The site of Australia’s worst maritime disaster is a desolate, rugged, windswept coastline. It is several kilometres from the nearest settlement, and tens of thousands of kilometres from where 399 doomed souls began their journey.
writer and photographer ROB SHAW
A rough 4WD track leads through paddocks to a modest memorial and information board. More than a handful of visitors on any day would be deemed busy.
Anyone tasked with designing conditions with which to wreck ships would be hard-pressed to come up with somewhere more perfect. It is easy to say in hindsight, but geography dictated that King Island was destined to earn the title of Australia’s marine graveyard. Sixty-five kilometres long, it sits bang in the middle of the western entrance to Bass Strait where prevailing winds and currents funnel unsuspecting seafarers toward a reef-ridden west coast as unwelcoming as it is unspoiled.
It's like placing a stinger spike trap in the unlit middle lane of a downhill highway.
Shipwrecks are as integral to King Island as sand dunes are to Fraser. The known total exceeds 80, dates from 1802 to 2015 and has claimed more than 1,000 lives. Included are Australia’s worst two peacetime maritime disasters. The Cataraqui met its fate 170 years ago on this haunting stretch of Fitzmaurice Bay, almost within sight of the line of latitude responsible for bestowing the name Roaring Forties on the winds which contributed to its demise.
Today, King Island is a fascinating and friendly place to visit. Its economy has been built on the luscious grass that grows abundantly. Cows transform it into dairy and beef delicacies while golfers locate small patches of sand in large swathes of it. But there is so much more to the island than bovines and bunkers.
There’s the same laid-back vibe as Bass Strait sibling Flinders, along with the familiar index finger acknowledgement between passing drivers.
Only 86km of the 442km road network is sealed, tiny creeks are optimistically called rivers, two litres of milk costs $8, as does one lettuce, and a picture of local hero and two-time Olympian Stewart McSweyn adorns the main street of the capital, Currie, where tourists instantly identify themselves by locking their car.
Local just leave the keys in the ignition.
Marsupials seem to struggle with the word nocturnal as their determination to become roadkill continues around the clock. One guide book talks up remote Naracoopa’s adequate parking and the chance to escape the “hustle and bustle” of Currie.
A sign on a backyard gate reads, “No visitors, no excuses.”
Wherever you go on King Island, the echoes of tragic shipwrecks are nearby. It is a past that locals recognise, and even embrace because King Island’s identity and character have been sculpted by the rugged rocks that dominate the beautiful but treacherous coastline.
Many headlands and bays are named after wrecks, rusting anchors sit at both ends of Currie’s Main Street, and the subject dominates the display of local books at the post office. The King Island Regional Development Organisation has created a Maritime Trail with information boards marking the site of all the major wrecks. Like a wayward ship in high seas, the stories lurch from humorous to heartbreaking, fascinating to frightening.
After all aboard the Blencathra were rescued in 1875, thoughts turned to the valuable cargo, including 800 cases of whisky. Cape Wickham lighthouse operator William Hickmott reported that “trusty men” were required to guard the haul “and yet, by some unaccountable means, 75 cases evaporated the first night”.
The number of survivors picked up after the Netherby ran aground near Currie in 1866 exceeded the number she had on board by one because a baby girl was born while they awaited rescue.
In response to the numerous disasters, what remains to this day the tallest lighthouse in the Southern Hemisphere (48m) was built at Cape Wickham in 1861, but even this did not solve the problem. Several ships mistook its beam for Cape Otway in Victoria and headed south, directly onto King Island’s lethal western coast.
When the Neva ran aground off Cape Wickham in 1835, its cargo of Irish women convicts were locked below decks. This didn’t stop its captain jumping in the first lifeboat and, when it foundered, swimming back to take the next one. He received no blame from the subsequent enquiry. Only 22 of the women made it ashore; seven of those were dead by daybreak and the total death toll was 224.
This is only exceeded in Australian waters by the Cataraqui, which foundered a decade later at the opposite end of the island.
There are so many bodies buried at the end of Parsons Lane, midway between Currie and the southernmost tip of Stokes Point, that only the location of one of five mass graves is known for certain.
An 802-tonne wooden barque built in Quebec (hence its French-Canadian name) and registered (like Titanic 71 years later) in Liverpool, the Cataraqui was transporting settlers to a new life in Australia. On August 3, 1845, the captain gave permission for the 376 passengers to select their best attire for expected arrival into Melbourne the following day. Only one would reach the destination.
In dreadful weather at 4.30am the next day, the ship struck a reef and immediately began to break up. By dawn, 200 desperate souls were still clinging to the disintegrating deck just 100 yards from the country they had set out for nearly four months earlier. Over the next 36 hours this figure gradually dropped as the storm continued.
Of the 408 on board, only nine survived. The only passenger to survive was Solomon Brown, who lost his wife and four children. Of the 399 victims, 186 were children. A large plaque at the wreck site records all names with an asterisk denoting those who survived.
An entire room at the excellent King Island Museum in Currie is now devoted to the Cataraqui. It includes many artefacts recovered from the scene plus a beautiful scale model of the ship, and is well worth the $10 entry fee (free to islanders).
Rob Shaw was born and raised in England where he trained and worked as a journalist. Coming to Australia in 2002 with his young family was supposed to be temporary, but Tasmania had other ideas. He has since spent his time working as a sports reporter, exploring our state’s wilderness and realising that he is staying here for the term of his natural life.