Our ship’s come in

Sun over the yard arm

More a traveller than a tourist, once aboard the ‘One and All’ – a late twentieth-century version of a mid-nineteenth-century brigantine – at Port Adelaide for a tall ship day sail earlier this week I braced for a crass ritual where all those from Blinman would be admonished to make more noise than those from Balaklava, and so on.

Would I be able to get away with being myself? Mercifully I was. We all were. Better still, we were invited to try our hand at heaving, easing, unfurling, making fast, coiling, and so on. It was even more enjoyable than the day at Monarto Zoo – which is saying something, especially for a land lubber.

Lunch would be served but I’d be famished by then so had a substantial breakfast. The run down the River to Gulf St Vincent saw a number of us in the rigging after a well-ordered safety drill conducted by the team of volunteers.

in the rigging

Back on deck other members of the team served morning tea. The woman who handed me mine apologised for the coffee being very hot. Thank you Jesus. Morning tea: bugger me! Hot coffee – out at sea.

The cheerful young woman deferred to by the deck crew sat beside Renee and me. I asked her what rank the shoulder epaulettes signified.

“First mate,” she said.

“And how far down the ladder from the Captain does that put you?”

“One step.”

We learned that she’d been to foreign shores, including the Antarctic and would have been at a Dutch Naval College had it not been for the pandemic. Another woman with the rank of second mate when on board as such was volunteering for the day along with numerous others. A trainee gave me a first hand account of her experience as a cadet and Renee learned from the ship’s medical officer that his day job’s in the emergency department of a public hospital. Teamwork was the soup du jour. One’s rank’s important, too, when it comes to having the search engine find a post so bear with me while I reiterate that this is all about the One and All – a brigantine.

Covid kept us on deck (except for those caught short and in need of the port or starboard head) so I never went below but whatever they did in the galley made for a delicious nutritious lunch that arrived as soon as the sun was over the yard arm.

Gulf St Vincent

The degree to which the co-operative atmosphere was generated by the healthy on board culture emanating from the captain and his Mate through the rest of the crew on the one hand and inherent in the nature of those who’re likely to purchase a ‘One and All’ ticket on the other I can’t determine but suffice to say it was a tonic. Would that such good government caught on.

There’s not much call for rugged individualism out on the water, I expect. The cadet to whom I spoke reckoned that community spirit did the trick. Too true. The last thing those crew members who went aloft and spread out along the square-rig yard arm to furl then stow the sail was for one among them to have ‘attitude’.

The Yard Arm

It’s a similar story at Monarto: this volunteer needs trust that other volunteer when feeding the lions and rhinoceroses. Trust and community spirit are just what the medical officer ordered. They’re part and parcel, too, presumably, of the effort to engage wayward youth and redirect this or that individual along a path to realising the satisfaction to be had from purposeful social co-operation?

Many would say that this volunteering model is all very well but limited to tall ships and zoos. Bring on the social wage, I say. A significant proportion of the ‘work’ done by paid employees is pointless and wasteful. We’d all be better off were the people doing those jobs provided a social wage and could go and do something useful each day. Volunteering would become the norm; the ‘One and All’ model would spread. Community spirit would do the trick. .

Back in Primary School, we were forbidden under pain of a rap over the knuckles to end a composition with “we came home tired but happy.” Expecting a cold southwesterly out on the Gulf, Renee and I had rugged up in wet weather gear but with the northeast winward we had a touch of the sun instead. Walking home along Semaphore Road, we were tired and thirsty. So we stopped for a beer – a Furphy – at a pub. Not bad. The barman had been processed through the same customer service course as the young man at my local bank: “How’s your day been? Will you be doing anything exciting this evening?” Margys and Karstens.

The point of view expressed here is taken up in different contexts in Chapters 8, 12 and 17  of the ebook.

Now, all of you from Blinman sing ‘One and All – a brigantine, One and All – a brigantine’ and then those from Balaclava can come in on the chorus: ‘One and All – a brigantine’.