(Toni Moate) I’m Toni Moate.
I was in charge of building
Australia’s research ship Investigator.
From leaving school at 15 and then doing a lot of part-time study
it is always incredible to me that I ended up being so involved
in building a research ship.
I left school at the end of Year 10 and at that stage
I had never even left the state and I went into the Public Service
and was hoping that I might be someone’s secretary one day.
So, I had a pretty limited view of what life might look like.
When I’m in my office and I see Investigator sitting out the window
I just feel incredible pride
that that was a project that I was so heavily involved in.
I feel like she’s still mine because I was in the bows of the ship
when they were putting the engines in and I walked all over that ship
when it was being built and so when I go on I feel like I’m,
like I’m walking around my house.
Like many women when I was first offered the opportunity
to be in charge of the project
I really didn’t think I had the skill set
that was going to let me do a successful job
and it took them three times asking me to lead the project
to build the ship before I finally said yes.
Building the Investigator was a massive project.
It was five years, $120 million, 3 million man hours
and it was amazing because we didn’t have an injury in the ship yard
during that time.
Being in the ship yard was a completely different experience
to anything that you can imagine.
The scale of the yard is massive, just the workforce, the size of the ship,
cutting the steel, all the activity is unbelievable
and it’s in the sweltering heat of the Singapore summer.
Very male dominated, and sometimes some really tense discussions
around the contract as well.
The ship yard didn’t stop which meant that we couldn’t stop
and they worked six days a week and I remember being at the Huonville Show
making a decision on a contract around the winches
while I watched the dog jumping with the family.
And so, it was pretty intense
and there was no let up for a really long time.
[Music plays]
My daughters were five and eight when I started the project
and when the ship came down the Derwent they were ten and 13.
Twenty trips to Singapore, that meant that I was away a lot
but they feel as proud of that ship as I do
and when they see it they feel like it’s part of who we are as a family.
I think my daughters took away from watching me
being involved in that project a lot of life lessons.
I think that they learnt that hard work pays off.
I think they learnt that you need to push yourself
out of your comfort zone.
And I think that they also take out of that that women
can actually do a lot more than they think they can do.
Investigator needed to be a ship that was for all things to all people
because we’ve got one