The Admiral reborn - Bruce Stannard looks at the life, death and rebirth of a grand old wooden boat

It requires a minor miracle for a wooden-hulled vessel to reach the age of 50 these days, let alone 100, but when they attain the venerable age of 145 we can be sure that something akin to divine intervention has had a hand in their resurrection. Their presence among us signifies some higher purpose, they inspire and remind us just how beautiful boats used to be.
The Admiral, an eight-oared pulling boat designed and built in Hobart in 1865, is one such vessel. Glorious in her gilded youth, she served as a vice-regal barge, ferrying the infant colony’s British-born Governors about the River Derwent in fine style.
In fuzzy old sepia-tinted photographs they’re seen on Regatta Day, uniformed grey-beards, dignified in their silken sashes, glittering medals on their chests and white egret plumes flying from their pith helmets.
The Admiral’s crew of jolly jack tars were smartly turned out in Victorian naval uniforms, straw boaters with black ribbons, short blue fearnaught jackets and white duck trousers. In the Admiral’s stern her skipper stood up to steer with a long curving swan’s neck of a tiller while behind him, hoisted aloft on an outsize flagstaff, floated the red, white and blue of the imperial Union Jack.
She was, in everyone’s eyes, the Pride of the Port.
For years, when she was not engaged on vice regal duties, the Admiral took family picnic parties and day-trippers out on the sylvan waters of the Derwent.
Then, when the sun finally set on the British Empire and imperial pomp and ceremony became a thing of the past in Hobart Town, the Admiral began her long and painful spiral down into what should have been oblivion.
The AdmiralIn the 1880s she was sold to fishermen who apparently cared little for her vice-regal past. They re-named her Myra, installed a dipping lugsail, drilled holes in her Huon Pine hull for a wet-well and took her to sea off Maria Island in pursuit of cod in the winter and crayfish and barracouta in the summer months. They added five planks to her bows and created a kind of decked-in cuddy or fo’c’sle. It was ugly but did at least help to keep the crew dry in a blow.
The AdmiralIn 1896 the ‘improvers’ set to work again, this time extending her length from 28ft 6ins to 34 feet. They installed a steam engine and drove a propeller shaft through her Blue Gum sternpost.
The Admiral/Myra endured all these indignities and more under a succession of indifferent owners until in 1980 she was shipped north to Sydney to begin what was supposed to be a new lease of life as a gentleman’s yacht.
It was there that some ignoramus came up with the absurd idea of giving her a fantail stern and a clipper bow. Thus bastardised, she remained neglected on a mooring for years. Eventually she took herself to the bottom, where all the hideous accretions foisted upon her could not be seen. She remained submerged for over a year until someone remembered and raised her.
In January 2000 she was craned onto a truck and sent 500 miles north to the Shannon Boatyard on Mitchell’s Island in the Tweed River at Taree on the north coast of New South Wales. There, she was supposed to undergo a complete restoration.
Nigel Shannon is one of Australia’s best wooden boat builders and is in fact one of the very few craftsmen in Australia with the skills and the sensitivity to do the boat justice. The trouble was that as a professional, Nigel needed to be paid, a minor matter that the owner consistently chose to ignore. Seven long years went by and nothing happened. The poor old Admiral looked more and more like a vessel doomed to die.
The AdmiralThen, one day, an American couple, John and Susan Dikeman, happened by the Shannon Boatyard in their 18-foot sailboat. Nigel invited them to come ashore for a cup of tea. When their talk turned to “old boats” Nigel produced his trump card.
“I’ve got a real old Tasmanian boat over there,” he said pointing to what looked a tarpaulin-covered pile of rubbish in an overgrown paddock.
The Dikemans could scarcely believe their eyes. Under the canvas they found a precious piece of Tasmania’s maritime history, a boat they realised ought to be back home in Hobart, perhaps even in a museum.
They immediately thought of Bern Cuthbertson, one of the few people in Tasmania with the drive and energy and initiative to do something about it. Notwithstanding the fact that he is 86-years-old, Mr Cuthbertson, a former fisherman and bluewater sailor, remains one of the most revered figures on the Hobart waterfront. He called 12 of his friends and within a few days they had formed a syndicate that stumped up the $20,000 needed to bring the Admiral home and restore her 1865 lines.
Before any of that could happen, Nigel Shannon had to go to court to gain legal title to the boat. The court had no hesitation in granting him clear title and within weeks the Admiral was heading south on a trailer.
At every stage in this quite remarkable journey, the Admiral syndicate has been the beneficiaries of extraordinary generosity: crane companies waived their charges; with a wink and a nod, the Bass Strait shipping line refused to charge their fees; an orchardist at Huonville, south of Hobart, handed over his apple shed for use in the restoration; timber suppliers have come to the party and a steady stream of volunteers have put in untold hours dismantling and reassembling the hull.
It’s been a labour of love and last month, the Admiral repayed all that care and attention when she slipped back into her native waters at Huonville where she will be rowed 65 miles over three days up to her old home in Hobart’s Sullivan’s Cove.
Bern Cuthbertson hopes the Admiral will eventually find a permanent home on Hobart’s historic waterfront, not stuck in a glass case to be gawked at by tourists, but as the living, working embodiment of a great tradition that goes all the way back to Queen Victoria’s heyday when Her Majesty’s representative in colonial Hobart donned his pith helmet and sallied forth aboard the vice regal barge pulled by his jolly jack tars.