Settlers Under Sail

by Don Charlwood

Published by Burgewood Books, 1978

Many Australians will have read Don Charlwood’s All the Green Year while at high school, but may not know that Charlwood also wrote about Australia’s early maritime history in Wrecks and Reputations and Settlers Under Sail – an account of the 1878 wreck of the Loch Ard, west of Cape Otway in Victoria. Charlwood’s connection with sailing ships dates back to the 1860’s when his uncle, Edward Charlwood, kept a shipboard diary of his journey to Australia with his new bride.

Settlers Under Sail provides an informative overview of shipboard life for convicts and emigrants coming to the Australia in the early nineteenth century. Charlwood’s research into aspects such as what early settlers ate on board (very little), what they could do to pass the time during the three-month voyage in cramped, crowded conditions (also very little) provides an interesting insight into how difficult sailing ship travel was for those either forced—or courageous enough—to seek a new life in Australia. Charlwood notes Caroline Chisholm’s important work in improving the conditions of Australian-bound emigrants.

After briefly discussing the fate of a number of ships wrecked before lighthouses were built at the entrance to Bass Strait (King Island and Cape Otway), Charlwood then recounts the night of 31 May 1878 when the Loch Ard’s captain misjudged the ship’s location near Cape Otway because mist obscured the horizon and with a “fearful, shuddering crash” the ship hit a reef off Mutton Bird Island. Fifty-two of the fifty-four passengers and crew drowned. The ensuing rescue and salvage operation reflects the pattern of many other wrecks around what is now called Victoria’s “Shipwreck Coast”.