Situated on the shores of Spencers Gulf midway along South Australia's Yorke Peninsula is the small town of Port Victoria. Like the other unassuming coastal towns on the Peninsula, it could be described as a sleepy backwater, but is one of the historically important settlements in South Australia. Its romantic connection with the age of sail and the great clipper ships gives the town the right to call itself 'the last of the windjammer ports'.
As recently as 1949 windjammers were still sailing into Spencer Gulf, mooring offshore and being loaded with 180-lb (80kg) bags of wheat before heading south to the Roaring Forties, rounding Cape Horn and making their way to the markets of Europe, mainly Falmouth, England or Queenstown, Ireland. Much of this vauable cargo, having been harvested in the wheat fields of Yorke Peninsula, passed through Port Victoria. Historic photographs of the town depict bags of wheat being offloaded from bullock drays, piled high in the town's main street before being wheeled on trolleys along a railway that ran to the end of the jetty, loaded into ketches and taken out to the clipper ships for transportation around Cape Horn and on to the major ports of Europe. Barely a day passed when the town was not buzzing with sailors from all around the world coming and going. Dances and social gatherings took place every weekend and Port Victoria became known as one of the most hospitable ports in the world.
Port Victoria flour mill, 1918. State Library of South Australia - B 30686
The township, when it was proclaimed on 31st August 1876, was officially given the name of Wauraltee but it was never called anything but Port Victoria. One of the reasons for this was because a small unofficial town, which had sprung up between Port Victoria and Mount Rat, had already received that sobriquet. The name is taken from the survey vessel Victoria, a schooner, which brought surveyor James H. Hughes and his team to the area in 1839.
After the jetty was built, sailing vessels called at the port to be loaded with grain. To save wharfage fees they usually anchored about 1.6 kilometres (1 mile) out and ketches which carried between 800 and 1000 bags of grain, lightered the cargo to the windjammers. Some ships carried 60,000 bags and it took six to eight weeks to load them.
In 1878 when local farmers complained about the incredible difficulty of loading bags of wheat into clippers waiting offshore, two large goods sheds were built and the L-shape of the jetty was added in 1883 to provide shelter from the south westerly winds. The jetty is now one of the few remaining original jetties used by the windjammers. The largest vessel to arrive at Port Victoria was the Cardigan Castle which left the port in 1879 carrying 1,800 tons (1,829 tonnes) of wheat. The last vessel to leave the port was the Pamir in 1949. There were 42 ships wrecked off the Yorke Peninsula coast between 1865-1933.
Photo: Port Victoria Maritime Museum
English travel author Eric Newby documented his visit to Port Victoria in 1939 as a crew member of the 4-masted barque Moshulu. His reminisces shed light on what Port Victoria was like back then. Sailors on the Moshulu, mostly Scandinavian in origin, referred to Port Victoria as "Port Veek", and it was their second Australian port-of-call after Port Lincoln; Newby did not have many complimentary things to say about the town, but he states that the inhabitants were "kind and hospitable". Moshulu was anchored off Port Victoria for just over a month, during which time she was loaded with 4,875 tons of grain – 59,000 bags which were manually loaded onto ketches at the jetty, ferried to Moshulu, and then manually loaded into Moshulu's holds. During the 1939 season, Olivebank, Pamir, Pommern and Viking were also loaded with grain at Port Victoria – some of these vessels now have streets in Port Victoria named after them. Newby wrote about his experiences on the round-trip from Ireland to South Australia in his book The Last Grain Race (1956), and several pictures of Port Victoria as it appeared in 1939 are included in his photo-essay of his voyage, Learning the Ropes.
In 1932, twenty ships loaded with bags of wheat left Port Victoria for the English Channel; a distance of 24,139 kilometres (15,000 miles). This was the commencement of the Great Grain Races. The Grain Race or The Great Grain Race was the informal name for the annual windjammer sailing season generally from South Australia's grain ports on Spencer Gulf to Lizard Point, Cornwall on the southwesternmost coast of the United Kingdom, or to specific ports. A good, fast passage Australia-to-England via Cape Horn was considered anything under 100 days. The masters of the square-rigged grain carriers engaged in unofficial competition who would sail fastest across the southern ocean, around Cape Horn and up the Atlantic. While the race was informal, it was a source of betting and prestige. The competition gathered so much attention that in 1928 the International Paint Company donated a silver cup for the fastest passage.
Herzogin Cecilie
The sailing ships, loaded with grain, usually wheat, in Spencer Gulf sailed from January to June. The ship with most victories was the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie at six times. The fastest ship was Parma in 1933 in 83 days, and the events of the voyage are described by the captain's apprentice, Betty Jacobsen, in her book A Girl Before the Mast. The grain trade "flourished through the 1930s and reached its peak in 1939." That year thirteen windjammers rode at anchor off Port Victoria. "With the exception of two German ships, all ... flew the flag of the Gustaf Erikson Line and the pale blue Finnish cross."
The peak of the windjammer trade, the Great Grain Race, was in the 1930s; the last working sailing ship to leave the port was the Pamir in 1949. Pamir (Captain Verner Björkfelt), fully loaded with 60,000 sacks of Australian barley for distilleries in Scotland, set sail at Port Victoria on 28 May 1949, rounded Cape Horn on 11 July, passed Lizard Point on 2 October and arrived at Falmouth just beyond it in 128 days. Passat (Captain Ivar Hägerstrand), carrying 56,681 bags of wheat, left Port Victoria four days after Pamir, but passed Pamir somewhere in the Roaring Forties of the southern Pacific Ocean on the 6,000 mile run to Cape Horn, and arrived at Penarth Dock South Wales after 110 days. However, it bestowed on Pamir the honor of being the last windjammer with a commercial load to round Cape Horn. When the Passat sank in 1957 it was decided to erect a memorial to the old sailers and sailors. It is near the jetty.
The wheat trade between South Australia and Europe, the windjammers, and the Grain Races is well documented in the town's National Trust Maritime Museum, located at the land end of the town's jetty and originally the general cargo shed (built in 1878). Among the stories told at the museum is that of the Cardigan Castle, the largest vessel to arrive at Port Victoria which left the port in 1879 carrying 1,800 tons (1,829 tonnes) of wheat.
Port Victoria is 195km by road from Adelaide via Ardrossan, and situated 25kms west of Maitland on Spencer Gulf. Wardang Island to the west of Port Victoria provides sheltered waters for boaties to fish safely and the Goose Island Aquatic Reserve provides a haul out site for Australian sea lions.
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