Currie foreshore is just as wild and rugged as anywhere else on the west coast; according to something I read, it is the only sheltered anchorage on the entire coast – and not too easy of access at that, with plenty of nasty sharp rocks lying in wait for the unwary sailor. In fact, King Island must be one of the most deadly in the world – there were more than thirty ships wrecked around the island between 1862 and 1915.
Blencathra was on the way to Sydney from Glasgow when her captain mistook the Cape Wickham light for Cape Otway – a common, and deadly error. Everybody was rescued with assistance from a salvage crew working on the wreck of British Admiral, which hit the island a couple of miles further south the previous May. Those on board the British Admiral had not been so lucky - of eighty eight people only nine survived, and cargo and bodies were strewn along twenty kilometres of beach.
The captain and crew from Blencathra hitched a lift to Melbourne
with a load of cargo salvaged from the British Admiral, and the wreck of their ship
was sold to another salvage company. Despite an armed guard, seventy five of eight hundred cases of whisky from Blencathra vanished without trace
the night after they were unloaded. A successful shopping trip for somebody.
These are the rocks that did for Blencathra on January 3, 1875. They are only just out of sight from where I am sitting typing this.
Nine years earlier and a few hundred metres further
south Netherby, carrying 452 passengers bound
for Brisbane fetched up on the rocks after losing her bearings in bad
weather. Everybody managed to get
ashore, and the second officer, Mr
Parry, set out with eight men to look for habitation. Five days later he handed
Mr W. Hickmott, the duty lighthouse keeper at Cape Wickham, a letter:
Send help and succour to 500 shipwrecked people from the ship
NETHERBY – Owen Owens, Master.
They were tired, hungry and footsore, but after a brief rest Mr Parry and the four strongest of his men set out for Melbourne in the
lighthouse whaleboat. Landing on the Victorian coast near Anglesea they were mistaken for bushrangers by the first person they encountered, but managed to convince him they were nice people, really. The old shepherd guided them to a nearby station where Mr Parry borrowed a horse. He rode fifty kilometres to Geelong and telegraphed his news to Melbourne. Then he probably slept for about a week.
Meanwhile, Mr Hickmott went down to the wreck site to collect the survivors, who now included a very new baby. Small groups of people straggled up to the
lighthouse all night. The lighthouse keepers’ wives housed and fed them until they were collected and taken to Melbourne where a good many of them decided they had had enough adventures and stayed.
I’m impressed that the lighthouse women managed to cope with so many people – they must have done some mega-serious grocery
shopping.
Cataraqui Probably the most famous wreck, one of Australia’s worst peacetime marine disasters, was in 1845 when Cataraqui, an emigrant ship with 369
passengers and a crew of 46, ran into horrible weather after about three months
at sea. Captain Findlay could not get an accurate position, but believed he was
about 50 miles southwest of Portland. He wasn’t. He was actually about sixty
miles further south and the ship ran on to rocks in a heavy rain squall.
Many
of the passengers were trapped below decks and drowned immediately, but about two hundred
clung desperately to the ship for more than ten hours until it broke in two. By the
time the ship finally went to pieces late the following day only nine people
managed to get ashore alive. They were discovered by a party of sealers and
eventually taken to safety a month later.
I
walked with some friendly King Island artists to the monument marking where 342 bodies were buried in five mass graves. It is a bleak and scary place. (above)
Having
duly expressed our horror at the fate of Cataraqui we continued on our way along
the shore until the rocks gave way to a windswept beach where we all began hunting for bits and
pieces washed ashore by the roaring forties. We soon had quite a collection of brightly-coloured
sea-weathered rope, fragments of plastic, old brushes, a multi-branched sponge,
bottle tops and similar treasures. “This is how we go shopping.” Alison said. Megan said “Tomorrow we’ll go to the tip”.
reference: Loney. Jack. Wrecks on King Island. Portarlington. Marine History. 1995