Ausmarine Editorial – August 2015
About the same time as you read this, I will be presenting a paper to the biennial conference of the Australasian Institute of Marine Surveyors in Hobart. The title of that speech will be "The Future of Australian Shipbuilding – An Historical Approach". As most of you will not be in "sunny" Hobart on August 13, I decided to share some of my preliminary thoughts with you.
When Captain Anne Rutherford, the organiser of the conference, approached me to speak on the future of Australian shipbuilding, my first thought was, "Does it have a future?" The answer to that came in a nanosecond was, "of course it does". Why else would my family persist with an Australian-based maritime publishing company that focuses mainly on new ships and boats?
Despite the best efforts of state and federal governments of both stripes, as well as all the various unions that inflict their avaricious demands on the industry, we need it to survive and thrive. As an island continent with a massive maritime task, it is imperative that Australia maintains some sort of ship building capability.
When I reviewed my fifty-year connection with this industry and the changes I have seen over that half century, they have been dramatic. I suspect they will be equally dramatic over the next five decades. I am sure the industry has a future.
While I can recall a strong interest in ship and boatbuilding from the age of five or six – indeed, my father and I built a number of small sailing yachts throughout my teenage years – it was not until I gave up on Law at the University of Tasmania at the end of 1966 and went lobster fishing at Dongara in Western Australia, that I began to mix with real ship and boat designers and builders. With them, I quickly realised I had found my true spiritual home.
It was there I met hard-driving pioneers like Michael Kailis and Fred Connell who both knew they needed faster, safer, more durable and larger boats. I met university "drop out", John Fitzhardinge, who has gone on to much bigger and better things in fishing, offshore oil and gas, naval architecture and ship building as well as civic and industry affairs. All three contributed enormously to fishing, shipbuilding and education. "Fitzy" still is contributing and recently launched an impressive new pilot boat that was, very bravely, built on spec.
They were exciting times. A boom-bust-boom industry attracted a lot of energetic, imaginative and innovative people. It also inspired a thirty-year burst of dramatic progress in vessel design and construction. I think it's fair to claim that our fast ferry, crew boat, patrol boat and super yacht sectors all had their origins in the fishing industry, most particularly in the West Australian lobster fishery.
Two years later, still fascinated with the fishing industry, I secured a berth on the Northern prawn trawler 'Karumba Norman'. She was a brand new, state-of-the-art vessel that taught me as much about vessel design and construction as the fishing and shipbuilding industries. Later, I enjoyed a brief voyage on the 'Pathfinder K' where I learnt something of the Michael Kailis approach to business. That is, to keep it simple and cheap.
I joined the 'Karumba Norman' at the late and unlamented Bundeng Shipyard in Bundaberg. There, even to a twenty-one year old, it was obvious why the shipbuilding industry of the sixties was on its deathbed. Inefficiently managed and irrationally union dominated, Bundeng, like practically all of its competitors, was doomed. Indeed, the 'Karumba Norman', which was a very good fishing machine, was the last vessel built there.
The old order was rapidly changing. I got to know some of the people who would bring about that change. People like Sid Faithfull of Cairns and Tasmania's own Robert Clifford. They could clearly see what was wrong with the old ways and where opportunities lay.
Over the next fifteen years to the mid-eighties, virtually all of the traditional steel cargo ship builders died out. While Bundeng was first, it was soon followed by the likes of Walkers, Evans Deakin, BHP, Adelaide, Carringtons, Williamstown, Newcastle State Dockyard and South Mole Slipway. All those traditional, subsidy-dependent steel builders went the way of their counterparts on the Clyde, in Scandinavia and the United States. The only survivors did so by adapting to contemporary realities.
Simultaneously, though, the designers and builders of high-speed aluminium craft were establishing themselves. Robert Clifford, John Rothwell, Don Dunbar, Don Fry, Toby Richardson, Ron Devine, John Fitzhardinge, Phil Hercus, Phil Curran, Loch Crowther, Mark Stothard, John Szeto and Stuart Ballantyne and a number of others were coming to prominence as builders and designers. They soon came to dominate the world market for fast aluminium vessels.
While many of those pioneers have retired or died, their children or people they trained have, or are, taking over from them. Those second generation companies are still leading the world. And that, really, is the point. Australians are adaptable. They are innovative and they perform much better when not reliant on government handouts like the "Shipbuilding Bounty" on which our long gone steel shipbuilders were dangerously overly dependent.
So, now that it is a free, globally competitive industry with minimal interaction with government, the Australian shipbuilding industry, has, in my opinion, a very bright, long-term future.
Neil Baird
