ҩԅԅҩ ᓏҩԅԅҩ
🔺 HMAS Karangi: once an important contributor in the defence of Darwin against the Japanese attack, now decomposing incrementally in the bay
🔺 the “interpretative and scenic lookout”ჱჲს A metal plaque on the ground alongside the trail directs the curious passerby to an old wooden viewing platform where you can observe these maritime relics redolent of rotting timber and rusting metal. This spot contains the ship-breaking ramp (or what remains of it) that was used to dismember these ex-naval vessels. Missing is the wooden crane (presumably submerged) and the telescope.
🔺 The ship-breaking dock
ჱჲს The story of how these ships ended up here begins in 1966 when the Maritime Services Board approved the use of land here as a ship-breaking yard for the Port of Sydney. From 1970 till to the early Nineties private companies leased the yard to demolish hulks which had surpassed their use-by-date.
ჱჲს With the passage of time, left to nature and the elements, a number of these ex-ships have experienced an almost complete organic makeover. The dense mangroves of the bay have invaded the vessels, turning them into what one observer described as “a floating mangrove forest” (May Ly) and another, “a floating rusty relic forest” (Ruth Spitzer). The stricken and abandoned vessels are now a haven for local coastal birdlife (at dusk the hovering and nesting white gulls are easy to spot aboard the arboreal hulls).
ჱჲს The most striking example of this process of afforestation of wrecks is the SS Ayrfield. The UK-built steam collier, which ended up in Homebush Bay in 1972 after World War 2 service, is spectacularly overgrown with mangroves, a dense armada of trees literally bursting out of the ship’s disappearing hull and threatening to swallow it whole! High-rise residents in the Wentworth Point estate and people strolling along the waterfront of the Point are afforded the best views of the organically-refashioned Ayrfield.
ነሃጣፈነ A curious footnote to the 50 year-presence of the scuttled and abandoned ships in Homebush Bay is that the vessels, despite the egregiously bad state they are in, are ‘protected’ by legislation (under the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976).
Materials referenced:
‘Shipwrecks of Homebush Bay’, (May Ly), 30-Jul-2013, www.weekendnotes.com
‘Graveyards of a different kind at Homebush Bay’, (Ruth Spitzer), 2015, www.ruthspitzer.com