Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Members may recall just a little over a year ago a replica of the Duyfken or ‘Little Dove’ set sail on a 12,000-kilometre voyage around Australia to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first documented European contact with Australia.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

And came to my electorate!

Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. During that voyage the Duyfken visited many ports—including yours, Member for Hinkler—around southern and eastern Australia, including Fremantle, Cairns, Hobart and Sydney, sailed by a combined volunteer-professional crew of 16 people. One of those fortunate enough to have been selected for a leg of the voyage was Frances Clements, who hails from Gilmore, my part of our island continent. Frances is a ranger with the Marine Parks Authority at Jervis Bay Marine Park and I was lucky enough to have her share the story of her experiences with me, which I now want to share with this House.

Frances is a qualified coxswain and this enabled her to meet the requirement to have completed a mandatory sea safety course, which would have otherwise scuttled her chances to volunteer in the time frame available to her. She joined the Duyfken at Newcastle in late October last year and over the next week, until she disembarked at Wollongong, was busily involved in fast-tracking the skills needed to crew a square-rigged sailing ship.

The Duyfken is a very small craft, only some 24 metres long, with a shallow draft of 2.8 metres. Anyone who had first seen photographs and then viewed the real thing would have been very surprised at the real size. According to Frances, there were plenty of jobs to go around and if sails were involved then plenty of ropes as well. At sea, crews stood watches of four to six hours day and night and all took turns on the lookout duties and at the helm. Adjusting the sails was an exercise in coordination. The crew focused on working in unison and responding quickly to the captain’s and mate’s orders to ease this rope and haul that one to avoid damaging the rigging. Frances says she now understands how sea shanties originated—from the need to maintain a rhythm when drawing the anchor or doing other hard work requiring a team effort. Incidentally, it took all free hands to raise the anchor, using a wooden ratchet-and-pulley device. Each time the crew pulled on the anchor rope, a plank was wedged into the wooden ratchet, devised to stop it slipping back.

Living on board, one gets absorbed in the sense of the history of the Duyfken and what it must have been like for those living on board. In keeping with the atmosphere, the use of mobile phones was discouraged and limited to offshore opportunities or moments when there was the least intrusion into the atmosphere of the ship. Frances slept in a hammock, which she found surprisingly comfortable, but she did say that when it rained or the deck was awash, the water leaked through the deck, dripping onto anyone sleeping below. Her head space on the hammock was only about 18 inches and the upper part of the hull became warm and humid overnight. So, whilst her trip in spring was relatively comfortable, a journey through the tropics such as the original voyagers took would have been an entirely different proposition. But there was a comforting feeling at the same time, no doubt encouraged by the cosiness below decks and the timber and rope that formed the world of the crew.

I hasten to add that she described below decks as small but not claustrophobic, and the creaking of the ship was a comforting, pleasant sound. Speaking of rope, Frances described how waste rope would have been recycled into functional pieces of equipment such as mats to buffer against surfaces that rubbed together. Washing up was done in a wooden bucket using a fat, frayed rope end as a scrubbing brush. Of course there were some mod cons, such as safety equipment, but overall the presentation stayed fairly true to the period, with hand-sewn flax cloth sails and tarred hemp and manila ropes.

Much of the journey involved stays in various ports and engaging in promotional activities—typically spanning a weekend, with a further two days for visits by school groups. It has to be appreciated that the volunteer crew constantly changed during the nine months of the voyage as people came and went. This was a challenging dynamic to the full-time crew, who virtually had to retrain people on a constant basis. It must have been very much like groundhog day for them.

Frances describes the lure of the sea as seductive and said that, if the opportunity was again offered, she would jump at it, particularly for a longer voyage. Despite some trying moments, her experience was memorable, enjoyable and a personal challenge. She felt as if she participated in living history and was enriched by the experience.

I am grateful for the funding provided by the federal government because it allowed the cost of volunteering to be kept down, thereby making the experience accessible to far more people than would otherwise have been the case. I urge any young or older Australian to consider the experience, if offered to them, for it illustrates a path of history like no other way. I endorse Frances’ words to encourage any young person or older person from the electorate of Gilmore to apply for this experience.