Cruiser (5 page)

Despite the primitive conditions, spirits were high. After a few days at sea, the youngsters and first-timers began to find their sea legs and to put the miseries of seasickness behind them. It was an adventure, almost a holiday, with little or no work to be done and, as yet, no enforcement of the daily naval routine. They stripped to their shorts and sunbaked on deck. In the evenings, there might be a boisterous sing-song or, more furtively, a school playing Crown and Anchor, a gambling game banned in the navy but which might just win you a few quid for a run ashore. Thoughts of a new war were far away.

The navy they had joined was barely a quarter of a century old. Yet its foundations were laid in the origins of the nation itself. When the weary ships of the First Fleet at last dropped their anchors at Port Jackson in January 1788, the new governor, Captain Arthur Phillip RN, saw before him ‘the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security'.
⁶
In the century that followed, the Australian colonies whose seed Phillip had planted grew and flourished, their security guaranteed by the ‘wooden walls' of the Royal Navy. British warships came and went from their ports. British admirals, each more grand than the last, added a salty glitter to colonial society in the
colonnaded sandstone splendour of Sydney's Admiralty House. It was all very reassuring.

But it was one thing to plant the British flag among the gum trees. It was very much another to keep it flying. Any new sail in the offing might be a foreign foe ready to descend with guns blazing. Every so often, fears ran wild. The wicked French, everyone knew, were a perpetual menace. So too were the ambitious Dutch, with their colonial empire in the Spice Islands to the north. In 1854, with Queen Victoria at war with the Tsar in the Crimea, the
Argus
newspaper terrified the good citizens of Melbourne by spreading a convincing though totally fanciful rumour that an invasion of the Russian fleet was expected by the day. The British naval presence in Sydney might guarantee the security of the founding colony of New South Wales but the other colonies fretted that they lay defenceless. Hesitantly, they began to assemble their own naval forces.

Flush from the gold rushes, Victoria moved first. Melbourne's bankers and men of property, acutely conscious of the immense riches from the diggings that lay in their vaults, lived in fear that a hostile man o'war, or even a pirate, with a battery of well-trained guns might one day hold them and their city to ransom. Ballarat gold was spent in Britain to purchase a handsome warship of 580 tons, powered by both sail and a single steam-driven screw, carrying seven 32-pounder cannons. Her Majesty's Colonial Ship
Victoria
arrived to a rousing welcome in Port Phillip Bay in May 1856.

Other colonies began to scrape together their own navies. New South Wales, rather reluctantly, obtained two torpedo boats and the steam frigate HMS
Wolverine
from the Royal Navy. Queensland boasted two small steel gunboats, HMQS
Gayundah
and HMQS
Paloma
, each of 360 tons, and in 1884 South Australia acquired a small cruiser, HMCS
Protector.
It was not much, but it was something. The colonists, for all that they wanted a defence from attack by sea, were not willing to lavish money upon it.

In faraway Whitehall, when their Lordships of the Admiralty
and the Colonial Office thought of the question at all, there was mild surprise that the descendants of convicts should concern themselves with naval matters far beyond their competence, combined with a certain nervousness that their curious little gunboats might accidentally cause some ghastly international incident that would embarrass everybody. But in 1900,
Protector
was despatched, at Britain's request, to the Boxer Rebellion in China, along with 500 men of the New South Wales and Victorian Naval Brigades and the horsemen of the New South Wales Bushmen's Citizens Contingent.

To the chagrin of all concerned, they arrived too late to do any fighting.
Protector
, temporarily commissioned into the Royal Navy as one of Her Majesty's Ships, steamed up and down but never fired a shot in anger. The troops ashore marched fiercely to and fro in eager anticipation of a dust-up with the warriors of the Chinese Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists and executed a few by firing squad but ended up performing tedious garrison duty in Peking.
⁷
No one was killed in action, although six men died of sickness. The entire contingent was home by 1901, just in time for the jubilant ceremonies that ushered in the Commonwealth of Australia.

Federation raised the question of what should happen to the colonial navies. Agitation began for a Commonwealth fleet – a vision opposed at first by the Admiralty in London but taken up by the new nation with increasing enthusiasm. Looking north, Australians were disturbed by the rise of the naval power of Japan, which had stunningly annihilated a naval fleet of the Russian Tsar at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. Australia was for the white man – a policy enthusiastically agreed on all sides – and the existence of a belligerent Japan emerging from centuries of isolation was a threat to that policy. The vast mass of the British fleet was 20,000 kilometres away, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The small squadron of the Royal Navy's China Station, based in Hong Kong, could be swept aside easily enough by a determined Japanese thrust to the south, leaving the way to Australia open.

Two years after Tsushima, in December 1907, the Australian Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, learned of plans by the United States to send a great naval fleet on a global cruise to demonstrate American power to the world in general and to Japan in particular. He seized the moment. If the British would not take Australia's defence as seriously as he wished, perhaps the Americans might. He cabled President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington to invite the fleet to include Australian ports in its itinerary. Roosevelt accepted Deakin's invitation with alacrity.

When the 16 gleaming battleships of the United States Navy's Great White Fleet steamed out of the Pacific sunrise and into Sydney Harbour on 20 August 1908, they caused a national sensation. First Sydney, then the rest of the country, went dizzy with delight. The thunderous salutes that echoed around the harbour were the signal for a tumultuous week of balls and parties, courtesy calls, parades, reviews and receptions, cathedral masses and celebration banquets, and sonorous oratory about the white, English-speaking race, of blood thicker than water. (The newspapers had warned there would be some negroes in the fleet but stressed there were none with any
military
function.)

The entire exhausting performance was repeated in Melbourne a week later, to the gushing approval of the
Argus
newspaper:

The Prime Minister had pulled off a political and diplomatic triumph. He had shaken hands across the Pacific with the
Americans, given Mother England a gentle nudge in the ribs and, best of all, had aroused in the Australian people a thirst for a navy of their own, a mood he caught in prophetic words:

That day was closer than even Deakin could have realised. With the naval arms race mounting in Europe, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office in London suddenly began to encourage the idea of an Australian navy as warmly as they had once rejected it. The Federal Government, still based in Melbourne, decided to obtain from Britain the very last word in warships, a great battlecruiser that would be the flagship of an Australian squadron to defend the nation at home or, if needs be, to answer the Empire's call from across the oceans. It was a stunning leap forward, the equivalent of today's RAN acquiring a nuclear-powered guided-missile submarine.

A flurry of activity followed. Smaller ships were also ordered and experienced British sailors were despatched to help man them. Training establishments sprang up for Australian-born officers and sailors. With all the appropriate flourishes, a call went out from the Navy Office in Melbourne for patriotic youth who would defend the nation at sea:

On 10 July 1911, His Majesty King George V conferred the title of Royal Australian Navy upon the fleet of the Commonwealth. The new battlecruiser, flagship of the navy and the nation, would be known as HMAS
Australia
.
¹¹
Just two years later, on Saturday 4 October 1913, excited weekend crowds thronged the vantage points of Sydney Harbour to see her lead the cruisers
Melbourne
,
Sydney
and
Encounter
, and the destroyers
Warrego
,
Parramatta
and
Yarra
out of an early-morning springtime mist for a ceremonial fleet entry into home port for the first time. Ensigns and signal flags flew bravely beneath billowing clouds of coal smoke, the ships' companies proudly lining the rails. The nation thrilled to the grandeur, and no less than the poet of Empire himself, Rudyard Kipling, was enlisted to provide a stirring couplet to capture the mood:

At the beginning of the First World War, the RAN could muster just 3800 officers and men in uniform, with 16 ships of various sorts and sizes. As it turned out, HMAS
Australia
would play a minor role. The great wartime triumph – really the sole triumph – of the new service was achieved by the light cruiser HMAS
Sydney
, the first ship of that name, which caught and cornered the German raider
Emden
in a fierce but one-sided battle at the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean in November 1914. The Germans lost 134 men killed and wounded. Four Australians died. It was the RAN's first blooding in a ship-to-ship action, a victory hailed with bursting pride at the time and commemorated by the navy to this day.

By war's end, the navy had grown to a sizeable force of 37 ships and more than 5200 sailors. Of those men, 108 were killed in combat or died through accident or illness. HMAS
Australia
was at Scapa Flow when the Kaiser's beaten ships steamed in to ignominy, but that was the high point of her career, for in the aftermath of the war to end all wars there was little use for her. Costly to maintain, the noble battlecruiser was put in reserve as a training ship with only a skeleton crew, and on 12 April 1924, by now sadly obsolete, she was scuttled 38 kilometres off Sydney Heads to meet the terms of an international naval-disarmament treaty signed in Washington. It was a forlorn end to a colossus and a painful blow to Australian naval pride.

In the years that followed the war, those now-familiar bronze and marble monuments to the fallen rose in poignant reverence in suburbs, villages and towns around the country. Hardly a family remained untouched. In 1914, the population had been less than five million men, women and children. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra records that 416,809 men joined up to fight for King and country. A staggering 61,720 of them were killed and 155,000 wounded, including 18,000 gassed in the killing fields of the northern hemisphere, the highest per capita of any nation of the British Empire.
¹³
For all the noble talk of an Anzac tradition forged in the fires of Gallipoli and Flanders, the awful reality was more emphatically expressed in the fading sepia photographs of dead sons and lovers on cottage mantelpieces or in the everyday spectacle of blind and maimed ex-diggers groping to find seats reserved for them on trams and buses.

Australia was swept by a yearning for peace, and the decade of the '20s seemed to promise that this longing would be met. No more war, forever. Jazz and ragtime piano music ushered in an almost frenzied gaiety that replaced the drabness of wartime austerity and served, perhaps, as some consolation for the slaughter of a generation. Life seemed to be returning to normal. Andrew ‘Boy' Charlton won gold in the 1500 metres at the 1924 Paris Olympics. At Hoyts De Luxe theatre
in Melbourne, the Australian actress Louise Lovely starred in
Jewelled Nights
, a film made for the jaw-dropping cost of £8000 and which, she announced, would be ‘the starting point for a prosperous local cinema industry'. In 1927, the Duke and Duchess of York opened the first parliament in Canberra. Men brazenly adopted topless swim trunks. Women's hemlines rose; they danced the Charleston and the Black Bottom in shimmering, low-backed frocks, their shoulderblades boldly on display. Some were brave enough to drive motor cars and even smoke in public. Lieutenant Bert Hinkler completed the first solo flight from England to Australia.