03 From the Dead | The Search

Tony Parsey: the wind would actually scream. Just like a, a loud screaming roar.

And sometimes to get into the lighthouse door, we would have to crawl on our hands and knees to get to the door before we could stand up

Piia Wirsu: Wow. That's some pretty savage weather.

Tony Parsey: It was, yeah

Piia Wirsu: Almost 25, fit and energetic, Tony Parsey had thrown in his job as a driver for the postmaster generals department to take up a gig as a lighthouse keeper in one of the wildest places on earth.

Piia Wirsu: Can you describe Maatsuyker Island for someone who's never been there?

Tony Parsey: Well, it's an island, group off the southwest coast of Tasmania. It's about 10 miles off the coast. it's a very steep, rugged, wind swept island.

Piia Wirsu: The morning of Saturday October 13 started like any other. Tony dragged himself up with his alarm at 2.30am, for the 3 o'clock shift, got dressed in the dark and shuffled out to the kitchen where he grabbed a cuppa.

Tony Parsey: it used to take probably ten minutes to walk down to the light. It was overcast. a slight sea.

Piia Wirsu: The shift was unremarkable. Pumping up kerosene to keep the lantern burning, a half hourly spin around the balcony.

Tony Parsey: when I was, at the stage thinking about, uh, putting the light out and knocking off.

I walked around the balcony and, uh, looked to Seawood and I, I saw this ship go past.

I still remember that ship just like it was yesterday, to be quite honest.

I was just a bit astounded as to how low it was in the water because the waves were actually breaking over the bow, travelling full length down the deck and breaking around the, the wheelhouse at the back, uh, and it reminded me, uh, of a, of a submarine,

And I thought, you know, I've never seen a ship so low. I actually went back into the tower and got the station binoculars. And uh, and I watched the boat for some time,

I thought, oh well, they must know what they're doing.

I did log it in the log book., I just left it at that and uh, proceeded to put the light out and uh, wander back up to the house for breakfast.

Piia Wirsu: He went to warm himself in the large kitchen at number two quarters, the heater scattering the wisps of cold clinging to his clothes.

Around 8 Tony looked out the window to see if there was any sign of the ship from earlier.

He spied it, a bit further away.

Tony Parsey: And my wife was up at that time in the morning and I pointed this ship out to her, it was on the horizon. And I said to her, I said, see that little ship out there? And she, she went to have a look and she couldn't see it.

And when I'm trying to point it out to her, there was a big, a big, uh, rain squall came over it. And then the weather just completely closed in

Piia Wirsu: By the time the rain cleared, the little ship had disappeared. Three days later, Tony was back on duty.

Tony Parsey: I got a, uh, radio message at around three in the morning it was, uh, the light keeper from, um, Cape Bruny.

Piia Wirsu: Cape Bruny, just south of Hobart was the relay point for all communications to and from Maatsuyker Island.

Tony Parsey: he had a fellow from Marine Operations in Canberra on the phone and wanted to know if I saw the Blythe Star go past yesterday.

Piia Wirsu: Just to be really clear here.. We're talking about a message having to go through three people .. Kinda like that game where you sit in a circle and send a whisper 'round…

Harry, on Cape Bruny has the phone to Marine Operations in Canberra in one hand.. And in the other he's got the radio to Tony on Maatsuyker...

When Tony says something, Cape Bruny repeats it into the phone… waits for an answer from Canberra... then repeats that into the radio to Tony. Solid.

And I said, uh, no, there were no ships went past here yesterday. And the fellow, uh, described it. He said it was a, a coastal freighter. grey hull with a white rear superstructure.

And I said, yes, there was a ship went passed a couple of days ago, maybe three days ago.

And Harry passed the information onto the fellow from Marine Ops and came back and he said, Oh, he said, that wouldn't be the one. And I said, um, I said, 'well, what's happened?' And he said, 'well, it's missing.'

Piia Wirsu: That ship that Tony had seen on the morning of the 13th? It was the Blythe Star and it was never seen again. Just minutes after Tony lost sight of it, it rolled and sank.

And while the 10 crewmen were clinging to survival in a life raft, only meant to keep them alive for a few days, on land, no one really seemed to know what was going on.

Headless chickens is a phrase that comes to mind.

This is From the Dead, season two of ABC's Expanse podcast. Episode Three: the search.

ARCHIVE: still no sign of the missing coastal trader, the Blythe Star, which is overdue on a voyage from Hobart to Grassy in King Island, where it was expected to arrive on Sunday.

Piia Wirsu: The Blythe star and her much anticipated cargo of fertiliser and beer was due on king island, right at the top of Tasmania, around 10am on Sunday 14th.

Instead, she was at the bottom of the ocean right off Tasmania's south, and her crew were trying to avoid being smashed against the rocks of Pedra Branca in their life raft.

The transport commission's man on the Island had been worried about the complete radio silence from the ship.. Especially when she then didn't show as scheduled.

He spoke to head office … The reaction was pretty much, 'no stress, I'm sure she'll be along shortly'.

When there was still no sign of her that night, they spoke again.. but got much the same response.

They seemed to think the captain might have just holed up somewhere to wait out some weather … he'd been known to do that.

The Transport Commission's phones weren't the only ones ringing.

Trevor Sutton: I was a journalist in 1973 working in the newsroom at TVT6. I wasn't at the station at the time, but someone had rung and said, there's a ship missing, we've got a ship missing off the coast of Tasmania somewhere.

Piia Wirsu: Trevor Sutton was 27. He covered a lot of politics for TV.

But he was about to be thrown into a story that would stay with him for half a century.

Trevor Sutton: I don't think I did anything about it on the Sunday until the Monday morning.

Piia Wirsu: Trevor lived just down the road from the station, and Monday morning drove to work in his maroon brown morris minor.

Trevor Sutton: We had a newsroom on the second floor of the building, which was above the canteen, and that was the news department.

When we came in, we had. Quick discussion about what we're going to do about the ship, supposed ship missing And then we, I think I got cracking straight away, rang the transport commission and got very little information at all from anybody. Um, even confirmation that a ship was missing and no one really wanted to tell me.

No one seemed to have any idea what had actually happened to the ship.

Piia Wirsu: Did they come across as concerned?

Trevor Sutton: No, no, no, not, not concerned at all. oh, it, you know, it's only running late. So it's just a late arrival, that's all.

Piia Wirsu: The Tasmanian Transport Commission was a brick wall. They were giving nothing

Trevor Sutton: Everybody wanted me to go back through the minister. And the minister at the time was the transport minister, Neil Batt.

Piia Wirsu: Neil Batt was a young politician. Transport was his first ministerial appointment, he wasn't given it because he had a burning passion for transportation.

When he got a call to say the Blythe Star had gone missing, that phone call was pretty light on details.

ARCHIVE — Neil Batt: The latest is nothing because we have no information. the last contact we had with the vessel was Friday evening at about, um, or sometime after 6.30 when she left Hobart, when the, the captain indicated that he was going up the west coast of Tasmania to King Island.

ARCHIVE — Reporter: It's known for certain that they went up the West Coast.

ARCHIVE — Neil Batt: No, it's not known for certain at all. He may have done that. We just don't know.

Piia Wirsu: And here's the wild thing… the ship's missing, not a peep… and the Minister and transport commission? They hire a light plane to go looking for it… literally go looking themselves .. Not an official search, just a mosey around to see what they can find .

In the air along the Southern coastline, the pilot was instructed to fly directly at the cliff face, before dropping down so that the passengers aboard could see if there were any marks on the cliff from a wrecked ship.

Neil Batt isn't a huge fan of flying .. quite frankly he was terrified.

The white-knuckled minister for transport didn't spot a thing. Which isn't a huge surprise to me. Doesn't seem like a super strategic approach.

Piia Wirsu: So the switchboards at the Transport Commission are lighting up.. as all the media in Tasmania try to get hold of some details..

And into this shit-storm… walks a young, naive 17-year-old.

Jennifer Lee: My name is Jenny Lee at the time 50 years ago, it was Jenny Midson.

And I started at, uh, the transport commission shipping services on the 15th of, um, October I was 17.

I was actually employed as the receptionist telephonist

Piia Wirsu: Yep, she's there to man the phones.

The phones that reporter Trevor was smashing trying to get some answers for his news report that night.

Jennifer Lee: Captain, Alistair Maddox was upstairs, He was a big, broad shouldered, um, grey headed chap yeah, he was a big man and he was the boss. , and Crystal Bridge, his, uh, secretary she was always on a diet. So every now and then she put me on a diet.

Piia Wirsu: Captain Alastair Maddock was the Transport Commission's shipping manager .. he'd been in the job 22 years, and was a big numbers man.. It all came down to profit on the page.

He's been described as a bullish, difficult kinda bloke… he once burnt through 70 crew on one ship in a year…

So when we talk about the Tasmanian Transport Commission? He's one of the big hitters.

Jennifer Lee: there was a lot of activity about because that was the day that it was kind of, uh, noted that it hadn't arrived on King Island with its load,

Piia Wirsu: It was actually the day after.. but it took that long for them to start thinking about taking it seriously.

Jennifer Lee: they were obviously very, very worried because, the ten on board and the ship missing And that would have been, you know, like who's accountable.

So there would have been people going, whoops a daisy, you know, what are we going to do, because there's going to be an accountability about this.

Piia Wirsu: There's still not been a peep from the Blythe Star… now missing two days..

Meanwhile, in the raft the wind was blowing the men further and further south .. and a cold front was shepherding in that weather.. Remember?

Mick Doleman: The raft is being hammered by getting picked up by a wave, taken to the peak of the wave, and then smashed back down

Piia Wirsu: There's no way this was staying out of the headlines.

ARCHIVE — Reporter: At 6.30pm on Friday evening, the 350 ton Blythe Star left the wharf here at Prince of Wales Bay. It sailed out there as far as we know into oblivion.

So far she hasn't been seen or heard from since.

ARCHIVE — ship transmission: We can communicate with men on the moon, and yet we cannot communicate with the Blythe Star.

Mark Eagles: We, we saw it on the news.

Piia Wirsu: Mark Eagles was 10 and three quarters.. when the news that his dad was missing at sea was broadcast in the 7pm bulletin.

Mark Eagles: no notification from the Department of Transport of Tasmania at all.

We were just numb.

Piia Wirsu: John Eagles, chief engineer on the Blythe Star who had risked everything to go below decks and switch off the engine in the ship's death throes, had left Mark and his two brothers at home on their banana plantation at Coffs Harbour.

Mark Eagles: we never referred to him as John. It was always Jack.

He always liked to listen to opera. And I could never get my head around why he'd like to listen to opera A very placid man, uh, never swore. Uh, not in front of us anyway. He hit his finger or something he'd say barmaid.

Bloody barmaid.

Piia Wirsu: Mark would go fishing with his dad, or would watch as he stripped back the family landrover.

Mark Eagles: he pulled the head off the second Land rover we had and had us on the grass driveway, grinding

Run them around with a bit of valve grinding paste and, um, smacking it back together and that thing ran like a, like a Swiss watch.

Piia Wirsu: Now, he scoured the papers for any skerric of news about his dad.

Mark Eagles: we could do nothing. We didn't have any communication. There was no one to talk to. No one knew any more than anyone, even in Hobart, they didn't have a clue.

Um, we weren't getting daily updates of where things were at. There was nothing, nothing. It was either through the paper or through the television.

Piia Wirsu: 1500km away in Crib Point on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula Robyn Simpson was getting ready for school on a normal Tuesday morning.

A few days earlier her mum had had this weird vibe.

Robyn Butcher: and I asked her what was wrong

And she just says, oh, I've just got a feeling something's not right.

Piia Wirsu: They didn't know that that day Robyn's dad Alf Simpson – cook on the Blythe Star — had barely escaped her sinking, and was now shivering as the weather turned.

But this morning there was just the usual pre-school bustle as Robyn got breakfast in their very 70s kitchen — orange benches and brown curtains… when the phone rang.

Robyn Butcher: Aunty Stella, you know, rang and said that she'd heard on the radio that the Blythe Star had sunk

And mum couldn't believe it, she started to cry and shake a bit.

She was just shaking her head, she said, I can't believe it, they, you know, we haven't been told.

I was just trying to calm mum, made her a cup of tea she didn't drink so I couldn't, I couldn't give her anything stronger.

She rang wherever the authorities and yes, it was confirmed that it was missing. So then we just waited at home.

Piia Wirsu: And what did, what did you do during that day as you waited?

Robyn Butcher: Cried. A lot. Yeah. It's the unknown, isn't it? It's, you know, the ship's missing. It could have sunk. It could have blown up. It could have, anything could have happened.

Piia Wirsu: As Robyn sat at the blue linoleum kitchen table, news spread and family friends started dropping by, armed with casseroles and scones.

Four o'clock that afternoon the mail arrived.

Robyn Butcher: The little postman used to bring it and mum got it out of the letterbox and she came in and she said, Here's a card from your father.

Piia Wirsu: Tomorrow was Robyn's 16th Birthday.

Robyn Butcher: And we sort of all shivered and then I opened it up and I just said, oh, it's a birthday card from Dad. and here's this card and it's funny it's got little Little kittens and bunny rabbits on it. And I remember thinking, Dad, I'm not a baby. I'm 16

Piia Wirsu: Alf Simpson had posted the card the day he sailed from Hobart.

Robyn Butcher: That was one thing he did right throughout his life He'd get a card and he would stand there for Half an hour to get the words right. 'cause he was a man of very few words. but he, he tried to find a card that would tell you how he thought.

And inside it said, missing you, love Dad. And, um, we all said, we're missing you too, Dad.

Piia Wirsu: That night was long and lonely, the absence of news about the ship like a physical presence in the house.

Robyn Butcher: None of us slept, you know, you just, you, things go over in your mind you go through all these scenarios and, and I know mum wasn't, she didn't sleep because I could hear her walking around, I was, I stayed in bed but she was walking around the house all night,

I used to Just lie in bed and say, Dad, where are you? You know, come back to us, you know, we love you

Piia Wirsu: And Joanie .. who was falling in love with fiery young deckhand Mick Doleman when he was called away to sea?

Well, at nine that morning she had started work at the local Chemist in Doveton..

Joanie Doleman: It was not long after I started that, um, Mick's mum came up to the chemist and told me that, Mick's ship is missing at sea.

And I remember saying to her, how, well, is this? Is this serious? Like, how bad is this, his ship being missing at sea?

And she said, well, it's bad, Joanie.

Joanie Doleman: I remember saying to Basil, my boss, can I, can I go with Mick's mum? He said, no, no, no, you can go down there after work.

So I waited. No, it was terrible.

Piia Wirsu: And when you finished work that night about five, what did you do?

Joanie Doleman: I went straight down there. Couldn't get down there quick enough. I just ran down there.

My sisters came in, um, to the shop. And, um, we just all, all took off and went down there.

Piia Wirsu VO: Mick's place was packed.

Joanie Doleman: there was people from the union, and lots of Mick's cousins and just friends. just everyone from Dufton was there, just trying to get a bit of news, good news about it, you know, Have they found it yet? And they were all trying to work out, you know, where it could be and, and whatever.

And yeah, it was, it was hard for me to. Take it all in it was a bit of a shock to the system.

Piia Wirsu: Mick's dad and all these old seafarers were bent over maps rolled out across the table.. all throwing their opinions in.. it could be here, what about this… maybe this happened..

Finally, someone drove Joanie home about midnight… her head spinning.

Joanie Doleman: I honestly thought that you'd get news within 24 hours or 48 hours at the most to find out that, yep, no, the ship's been found. But of course that wasn't the case.

I remember going to work the next day and saying to my boss, can I please have the radio on? and he'd say, no, it's too disrupting for the shop. And I said, well, just put it on in the background. I need, I need to know what's going on.

Anyway, he said, look, I'll think about it, but he never did it.

Piia Wirsu: Instead, people streamed in and out of the chemist, delivering news.

At lunch, Joanie would race back to her place.

Joanie Doleman: which was just around the corner, so I'd turn the TV on get what news I could, and then go back to the shop, and then straight after work I'd just run down to, um, Mixed family home and just, just be there.

Oh, it was eerie feeling. It was, it, and everybody had their own opinions about what could have happened and all the women, of course, they brought cakes and food and they'd sit around with their cups of tea and all that and just talk

Piia Wirsu: All Joanie could hope was that Mick's fighting spirit – which had him in punch-ups on the regular – would be enough now to keep him alive.

Finally, four days after the Blythe Star sank, three after she failed to show… As the men were desperately bailing water out of the raft, and John Sloan was going downhill without his medication… the search got underway.. 9well kind of.

Trevor Sutton: Well, it didn't really kick off. It was, it took, it took nearly, what, I think it was about four days before, you know, the government and the Transport Commission really started to buckle down to the fact that, you know, this is a serious issue.

Piia Wirsu: Journalist Trevor Sutton was in disbelief.

Trevor Sutton: The ship is nowhere near King Island. Where, where the hell is it? it was the biggest talking point ever. We've lost the ship. Where is it?

Piia Wirsu: So, the searchers had lost time to make up for.. it grew into the biggest sea and air search in Australia's history.. being co-ordinated by Marine Operations out of Canberra.

But, here's the thing.. they still didn't really know where they were looking.

Trevor Sutton: Did it go east about? Did it go west about? We didn't know

Piia Wirsu: The authorities discounted lighthouse keeper Tony Parsey's sighting from Maatsukyer Island, saying the ship he saw must have been another one.

Meanwhile another lighthouse keeper on the east coast reckoned they saw the Blythe Star going that way.

Spoiler, they didn't.

The captain of a different ship, who was the last to speak to the Blythe Star, said Captain Cruikshank had reported he was heading west… but that was ignored too.

Instead? Well the idea was to search… the entire ocean around Tasmania…

ARCHIVE — Reporter: last night, preliminary searches by light aircraft failed to sight the vessel. At first sight, they called in the Air Force to continue the search.

Piia Wirsu: And the RAAF? well they knew how to search, it was kinda their thing, and they didn't appreciate being told to do it kinda the wrong way by Marine Ops16… so valuable searching time was taken up by bickering.

ARCHIVE — Marine Ops: Overdue vessel Blythe Star. Victor Juliet November Zulu. Vessels are requested to keep sharp lookout and report sightings. Signed, Marine Ops Canberra.

ARCHIVE — ship transmission: Hello, Romeo and We'll be getting away probably tonight out this way and we'll keep our eye on it.

Piia Wirsu: As the week wore on, with the search finding no trace of the missing ship or her crew, frustrations simmered…

And on the raft.. The men farewelled John Sloan, slipping his body over the side, as they gave up hope of being found.

Cliff Langford's dad decided to charter his own plane to get out and search himself, making note of the intel that was being sidelined.

ARCHIVE — Reporter: Do you think that enough has been done so far to search for them?

ARCHIVE — Langford's Dad: I certainly do not. I'm quite sure that if some VIP were lost, the whole Air Force and possibly the Navy would be out looking for them.

Piia Wirsu: He went up, and scoured the southwest coastline until the plane's fuel ran low.

ARCHIVE — Langford's Dad: Well, it's rather disappointing that we haven't found any trace of the, uh, members of the crew of the boat

ARCHIVE — Reporter: Are you still hopeful?

ARCHIVE — Langford's Dad: Well, I'm not without hope, but, uh, as you must realise, my, my hopes are getting rather low now.

Piia Wirsu: What he didn't know was that by now, his son and the other crew had been blown hundreds of ks – almost halfway around Tasmania, and were being pushed up and down the ocean off Tasmania's southeast.

Families were losing faith in the official search .. and I can understand why.

The Transport Commission had dismissed the problem for a crucial few days after the Blythe Star failed to show19.. then bungled the communications with the people who last saw or heard from the ship ..

And then? Bickering waylaid the search's efficiency even more.

They didn't even know which way the ship had sailed up Tasmania, or where to look.

And this is where I come back to 17-year-old Jenny Lee… starting work wielding the phones the day after the Blythe Star failed to show up … because she had a newcomers' perspective on the culture inside the Transport Commission.

Jennifer Lee: it was like, it was a bloke's world, um, on the ships, it was very misogynistic, they were all big drinkers. when they came on shore, you know, they're off to the local pub.

Piia Wirsu: All this has me wondering what was happening in the transport commission .. because in six months they had three ships sink or run aground. That's not a great success rate…

Even in transport minister Neil Batt's books. After all that? He offered to resign.

And remember that old seadog who we found in a food market in Penang, Malaysia, Colm Whelan? He says from where he sat — accountability was always pretty … murky

Piia Wirsu: Who did the Tasmanian Transport Commission answer to?

Colm Whelan: Themselves, dear

Piia Wirsu: it's like putting the, what is it saying, the wolves to guard the sheep?

Colm Whelan: Yeah, that's right, or the alcoholic in charge of the bar.

Piia Wirsu: So you've got a heavy drinking culture… an apparent lack of accountability.. and a pretty blokey world of 'she'll be right mate'… Only this time? It wasn't alright. A whole ship was missing.

Trevor Sutton: wherever you went, whoever you talked to, the first question that would pop up is, where is the ship? Does anyone know where the ship is? Where's the Blythe star was the question always.

Piia Wirsu: In the TVT6 newsroom, a plan was being cooked up with Trevor Sutton… a plan that might just save the remaining nine crewmen… even if it was too late for John Sloan..

Trevor Sutton: We had a pilot, a guy called Verne Reed, and he, he came to us, and he said, look, tomorrow's weather is going to be fantastic, absolutely fantastic. it'll be the best weather that we've had since the ship went missing, we can do a, you know, a coastal search, And I said, how would we do that?

He said, well, I'll put up a drum of fuel. Would your station give a drum of fuel to the search?

And I said, yeah, I think so.

Piia Wirsu: The plan was to search a particular area of the cost Verne thought was a likely place to spot something

It was an educated guess.. But a good one. Right under their proposed flight path? Were those 9 men in a raft.

Trevor swung 'round to his news Editor to float the idea.

Trevor Sutton: and he said, uh, well, that's a bit of a off the top of the head idea, isn't it?

We don't know which way the ship is, where it's gone. And you want to go flying down the south.

I don't think I could support that idea.

Piia Wirsu: Trevor can't believe what he's hearing, they've got a window in the weather and someone offering to pay half the cost.

They might be able to actually find these guys

Trevor Sutton: I had the gut feeling that it was a really good idea. and I thought of going over, walked his head to the general manager, But then I thought it was probably a bad idea, I was only three years into a new job, as a journalist, and Bill Walkley was the news editor, and he made the decisions. But in hindsight I greatly regret not pushing it harder.

It's been my great regret for many, many years. In fact, it's, you know, it's stuck with me all this time. Maybe, maybe, just maybe we could have saved lives if we'd done the search.

But we didn't do it. We didn't do the search. I was really upset about it at the time.

It's never left me, that's the whole thing.

Piia Wirsu: Sounds like it's been quite, almost a weight to carry over the years.

Trevor Sutton: Well, I'm still carrying it. I honestly feel guilty that I didn't push it hard enough.

Piia Wirsu: But here's what I'm trying to get my head around .. it wasn't the media's job to find the Blythe Star … ten men are missing.. they've been gone eight days…

All the survival advice is that they could only survive out there for five.

And the first three of those? Were frittered away by the authorities.

ARCHIVE — Reporter: For some reason, nobody seems to be particularly worried about the Blythe Star.

Nobody seems to think that anything very serious has happened at all.

ARCHIVE — ship transmission: What do you think's gone wrong?

ARCHIVE — Transport commission: I wouldn't hazard a guess. Because it's pointless to do so.

Trevor Sutton: I think the government at the time was probably caught short. Um, and so was the transport, transport commission people. They were bamboozled.

Piia Wirsu: How does an organisation… a government business, just lose a ship? And not bat an eye for days?

While families paced the hallways at night, desperate for news .. time was up for the remaining crew.

And I'm trying to decide if what happened next was really lucky or really unlucky.

This is Expanse: From the Dead… made on Awabakal land and the Stoney Creek Nations.. hosted by me, Piia Wirsu. My producer and sound engineer is the wonderful Grant Wolter. Executive producer is Blythe Moore, Senior producer is me. With thanks to Liz Gwynn and Helen Shield for additional production and research.

Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.