On the 12th of October, 1973, the coastal freighter Blythe Star set sail on a routine
voyage to King Island, in the Bass Strait.
She was due at her destination two days later.
When she didn’t arrive, the largest air-sea search that had ever been conducted in Australian
waters began, in a desperate attempt to locate the ship and her crew.
Eight days later, the search was called off – the ship presumed lost and the crew presumed
dead.
At that time, however, the majority of the crew were still very much alive.
The Blythe Star was built in France in 1955 - originally for a Norwegian company who named
her Tandik.
In 1960 she was sold to the Bass Strait Shipping Company, who renamed her Blythe Star and started
using her for regular voyages around the Tasmanian coast.
The day before the journey to King Island the ship was loaded with a cargo of fertiliser
and beer.
On the morning of her departure Captain George Cruickshank performed a final check and satisfied
himself that the ship was in good condition.
At around 8:00pm Blythe Star left the Prince of Wales Bay in Hobart, on the south coast
of Tasmania.
To get to King Island, which is located to the north west of Tasmania, she could be taken
around the west side of Tasmania, a quick but dangerous route, or around the east coast
– a safer route that took significantly longer.
It was always up to the captain to decide which route to take, and he wasn’t required
to inform anyone but the crew of his decision.
Captain Cruickshank usually based his decision on which route had the calmest weather on
the day.
On this occasion, he decided to travel the quicker but more dangerous west coast route.
The first part of the journey passed without incident.
As night fell, the crew manned the wheel in shifts, and kept the vessel on course.
By around 8:00am the following day, the ship had developed a slight list to the starboard
side.
The captain was notified straight away, and he sent Chief Engineer John Eagles down to
check on the ship’s ballast tanks, and see if they had taken on water.
Before Eagles could fully investigate, though, the ship lurched further, abruptly tilting
to almost 90 degrees.
At this point, crewmembers that had been asleep were thrown from their bunks.
Water poured into the ship, and the crew had to make their way through the rising water
and clamber out onto the port side, the only part of the ship that remained above the water.
Both lifeboats were out of reach, and so the crew resorted to the inflatable life raft
– a rubber boat measuring just 3.7 meters (or 12 feet) across.
All ten members of the crew managed to clamber aboard, and from there they watched the Blythe
Star disappear into the water, leaving no trace on the surface.
At first, there was a great sense of relief amongst the crew.
As seaman Michael Doleman later recalled:
“We just thought: that’s the worst thing that can happen to us, and we beat it.
We’re home, no worries about it.
We couldn’t have been so wrong.”
This sense of optimism was dampened when Captain Cruickshank revealed that he had not had time
to send a distress signal, nor had he been able to fetch the emergency radio before disembarking.
The only people in the world who knew that the ship had sunk were on board the life raft.
Captain Cruickshank soon went into a state of shock, so First Officer Ken Jones took
charge and set off a flare, hoping that a nearby lighthouse would see it.
There was, unfortunately, no response.
This was bad news.
The crew were not prepared to spend time adrift at sea.
Several of them, having been asleep when the ship began to sink, were wearing only their
underwear.
Captain Cruickshank gave his coat to seaman Michael Doleman, who was the youngest person
present at just 18 years old.
Grimly, they took stock of their emergency supplies: glucose tablets, high-protein biscuits
and a small supply of canned water.
It was not nearly enough for ten people to survive for an extended period of time.
At this point they were around ten kilometres (or 6.2 miles) off the Tasmanian coast, close
enough to reasonably hope that they would be seen within a matter of hours.
They paddled against the tide to try to remain close to the coastline, but started to drift
south.
Over the coming days, the weather changed constantly, dragging the raft closer and then
further away from land.
The men had to bail water out of the raft to keep it afloat as waves crashed against
the sides.
John Sloan, the Second Engineer, had a medical condition which affected his thyroid.
He had not had time to collect his medication before Blythe Star sank.
After three days at sea with no medication, his condition deteriorated and he passed away.
He was given a funeral by his crewmates, before they committed his body to the waves.
Meanwhile, when the ship failed to arrive at King Island on time, authorities were alerted
and considerable resources were made available for a search.
This began on the 15th of October.
More than a dozen aircraft were mobilised to search for the ship.
Unfortunately, they had no way of knowing whether the ship had gone west or east, meaning
that they were required to search a vast expanse of coastal waters.
Trevor Sutton, a reporter at the time, later said that, “It was like looking for a needle
in two haystacks.”
Another issue was that searchers did not know the ship had sunk.
As such they were looking for a missing thirteen meter (or 44 foot) ship, not a tiny life raft,
which had no metal parts and thus was undetectable by radar.
After eight days without seeing any sign of the ship, the crew or any debris, the search
was called off with the entire crew presumed dead.
Of course, nine of the crew were still very much alive.
The raft drifted over 400 kilometres (or 250 miles) during those eight days at sea, before
eventually coming ashore at Deep Glen Bay, a small rocky inlet on the Forestier Peninsula.
As the survivors made their way onto land, they found that they could not immediately
walk after spending so long cramped inside the raft.
They crawled to safety and waited for their muscles to recover.
There was a freshwater stream in the mountains that surrounded the bay, providing some much-needed
drinking water.
This stroke of good fortune, however, didn’t take away from the fact that they were surrounded
by cliffs and impenetrable forest in one of the most remote areas of Tasmania.
One of the crew even suggested getting back in the raft to try to find a better place
to land, but there was no enthusiasm for this idea.
In the first 24 hours after finding land, two men, John Eagles and Ken Jones, died of
hypothermia and exhaustion.
These deaths hit the remaining crew hard.
Not only had Jones been a leader for the group, but it also made them aware of how vulnerable
they all were.
Time was running out and they needed to find a way to safety.
Seamen Michael Doleman and Malcolm McCarroll and ship’s cook Alfred Simpson took it upon
themselves to scale the cliffs in search of an escape route.
They cut up the raft to make ponchos and foot protection to aid them in their journey.
It was not easy.
The forest was so thick and the cliff so steep that it sometimes took them hours to move
just a few paces inland.
As night fell, they took shelter in a hollow tree trunk, covering themselves in ferns for
warmth.
The next morning they found a track, and followed it until they heard the sound of an approaching
truck.
Elated, they ran towards it, and told the driver who they were.
As Doleman later recalled:
“I said, ‘We’re off the Blythe Star’.
And he said, ‘No, no, you can’t be.
They’re all dead.
They’ve pulled the search off.’”
The three men managed to convince him that they were who they said they were, and he
drove them to safety.
Soon a helicopter was dispatched to rescue the men that had remained on the beach.
None of the men had eaten in four days.
In some cases services had already been held to mark their passing.
And yet all seven men who were rescued from the beach and the forest went on to fully
recover.
Due to the complete loss of the ship, it could not be determined exactly what had caused
the sinking.
Nevertheless, the Australian government called for a judicial inquiry to determine why the
search had been unsuccessful.
This led to major changes in Australian maritime law.
Every ship that enters Australian waters must now lodge travel plans before it sets off
and report its position every day.
Additionally emergency radio beacons are now carried on all life rafts, and life rafts
are made of thicker material which will show up on radar.
In relation to these changes, Michael Doleman said:
“The three lives of my comrades were a hell of a high price to pay for this, but there
are seafarers alive today because of the changes.
They didn’t lose their lives in vain.”