Our waterfront roundsman has been getting about with a notebook which on its cover declares it is one to be used in all weather condtions . On spotting the notebook, we asked him if he expects an outbreak of southerly busters or if he is planning a trip to Antarctica.
In his salty reply, he said several of the notebooks had been given to him by a contact in the mining indusry who has to take notes, sometimes in the rain or with water spraying about .
The Shipping Reporter is a great scribbler . Sometimes his usual notebook jottings are hard to decipher after coming into contact with rain or spillage from a drinking session with sailors in waterfront grog shops .
In any case, soon after he began using a waterproof notebook he found the revised book about the wreck of the Pandora by Peter Gesner, published by the Queensland Museum, in a Townsville op shop .
HMAS Pandora, sent by Admiralty to the South Pacific to recapture the Bounty mutineers, ran aground on Australia's Great Barrier Reef on August 29 ,1791 ,resulting in the loss of 31 crew and four mutineers.
The mutineers were locked up in a shipboard prison named Pandora's Box.
For more than 200 years the wreck remained untouched,a number of maritime archeology dives made on the site, resulting in a Pandora exhibition in Townsville's Museum of Tropical Queensland.
One of those involved in the project was marine archeologist Vivienne Moran ,late of Magnetic Island , who ran the above art gallery there, dived on the Pandora , and also wrote a book about Southern Ocean shipwrecks.
She knew the late Dr Colin Jack-Hinton who was the inaugural director of the Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory, Darwin, which set up a maritime gallery in his name covering traditional boats and canoes .
(Pandora. Moran. Shipwrecks.)
