite” – the Garden Island Ships’ Graveyard, in the Port River’s North Arm.

It is a “treasure trove” of maritime history, albeit a progressively-vanishing one.

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As Neil Young once put it, rust never sleeps.

(the title of his still-celebrated 1979 LP was borrowed from an ad for a “rustproofing” product)

The featured image may tell you what kind of “graveyard” is a striking feature of Adelaide’s Port River.

If it does not, this series’ next chapter will make it readily apparent.

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The Falie is a notable, historic vessel – the last of its South Australian kind, and one of just two “survivors” among the many ketches that used to be Australia’s “coastal traders”.

It is more than a century older than the BBC Venus and Red Cosmos.

Almost certainly, neither of this series’ two previously-featured vessels has ever entered its registered, purely-notional, “false-flag” port.

However, you can believe what you read on the stern of today’s much smaller hero – Port Adelaide really was/is the Falie’s actual home port.

In 2024, however, this lovingly restored “icon” of South Australia’s maritime history has been out of service for nearly two decades, and there is no guarantee that it will ever sail again.

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There is nothing Socialist – let alone Communist – about this Red Cosmos.

The bulk carrier of that name was launched in 2015, and has since made more than a few trips to Port Adelaide – all with capitalist intent.

Also a fiction: the vessel’s purported home port.

Majuro is purely a “flag of convenience”; such “false flags” are deployed by most ship-owners.

They are a key part of their efforts to minimise expenditure, to maximise their profits and to evade any legal “liability” in relation to “accidents”, and to mistreatment of employees.

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A particularly vivid childhood memory: visiting one of the woolstores in Port Adelaide, to see some of our family farm’s wool on display, prior to its auction.

At the time – circa 1960 – Port Adelaide’s woolstores were the world’s largest; the one I walked into was by far the biggest and most impressive man-made space I had ever seen.

Port Adelaide’s lighthouse – pictured above and below – pre-dated any of those woolstores.

Like them, this much more modest structure long ago lost its original raison d’être.

In recent decades, however, the lighthouse has been rather better looked after than have most of the woolstores.

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