Engine Order Telegraph

The engine order telegraph sat at the centre of the communication chain aboard MV Cape Don. When the officer on the bridge called for a change in speed, the telegraph transmitted that order to the engineers in the engine room below, who moved the throttle on the 5-cylinder Polar diesel accordingly. The signal flag pigeon holes to its left held the coded markers that made the system legible across noise and distance. It was a simple, physical mechanism for keeping a 76-metre steel vessel responsive to the people running it. MV Cape Don was built at State Dockyard, Newcastle, New South Wales. Her keel was laid in 1961. She was launched on 28 May 1962 and completed in January 1963, one of three Cape Class sisters designed by the Australian Shipping Board for the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. The other two, Cape Moreton and Cape Pillar, are both gone. Cape Don is the only one left, and the only surviving vessel of the entire CLS fleet. For 27 years she worked the Australian coastline, supplying lighthouses, lightships, and navigational buoys from a home port at Fremantle. She carried fuel, equipment, stores, and lighthouse keepers to stations along the Western Australian and Northern Territory coasts, and operated as far as Bass Strait and the eastern seaboard. Her complement was 39. The engine that answered the telegraph's orders was a 2,000 BHP Polar two-stroke diesel, assembled at the State Dockyard under licence from NOHAB of Sweden, driving a single variable-pitch Kamewa propeller. The progressive automation of Australian lighthouses through the 1980s made Cape Class vessels redundant. Cape Don retired from government service in 1990. After years of cargo work between Australia and the Solomon Islands and a period laid up on the Clarence River, she was sailed to Sydney and moored at Balls Head Bay, Waverton, at the former Coal Loader wharf. She remains there now, under the care of the Sea Heritage Foundation and the MV Cape Don Society, the telegraph still in place, the pigeon holes still waiting. This photograph was made in 2016.