The Castlemaine was built in 1942,
down here in Williamstown at the dockyard…
She was commonly called a corvette.
Naval Legends Corvette HMAS Castlemaine
Today, on December 6, 1940,
when a new world war came knocking for our common home—Australia—
our Navy received a new warship.
She was built here, at one of Sydney's shipyards,
and was named after the small town of Bathurst
that lies in the South-East of our continent.
She is the first in a series of versatile ships, capable of ensuring
the effective protection of shipping near Australian shores.
Well they were mainly built as minesweepers,
for sweeping mines and that.
There weren’t too many mines laid around Australia,
so she was used for convoy work.
The Bathurst-class anti-submarine and anti-mine corvettes were built
as part of the largest shipbuilding program of the Australian Navy.
Their construction was carried out by all the major shipyards of the continent.
…They’re a workhorse. They’re the small ship of the Navy.
Because Australia was a small population at that stage,
only four-odd million people,
we didn’t have big factories and workshops or big dockyards.
So we were able to build a lot of small ships, rather than a dozen big ones.
They built some bigger- class ships, but not a lot.
Specifications of HMAS Castlemaine.
Length: more than 56 meters.
Beam: almost 10 meters. Draft: about 2.5 meters.
Total displacement: 1,050 tons.
Main propulsion plant:
2 Admiralty type boilers, 2 triple expansion steam engines.
Power: 2,000 horsepower. Maximum speed: about 15 knots.
The water we used in the boilers… had no salt whatsoever in it.
We’d make our own water in the engine room with a distilling plant.
So, we used to work in parts per million as salt content.
You can’t have salt under pressure in the boiler, because you get rapid corrosion.
Armament: one 4-inch (102-mm) gun.
Anti-aircraft artillery: three 20-mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft cannons
that were later replaced with 40-mm Bofors guns.
Very often what armament sea ships had depended on where they were working.
Particularly in the Mediterranean, there were quite a few arms dumps
where Italian arms and mines had been captured.
And they were able to scrounge various armaments they had on those
and add them to the official list of the armaments.
So, they had some ability to defend themselves.
Anti-submarine armament:
20-30 depth charges, 4 bomb-release slips, 2 mortars.
The explosive that’s in canisters that you see on the mounting behind me
is for trying to sink or disable a submarine
that might be in your vicinity, either underneath your ship or nearby,
and when you throw these, when they sink down to a certain depth,
they’re programmed to explode,
and hopefully they do some damage to a submarine.
Range: 2,600 miles at a speed of 10 knots.
In these summer days of 1942, "the battle for Australia" is in full swing.
The enemy is as active as ever:
the city of Darwin has been subjected to a cruel and intense bombing raid;
submarines are scouring the coastline of our continent.
Our country is defending its sea routes.
On June 8, 1942, a system of convoys was introduced
for the Pacific shore of Australia, and corvettes are its key element.
These ships were certainly not heavily armed,
and you wouldn’t really think of them very much as attacking ships.
They carried troops to land them at various places,
they picked up survivors who had to be evacuated, and convoyed escort.
In other words, we were looking for enemy submarines,
and could deal with them using depth charges.
Right after her commissioning,
Castlemaine was assigned to the so-called Timor Ferry Service—
a program of assistance for guerrilla forces
fighting against the Japanese on the Island of Timor.
But the enemies that Australians had to fight in these convoys
were not limited to submarines and aircraft.
Everyday life on the ship was far from being easy…
You also spend quite a bit of time at sea.
These are very uncomfortable ships; they’re very shallow,
so they’ll bounce around a lot if you get a bit of a seaway going.
So, you don’t get a good sleep, it’s tiring, if it’s 40 degrees outside,
it’s 40 degrees or hotter inside, because this is a steel ship,
so the temperature is relative to what’s outside, plus the heat on the deck.
So, extremely warm.
If you’re in a wartime situation, where people…
you’re fighting another ship, or aircraft, or a submarine,
you may be down here for up to 12 hours. So that is very draining.
The machines and mechanisms of the ship
worked around the clock while she was at sea.
All of the internal service compartments were filled with loud noise.
It was almost impossible to talk to one another down there,
and communication with the bridge was also very difficult.
We have a voice tube and we actually talk through a tube—
think of talking through a rubber hose:
it’s not very clear, and it’s very hard to get their attention
when there’s a lot of noise going on in both places.
We’ve actually got to shout at each other,
and we use hand signals in a lot of cases,
because you can’t necessarily make sense of someone yelling at you.
So you actually then use hand signals.
If you’re working on a boiler, they do hand signals…
This is saying put on an extra sprayer, or take a sprayer off,
which means these things on the front of the boiler.
That means more oil goes in, or less oil goes into the boiler,
so the ship can then go slower or faster, as required.
The noise might have been tiring, but its absence was an alarming signal:
any crew member knew that sudden silence was a sign of imminent trouble…
So when that happens, it goes extremely quiet, and that’s when you wake up,
because you know that if you don’t have power, you’re not going anywhere,
and if you’re not going anywhere, you’ve got a good chance of sinking.
So it’s a part of the world that you actually have
in your subconscious mind all the time, that things have got to run.
Noisy is okay, but when it stops making noise, that’s not.
Machines working 24 hours a day broke down often
and required maintenance and repair.
But the ship was subjected to strong rolling and pitching at sea,
damaged parts were still hot from working and spare parts were very heavy.
So what we’d do, we’d have a rope block,
which is a block and tackle, which is a multipurpose unit,
and we’d actually then, after we’ve unbolted it, use that to lift it out.
But when we’re lifting pieces out that can weigh 50 kilos or more,
and having one of them swing around on a rope block,
in a confined space like this, is not fun. It’s quite dangerous.
Repairs often needed to be carried out while the ship was underway,
but everyone from almost a hundred crew members
on each corvette similar to Castlemaine had several specializations.
This versatility was very useful: those who serviced artillery
were always capable of helping their shipmates repair engines, for example,
which often turned out to be quite a dangerous enterprise.
The bearings on the engines are not water-cooled, so they run very warm.
And the only way we can find out how hot they are
is to actually put our hand inside the engine while it’s running.
So, it’s a bit nerve racking.
To do it while we’re stationary like this, that’s bad enough.
But when we go to sea,
this ship would be rolling 15 to 20 degrees either side of upright,
plus it’s pitching from front to back, so it’s quite a moving environment.
So, to put your hand in a machine like that, and make sure you’re hanging on
and not putting your hand where you shouldn’t be, and lose some fingers,
is very difficult. But, everyone seemed to have survived.
So, here we are in the steering compartment…
and, like virtually everything else on this ship, it’s driven by steam…
But if you lost steam to the power steering,
then it was very-very heavy work on that.
You try to turn 820 tons of ship with the pressure of water on the rudder,
you would need four people and they’d be working very-very hard at that.
The orders would come down the voice pipe.
People who steered ships
didn’t necessarily need to see where they were going.
They went where Sir told them.
To avoid any unwanted battles, corvettes could set up a smoke screen
and escape from a pursuing cruiser or other capital ship under its cover.
It’s just a matter of incorrect combustion.
You know, there’s… fuel, heat, and oxygen…
incorrect combustion, well you just wanna fan in…
and obviously have enough oxygen, so you’re making black smoke.
The harsh conditions of wartime service were supplemented by everyday hardships.
One of the big problems with a ship is that we use a lot of water,
and we don’t carry a great deal of water onboard the ship,
so the ship has got to make its own water.
In fact, on this ship you had salt water showers.
And you also washed your teeth in salt water as well,
and you washed your clothes in it.
So, everything had a slight salty feel to it.
That’s another hardship, if you like, that people don’t imagine,
that people have got to go through, and do it for long periods of time.
The crew of corvettes similar to Castlemaine consisted of 85 men,
including sailors and officers.
The conditions of service on board were harsh,
but difficult challenges brought people closer—
crewmen maintained friendly relations.
Pick an apartment block, put everyone inside it, and don’t let them out.
You’re living in dormitories, so you’re not living singly in a room,
you’re living in large areas. On this particular ship,
up forward on the mess deck, there were 70 men, on average.
The ships… mainly there were 40 men in the mess deck.
It’s a 24-hour service, so people are coming and going all the time,
every 4 hours at least, so you have a…
You’ve got to get on with your neighbor,
because if you don’t get on with your neighbor, you go nuts.
In the last two years of the war,
Japanese submarines were no longer a threat to our shores.
The enemy suffered one defeat after another
and left the territories they had previously captured.
Now, it’s time to clear the sea of mines:
our own, dismantling the defensive barriers near Australian shores,
and those the enemy erected, in the harbor of liberated Hong Kong
and in the coastal waters of New Guinea, after Japan's surrender.
Starting from summer 1945,
Australian corvettes had to remember their minesweeping training.
Objects that look like torpedoes are not torpedoes,
they are actually floats, Oropesa floats.
They hold the minesweeping wires
that the ship trawls behind when she is doing minesweeping.
And each of the floats, one on either side,
will hold about 2,100 pounds suspended underneath.
They are lifted into the water and out of the water
by the cranes that are directly behind me too.
These are to hold the kites that are directly behind me
that are pulled through the water to hold the gear down
and not let it sink to the bottom.
Because you don’t want to trawl at the bottom
because mines are usually set out of sight below the surface of the water.
When you’ve mineswept and you cut them adrift from their chains,
you try and sink them with small gunfire at a safe distance.
On November 16, 1945,
after 117 thousand miles and 13 thousand hours of combat cruises,
Castlemaine returned to her hometown of Melbourne.
Then, she stayed in reserve for 10 years,
after which she served as a stationary training ship for naval mechanics.
In 1973, a decision was made to convert the ship into a museum
and restore her to her 1945 configuration.
Worst thing that happened to her was in the 90s when we were up at North Wharf.
A big ship broke adrift in a storm and swept across the river
and smashed into the side of the ship,
which took out the after gunwale, which you can see behind me,
and bent all the side of the ship, did a lot of damage.
So, the ship had to go into a dry dock and all that work had to be repaired.
At that time, we didn’t know whether we were going to save the ship or not.
But it was done and so here it is today,
well, looking pretty good for a 75-year-old ship.