Waterworks

The compartment holds the domestic water system of MV Cape Don: water pressure tanks banked at left, freshwater pumps and a hot water boiler spanning the frame, fuel oil pumps at left, and the base of the starboard general service pump occupying the foreground. At the rear of the space, two SSG generators stand alongside the main engine, a 5-cylinder 2-stroke Polar diesel producing 2,000 BHP at 250 RPM, built at the State Dockyard, Newcastle, to a NOHAB of Sweden design under licence. MV Cape Don was built at the State Dockyard, Newcastle, for the Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. 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. At 76.25 metres in length and displacing approximately 2,140 tonnes, she was purpose-built to service lighthouses, lightships, and navigational buoys along the Australian coastline, carrying fuel, equipment, stores, and lighthouse keepers to manned stations in some of the most remote waters on the continent. She arrived in Western Australia in 1964 and was home-ported at Fremantle for most of her working life. Cape Don retired from government service in 1990 after 27 years. She is the sole surviving vessel of the entire Commonwealth Lighthouse Service fleet, and the only Cape Class vessel still afloat. Following a period as a cargo liner between Australia and the Solomon Islands and time laid up on the Clarence River, she was sailed to Sydney and moored at Balls Head Bay, Waverton, at the former Coal Loader wharf, where she remains today under the care of the Sea Heritage Foundation and volunteer members of the MV Cape Don Society. This photograph was made in 2016, when the machinery spaces retained their original configuration. The water system and engines documented here are part of a 16-print series recording the vessel in that year.