The Shipwreck Coast

Why are shipwrecks so attractive?

I don’t mean a shipwreck unfolding before our eyes – I’m sure that would be a horrific thing to witness. Yet many people are fascinated by the legacies of shipwrecks – the stories they generate and the physical evidence they leave behind.

From the beautiful 16^thcentury sailing ship Mary Rose to the magnificent 20^thcentury steamer Titanic, wrecked ships have been objects of widespread interest, speculation and downright obsession. We love to hear their tales of heroism, tragedy, miraculous escapes and sunken treasure.

A few weeks ago, my husband and I visited the area of southwestern Victoria known as the Shipwreck Coast. This section of coastline, which runs for about 130km from Cape Otway to Port Fairy, is part of the Great Ocean Road, one of Australia’s most popular national and international tourist destinations. The Great Ocean Road is famed for its spectacular views of jagged shoreline hugging the mighty Southern Ocean. The Shipwreck Coast commemorates the ships that foundered on that same combination of rugged rocks and whirling waters.

Over 200 wrecked ships have been discovered along this section of coast, and the number lost is believed to be much higher – probably more than 600. Many of these ships were heading for the city of Melbourne. To reach it, they had to ‘thread the needle’ between Cape Otway and King Island. (An 80 km gap might sound wide enough to us, but using the navigational instruments of the time it could be difficult to locate accurately.) Ships headed to Sydney also used this route, taking advantage of the strong westerly winds known as the ‘Roaring Forties’ to speed past the southern edge of the continent before turning northwards along the coast of New South Wales.

 Failure to ‘thread the needle’ was one notorious cause of shipwrecks along this coast. Others were the high winds and huge seas that built up over the thousands of kilometres of unbroken ocean between here and Antarctica, poor visibility due to frequent fogs, and the treacherous nature of a stretch of sea studded with submerged reefs. 

The geology of the seabed has a lot to do with the difficulty of safely navigating this shoreline.  The same kinds of limestone protuberances that create the dramatic, tourist-pleasing scenery of the Great Ocean Road also caused hundreds of shipwrecks. We realized this while looking at the famous Twelve Apostles – those iconic limestone stacks emerging from the water between Princetown and Port Campbell – but we received an even stronger sense of maritime danger at a lesser-known site further along the road, the Bay of Martyrs. 

This is a truly weird seascape, which I urge visitors to the Great Ocean Road not to miss. It may not lend itself to the perfect Instagram shot in the way that the Twelve Apostles do, but it shows even more clearly how crowded the ocean here is with submerged reefs and islets, which are intriguing to the imagination but deadly to shipping. A beautiful four-masted iron barque, the Falls of Halladale, was wrecked here in 1908, almost at the end of its voyage from New York to Melbourne. The wreck lies in only ten metres of water, and now hosts a wide variety of marine plants and creatures.

The ill-fated voyage of the Falls of Halladale is one of the later shipwreck stories told at the excellent museum in the Flagstaff Hill maritime heritage complex at Warrnambool. Mostly, the museum is concerned with wrecks from about 1840 to 1880, and in particular with one of the most famous shipwrecks in Australian history, that of the clipper Loch Ard in 1878.  

In storm and fog, in the early hours of the morning of 1 June, 1878, the Loch Ard ran into a reef off Mutton Bird Island, near Port Campbell. Having left London three months before, the ship was less than a day’s sail from its destination, Melbourne. Of the 54 passengers and crew on board, only two survived: midshipman Tom Pearce, and a young Irish girl called Eva Carmichael, who was immigrating to Australia with her parents and five siblings, all of whom lost their lives.

The Australian press lapped up the story of the Loch Ard and a quick search of the newspaper archive Trove uncovers many contemporary accounts of the disaster. The two survivors, who were both eighteen years old, became instant celebrities, and there was a general feeling that the perfect ending of the story would be for them to get married – after all, they had spent part of a night together in a cave after reaching the shore! (It’s said that Tom politely proposed to Eva and she politely declined.)

Another layer of the story is that the ship’s captain, 29-year-old George Gibbs, had himself been married only six weeks before the voyage began. His wife remained in Scotland, and never saw her husband again. No blame seems to be attached to Captain Gibbs for the disaster – in fact, the survivors praised his courage and seamanship.

The tale of the Loch Ard has everything we appreciate in great shipwreck stories. It’s a story of luck, both bad and good; of romance, or the possibility of it; and of heroism (Tom Pearce was awarded a medal for his actions in rescuing Eva from the surf). Above all the story has a kind of cosmic irony, a sense of ‘so near and yet so far’. 

There’s something ironic, too, in the display that is the centerpiece of the Shipwreck Museum at Warrnambool: the improbable, beautiful ‘Loch Ard Peacock’. This much larger-than-life-sized ceramic statue of a peacock, a magnificent example of majolica ware from the Minton pottery in Staffordshire, was on its way to Melbourne to be shown at the Great Exhibition in 1880. Incredibly, it came through the shipwreck unscathed.

The almost insolent beauty of the Loch Ard Peacock seems to mock our human scale of value. On the night of the wreck, the sea claimed 52 lives, yet threw this fragile, human-sized art object safely onto the beach. 

Peacocks traditionally symbolize pride, and many shipwreck stories have an element of ‘pride going before a fall’. (The Titanic exemplifies this.) Nothing has the power to humble human pride like the ‘brute’ or ‘impersonal’ forces of nature. Whether it’s an iceberg, a mighty storm, a deceiving fog, or a microscopic virus, nature has a way of turning our best-laid plans upside-down and revealing how illusory our sense of control over life really is.