The Last Seafarer

Wayne Ward first discovered he could write as a young man when the ship delegate told him to take the minutes.

Six hundred pages. Forty-six years at sea. Three years in the making.

"The love story is fiction. Otherwise it's all true -- a non-fiction novel," Wayne said. "It's all about the ships I was on and the guys I met and the things that happened. Everyone is in it. A lot of old seafarers will find themselves there."

Bosun Bill Bodenham (now secretary of the MUA Veterans' Association) doesn't even get a name change.

It is the bosun that gives the on board lessons on politics and class and has a go at the skipper:

"He is deaf, blind, totally brainwashed. He doesn't turn his prayer mat to the east, he points it where the BHP smokestacks rise."

Class politics is throughout the novel, whether onboard the ship with tensions spilling over between officers smelling of after shave and ABs smelling of sweat, or in the home in an estranged husband's sneer as he asks his wife if her arty friends have been "nibbling cheese like mice" at Hunter Valley vineyards.

The books central character is Marty and his story begins where life began for the writer -- in Melbourne.

"I lived just off the Hungry Mile with my grandfather," said Wayne. "It was a breeding ground for seamen. It was also a breeding ground for good unionists."

His father, a police sergeant, got Wayne to sea. He was well known to maritime workers.

"The first stop for seamen was the pub, the second stop the gaol," said Wayne.

In his travels Marty, like Wayne, learns both to endure the poverty and love the mateship it engenders.

"It was bottom life," he recalls. "Our clothes were permanently dirty. When you had a shower you scrubbed them on the deck and hung them up. We didn't have washing machines. We didn't have TV. Just a deck of cards. Those days you'd be three weeks in port. Those days all hands went up the road with their mates. We had camaraderie. Now two guys are doing the job seven or eight did."

Some of the characters in the book are so bizarre they seem a figment of the writer's imagination. But Wayne Ward says otherwise:

"The coast from the 50s was full of characters. Seagull. The Admiral. Up flag poles, in fancy dress. They livened up a ship. They were beautiful people. But they were also quite mad. When you met them you knew they were different. They had an aura of eccentricity."

As well as the characters of the era, the colourful port communities have faded over the years. They too are recorded in their full glory in Wayne Ward's minutes -- Bell Bay, Mackay and Carrington.

His ambivalent description of Newcastle in the heyday of the BHP steel factory, the bars and brothels is again a mix of respect and repugnance.

"Nothing impeded production. All was secondary to the continuous production of steel; the environment, humanity, the nearby city cloaked in a brown haze of pollution. Day, night, month, year. It was all one. Here was a seamless transformation of raw materials into bar and plate, ingot and joist. Fouling the atmosphere for hundreds of feet above its sprawling mass until the suspended particulates bonded together, becoming so heavy it fell like rain upon the host city. Chimneys, blast furnaces, coke ovens disgorging into the air billowing clouds of foul smelling smoke, chest constricting gases. From the coke ovens, methane so putrid it pervaded all of surrounding suburbia, forcing the closure of windows, the jamming of wet towels under doors..."

A seafarer's love of the ships he sails is so great the vessels rival the women in his life. They are almost human.

"Somewhere amid the noise, the pollution, dust so thick it turned the sun into a red ball, the River Murrumbidgee lay at the ore jetty with a bunker barge secured alongside. Her innards were under assault from twin gantries, grabs as wide as her hatches."

And the ageing sailing ships on the Australian coast are paid respect before being laid to rest.

"The mainsail, creased, wrinkled like an old man's skin, weathered a dirty grey, slowly unfolded to fill his field of vision through the centre window. Slowly it ballooned, the ship's head falling off to port."

The book is set in Menzies' Australia with Marty as a young boy debating politics with his mother and father over the dining room table in their suburban home. They vote conservative and stand for the national anthem. They are horrified their son is exposed to communists. They grow estranged.

Politics is also debated at sea, with the unruly crew standing ground against the officers.

"The captain during his inspection rounds had demanded the portrait of the foreign leader (Mao Tse Tung) be removed from BHP property. The delegates had agreed on the proviso the portrait of the other foreign leader in the saloon be taken down, Queen Elizabeth. The next trip the crew attended, Moscow Mike, had another portrait hung next to the Chairman, Joseph Stalin."

Union politics, union leaders, stopwork meetings figure time and again in the book.

It is the union secretary who shouts Marty a cab to his first ship, the delegates who steer him away from dubious friendships and troublesome pubs, the union which educates him about the politics of commerce.

"An endless conveyor belt of trade, profit, generation of money to build bigger, better, faster ships to further hammer in the nails of our coffins. We can't compete because they won't let us into their little club. What really tears your guts out is the government supports them. Supports the use of foreign ships, foreign labour...."

Wayne Ward bought a typewriter soon after going to sea as a young man.

"I started writing in my cabin. Learnt to touch type. Terrorised everyone. Click, click, click. It's a terrible noise a bit like a machine gun going off. You had plenty of time to write at sea in those days, not like it is today."

His work starting selling. Love stories, with torrid sex scenes written for men's magazines like Man, Adam, Esquire.

It was all good practice for The Last Seaman.

But there are no stereotypes, no buxom blondes in Wayne Ward's novel. Only the pimpled Mavis who takes his virginity on a Mackay beach, an ageing nightclub singer in Manila, his boss, a middle aged bar manager in the outback, a red, peeling sunburnt, bikini clad woman clambering over the rocks on Nobby's Beach.

And Charlotte, the bony, shapeless and shy, wallflower alone at a Carrington dance hall.

Unlike his first shipmate Sheepdip, who boasts of women 'creaming their pants' in anticipation of his arrival at every port, Marty falls helplessly for women, especially Charlotte, his young wife, who quickly outgrows him during his long absence at sea. And breaks his heart.

In the end Marty's only true love is the sea.

The Last Seaman ends pretty much where it begins -- at the Australian Maritime College in Launceston -- where once "sour smelling, unwashed bodies. (with) Bloodshot, haunted eyes sunk deep in iron ore impregnated faces" --seamen -- study to become hard headed, hard hatted professionals.

It was the revolution in the Australian maritime industry when union, management and government got together in the eighties to overhaul and abolish old class barriers and make Australia competitive with the rest of the world, even the blight on Australian seafarers, flag of convenience shipping.

"There was a line of thought subscribed to by many seamen who believed it was a carefully planned scheme between the Seamen's Union of Australia and the shipowners. A scheme to cull from the industry brain-dead veterans, chronic malingerers, drunks, persistent troublemakers. The majority held the view, as did the union, that this was the way forward. Painful for many, necessary to survive. At union monthly meetings, shipboard meetings, most agreed seamen had to work harder, smarter, longer, with less numbers, fewer conditions...

"The union was aware, as were their counterparts in the US, Europe and Britain that with the stroke of a pen shipowners could move head offices, including fleet registrations, to a Bahamian beachfront office or a grass hut on a coral atoll in the Pacific. An office could be established next door to a Burger King in the West Indies, or on an icefloe south of Greenland where classification societies were meaningless. As a bonus there was the opportunity to employ the local lay abouts, ignorant of organised labour, guaranteed on low wages to work long, low leave contracts."

The stress for some was too great. He points to a tree in the college grounds where one man hanged himself.

Another true story.

Throughout the book troubled seafarers agonise over the future of the industry and the union, doubts and debate that are just as relevant today as they were last century.

"Market forces dictating your survival. You take home a good pay. You live well on your ship. On the other hand we have seamen from the Middle East, Asia, India in growing numbers who earn a few pounds a month on ships owned by the old colonial powers. When they complain the toilets don't work and the food is bad they are told there are thousands eager to take their jobs. True. As well they don't ask to go home every few months to be with family. They will work for two years. They are your competition, your market force. Can you compete? Aren't your ships getting older, more expensive to replace? Might it not be cheaper to let foreign, less expensively operated ships, work on the coast? How safe is cabotage in the future, your only protection at this point in time?"

His mate, an ex seafarer, offers Marty a share in his trucking company, arguing that shipping is going down the gurgler.

But Marty believes in his union and by the eighties Australian shipping is strong, work conditions good:

"The future was secure as was the Australian red ensign flying on the stern of the new ships. The industry was thriving, investments in shipping guarantee of high returns. The union was strong."

Wayne Ward will tell you The Last Seaman is a best seller in Newcastle, even outselling the Da Vinci Code.

Certainly the book is a must read for maritime workers. It is a faithful record of maritime culture, the seaman's vernacular, his port communities, his mates, his skills lost to mechanisation.

It is a long, demanding read. Perhaps too demanding for those outside the industry. It is full of ship language, with detailed page-long accounts of splicing and rope knotting. But it is also a moving account of one man's romance with the sea as well as a record of the times.

Wayne Ward's minutes.

Now living between Wangi Wangi, near Newcastle and a small town in Canada, (house swapping over the internet) Wayne is busy writing his second novel. He notes wryly that without his superannuation package this lifestyle would be impossible.

"I love the union," he says. "I love SRF."

But why the last seaman?

"These days going to sea is just not quite the same as it used to be," says Wayne. "Maybe we were half drunk all the time, but in those days we walked tall, 10 foot tall and bulletproof. Seamen were proud of our craft. The union made us strong."

Those days the harbour was jammed with ships flying the Australian flag. No longer. No vessel ships out of Newcastle anymore. The Ikuna now flies the Tonga flag. The old sixty miler Wallarah is now registered in the Bahamas as the "Iluka". BHP has shut down. The iron ships no longer call.

In his home port, Wayne Ward is as he describes -- one of the last.

Order your copy of The Last Seafarer through your local branch. Cost is $25.