Forecastle and Crane Cabin

The well-deck of MV Cape Don runs toward the forecastle in a long corridor of painted steel, open to the sky. At left stands the Clarke Chapman of England crane, rated to 12.5 tons, the piece of equipment that made the vessel's core work possible: lifting cargo, navigation buoys, and LARC-V amphibious vehicles over the side and onto stations that had no wharf, no jetty, and sometimes no sheltered landing at all. The crane is not incidental to the frame. It is the frame. MV Cape Don was built at State Dockyard, Newcastle NSW, one of three Cape Class sisters designed by the Australian Shipping Board for the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. The keel was laid in 1961. The vessel was launched on 28 May 1962 and completed in January 1963, with her maiden voyage on 29 March that year. She measured 76.25 metres in length, displaced approximately 2,140 tonnes, and carried a complement of 39. Her main engine was a 5-cylinder 2-stroke Polar diesel producing 2,000 BHP, assembled at the State Dockyard under licence from NOHAB of Sweden. Most other heavy machinery aboard was British-built, the crane among them. For 27 years, Cape Don serviced lighthouses, lightships, and navigational aids along the WA, NT, Tasmanian, and eastern Australian coasts. Home-ported at Fremantle from 1964, she ran fuel, stores, and equipment to manned stations, rotated keepers in and out, and carried families travelling to and from their assigned lighthouses. The LARC-V amphibious vehicle on the port side went ashore where the workboats could not. She retired from government service in 1990. The progressive automation of Australian lighthouses through the 1980s had made the Cape Class redundant, and one by one the fleet dispersed. Cape Don is the only vessel that survived. She is berthed today at Balls Head Bay, Waverton, within the former Coal Loader Complex, which was added to the NSW State Heritage Register in 2021. This photograph was made in 2016.