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Sunday, 1 May 2005
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Departure Day! As I sat there by the old post office waiting to board MV Trinity Bay,
I pondered if my liver would have survived another night on T.I. I was the only one
boarding the ship and was asked by the other passengers, "Are you joining OUR
ship?". Their ship indeed! Primeval group instincts asserted themselves as I was
being drawn into playground talk along the lines of "My name is ..., what's yours?".
I was facing two more days of intersecting monologues.
Adrienne, who had been the hostess on the outward voyage a week ago, was still on
board. Amongst the usual assortment of elderly passengers was
80-year-old Dennis from Brisbane who played "Lily Marlene" and
"Wooden Heart" on his mouth-organ and wore a t-shirt
that read, "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.".
He was the only interesting character amongst an otherwise very (sub-)urban mob!
The skipper was new. He turned out to be a German, Chris Oppermann
from Hildesheim, who had come out to Australia 25 years ago and now navigated this 3200-tonne
cargo ship through waters around Australia that had tested
the navigational skills of Captain Cook and Lt. Bligh! Hadn't
the world become a small place?
It was Lt. William Bligh who sighted the Prince of Wales group on 3 June 1789 during his classic open-boat voyage from Tofua to Timor after the infamous Bounty mutiny. The day being Wednesday, Bligh conferred this name on the first island he passed (his imagination clearly lagged far behind his navigation) - and so set the theme for the eventual naming of Thursday Island. Who actually did name Thursday Island has been a mystery which has baffled local historians for decades. Recent research at the Hydrographic Office in England resolved that it was Captain Owen Stanley during his 1848 Rattlesnake voyage who named Thursday and Friday Islands - but in the reverse order to that which applies today! Before the charts could be engraved, someone crossed out the names in red ink and reversed them, presumably to preserve the geographical/chronological sequence of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from east to west.
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As the ship got under way, I looked back to that "Thirsty Island" and those
6-inch guns on top of Green Hill which were to have staved off a feared Russian invasion
in 1898 but had never fired a shot in anger. Nor would they have needed to!
If an invading fleet had ever come that way it should have been encouraged by every
possible means to come ashore; the heat, the thirst, the beer, and the Islanders
could have been trusted to do the rest. "Yawo" (Good-bye), Thursday Island!