Begetting of Sealegs

NFS

Peter Kreet

Not everyone goes to sea to see the sea, in my case it was more a case of extreme necessity, a dry and warm place to sleep and most importantly three meals a day. Mother had been discharged from Parramata Mental Hospital and was currently installed in a very damp, dingy bedsit in Roslyn Street, King Cross.The flat was a basement affair so you needed to leave the light on during the day, unless you  wished to carried a flash light in you back pocket. The apartment  had one room with an alcove off to cook and a bathroom off an open veranda. This unfortunately was open to a narrow alleyway where all the garbage was stored for the twenty odd flat resulting in a high rat population. When ever you wish to visit the bathroom particularly at night it was wise to carry a broom with you as you most likely needed to flatten a few rats on the way. Mother now was receiving a disabled pension bed ridden and only able to walk a few steps with the aid of a cane. Someone would visit each day to cook a meal give her a wash. Jack who had somehow against all the odds had obtain her release used to visit to keep her company. He suggested that as my grandfather had been a master mariner with Burns Philp that I should try to obtain a cadet ship with the company.

This seemed like a great solution to the problem as to where I could live . The only draw back being that I needed a uniform and as money was in short supply mother gave me her last valuable possession, a large aquamarine ring to sell. Even this proved to be a trial ,.as the pawn shop I found willing to buy the ring asked me to wait', after fifteen minutes or so two policemen arrived and took me into custody on the grounds that the ring must be stolen. After several hours and a police visit to mother's flat I was released and able to complete the sale.

A great sense of excitement griped me as it would any fifteen year old at the prospect of setting out on a new adventure. At the time the wage of six dollars a month did not bother me , only later did I realise that this was no where near enough to help mother pay her medical bills let alone live, still more of that later. My main job seemed to consist of cleaning the brass whistle on the funnel, then the ship's bell and all the other brass objects aboard from top plates on doorway to plates that seemed to be everywhere on the ship's rails. It seemed to take days .

 S.S.Burnside  belonged to a drying breed steam ships with all their accompanying soot and grit that I seemed to be forever getting in my eye. They were the day of trimmers who had to drag the coal forward towards the furnaces and boilers and stokers could shovel it in. It was very hot work particularly in the tropics and I was grateful that this was not my job. In those days crews where made up of different racial groups, in our case Malays on deck, Chinese cook and stewards and Indians in the engine room. This I was told was done to keep order as the various racial groups could be counted on to argue among themselves.

We sail on through Torres Strait to Surabaya in Java where I experienced my first fatality when a linesman on the wharf lost his leg when a wire broke and wiped back onto him. The harbour was  a mess, full of sunken war wrecks , broken cranes and railway tracks with no skilled workers able to repair the Dutch infrastructure. Sukarno had just obtain independence from the Netherland so the country was still in some termoil. Most of the roads were little more than dirt track and you had to pick you way through rubbish ,holes and large puddles of water.In those pre-container days ships would spend many days or weeks in port. There where many inter island ships with Dutch officers  left over from war, as well as tramp ship a breed of shipping that seems to have disappeared from world. Some of these vessels I learned from talking to crew members took two  to three or more years before returning home. They loaded a cargo for say South America ,unloaded , reloaded and then went  on to who knows where.

In port I had a new job drawing cargo plans. This required a detailed layout of where all incoming cargo was stored so that each batch was not stacked on top of goods due to be discharged at the next port .After a few days we sailed on to Jakarta and Singapore. In the 1950's Singapore looked nothing like the city we see today. The city was still to a great extent showing signs of the war, the Japanese occupition. Raffles Hotel was the largest building and many road where in a state of disrepair. Chang's Alley seemed to be the focal point of commercial activity, it was a whole new experience People cooking in doorways, eating in the street, while all around hawkers trying to sell everything that seemed available on the face of the earth. There was the strong aroma of spice mixing with the strains of "Rose of Malay" (a very popular song at the time) drifted across the heavy tropical night air. Another favorite haunt of mine used to be New World and Happy World. To-day I have no idea where they were as all has disappeared under the developers hammer. As I remember there were gift shops, fun parks, bars, dance halls ,cafes and everything in between.

After Singapore we sailed up the Malay Peninsular to Penang, loading rubber, coffee, tin,timber at various ports before returning to Singapore. After a stay of a few more days we set off for Sarawak and sailed up some river between tropical jungle on each bank. Eventually on rounding a bend in the river we were greeted by a fleet of log rafts, Each raft  was controlled by a single man armed only with a pole, they were very agile and would jump from log to log without losing their footing. The loading of this timber took several days and we had time to observe the activity on the river. Whole families liveing in small dug out type boats partly enclosed, cooking, sleeping their whole life took place within the confines of these vessels. The common name for these boats was " bum boats" I will leave it to your imagination as to the implication.

After loading the logs we returned to Sydney. I made several more voyages on this ship, sometimes to different ports and islands, but the routine was much  the same. In the end the pressure to earn a larger income to support mother forced me to abandon my cadet ship and I joined the Australian Seaman Union and spent the rest of my six seagoing years on Australia. This proved to a very different experience.

footnote ::Joined the Burnside in June 1953.