Page 133 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

Sandra Taylor was a comely young lady, but above all was a friendly, bubbly,
personality. The securing of the life-jacket she seemed to find immensely diverting
(as did I), even without any dubious help on my part. A little discussion revealed
that she was travelling with her Mother to a new life in New South Wales, that she
knew nobody on board, and, yes, would with pleasure join me for a pre-dinner
drink by the pool. As we were by that time speeding gracefully over the equator in a
calm sea and with a light breeze, this looked like an idyllic evening under the stars.

So it proved. I discovered that her father was British and her mother Sinhalese,
and that she was a trainee psychiatric nurse who was looking forward to a future
in Australia that was simply not on the cards in Ceylon (I never found out
anything about her father, other than gleaning from her demeanour that he was
an educated man). Not beautiful, but pleasingly presentable, she spoke well and
had a gracious self-confidence that I found disarming; in one short afternoon,
this trip was suddenly looking a lot better! At the first opportunity (the next
evening at tourist Island-Night, always a better evening in tourist- than in first-
class) I enjoyed her company again, and she seemed to enjoy mine.

Four days later we berthed in Fremantle and, again, the virtues of a bigger ship
with the most modern stabilisers was apparent; the weather was unpleasant with
a strong westerly wind (as is usually the case to the south and west of Western
Australia) but there was little point in going ashore, this being a short stop for
the purposes of disembarking some passengers, and, truth to tell, it looked an
uninteresting place, though we were told that Perth, a very short distance inland,
was far more vital. Some ports inherently seem interesting, of course, and the
sheer remoteness of these two cities from other significant conurbations probably
merited exploration, bearing in mind that there was then virtually none of the
resource-based wealth that later produced a far more prosperous local economy,
but I knew that I would be back (besides which, I didn’t mind; I had received a
most welcome and lucid letter from Heidi).

The run across the Australian Bight was accomplished with expedition, much
assisted by the usual strong westerly wind; it generated one of those seas into
which one was pleased not to be heading, but could be dangerous to small vessels
because of ‘pooping’ (a sea or wave-form that ran along with a ship and whose
water could overwhelm the deck as it slowly overtook a vessel). On June 5th,
at the beginning of winter, we arrived in Melbourne. For the first time on this
voyage I took the opportunity to go ashore and see the sights; this city had for
me neither reputation nor profile. Nor was my ignorance much altered by an
afternoon’s walk; I noted no particular features nor much of interest other than
that it seemed an expensive sort of place, hardly surprising perhaps as it was at
the southern end of a very large country and long railway (though Tasmania,
completely unknown to anybody of my acquaintance, was a good deal further
south); my conclusion, perhaps oddly, was that it resembled Woolwich, largely

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