Don Starboard Side Corridor

The starboard side corridor of MV Cape Don runs the interior length of the vessel, crew cabin doors to the right, bathrooms and storerooms to the left. It is a functional passage, steel-built and narrow, the kind of space designed entirely around purpose rather than comfort. Thirty-nine people lived and worked within these bulkheads during each voyage. MV Cape Don was built at the State Dockyard, Newcastle, New South Wales. Her keel was laid in 1961; she was launched on 28 May 1962 and completed in January 1963. Her maiden voyage followed on 29 March 1963. One of three Cape Class sisters designed by the Australian Shipping Board for the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service, she measured 76.25 metres in length with a beam of 12.8 metres and displaced approximately 2,140 tonnes. A 5-cylinder 2-stroke Polar diesel engine drove a single Kamewa variable-pitch propeller at a service speed of 12.5 knots. For 27 years, Cape Don serviced lighthouses, lightships, and buoys along the Australian coastline, supplying fuel, equipment, and stores to remote stations that had no other reliable connection to the mainland. Her home port was Fremantle, and her primary operating area covered the Western Australian and Northern Territory coastlines, though she also worked Tasmanian and eastern Australian waters. Where workboats could not land, a LARC-V amphibious vehicle carried cargo and personnel through surf and onto rocky coastlines. In 1973 the vessel recovered both anchors of HMS Investigator, jettisoned by Matthew Flinders in the Recherche Archipelago in 1803, which now hold in the South Australian Maritime Museum and the National Museum of Australia. The progressive automation of Australian lighthouses through the 1980s made vessels like Cape Don redundant. She was retired from government service in 1990 and is now the sole surviving vessel of the entire Commonwealth Lighthouse Service fleet. Berthed at Balls Head Bay, Waverton, within the heritage-listed Coal Loader Complex, she is managed by the Sea Heritage Foundation and the MV Cape Don Society. This corridor was photographed in 2016.