Andrew has produced an old school, analogue (!) Calendars for 2024 featuring his photographs of some of Australia’s wooden craft, and he has kindly made a small quantity available to SWS readers.

The Timber Boat Festival provides a great opportunity to welcome people aboard your boat and enjoy their enthusiasm for timber boat craftsmanship and share in the camaraderie of fellow timber boat owners.

After almost two weeks of uncertainty, and six months' worth of mud drying on the weary paddle wheeler's hull, Longreach tourism company Outback Pioneers revealed the boat would not be able to cruise again.

When I first became interested, I thought that this taciturn Englishman was working in a space where eccentricity meets the counterculture…. Well-meaning hippies, who were fun to follow, but not to be taken too seriously. But the more I learned the more appreciative I became.

In thinking about trade routes in the parallel universe of Indian Ocean sail cargo it is important to understand that in spite of the desert, the heat, humidity and the vast areas, there was an active trade of considerable size and variety centuries before the discovery of oil or the building of the Suez Canal.

As the day wore on the breakers grew closer. By early afternoon I had rounded the northeastern tip of the island and begun to make my way along the northern side. By about 1400hrs the first pang of fear came in. I was rowing along, just outside the reef, the land was oh so close, yet completely inaccessible.

Almost exactly three months after we had left Sydney, on 22 April I stood on Georges Head to watch ANITRA V sail back through the Heads after a voyage of seven days from Kettering. It was an emotional moment to see my boat returning to Sydney.

“I have in mind to admit it all to the New York Yacht Club that I really owe the secret of the design to a Greek guy who helped me out and was invaluable. He’s been dead for 2,000 years. Bloody Archimedes…”

So now I’m a little confused!  There are so many good things going on, so many positive stories and no shortage of activity, so why we are not brimming with optimism?

But like his fellow netsmen, Len Walters remains gloomy about what the future holds. “If you take away the right to fish, you’ll no longer have people making coracles,” he says. “And it’s such an amazing way to fish. All feel. No engines, no noises, just the skill of two boys in a coracle. And it’s sad because once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’ll never come back.”

In 2012, having retired a few years earlier, I had the wherewithal for an extended stay in a Balinese village. However the common sight of local boat building had died out, so I decided to commission my own Jukung.

It's an ignominious resting place for the 99-year-old wooden paddle wheeler, which attracted national headlines when it was trucked nearly 1,750 kilometres from country Victoria to Longreach in May 2022.

In 1923 Adolphe and his family opened the cash only Bar Nautic with its tables and balcony to take in the view and they lived there quietly for 20 years until World War II had its way and the family found itself on a train to Dachau.

For its characteristics of toughness and strength, the traditional gajeta falkuša was made only with cypress wood from the volcanic island of Svetac. The keel was made of oak and the shell of larch.

E.F. Schumacher wrote in his seminal work Small is Beautiful that “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

So began a number of new practices. One was the balloon chase, a large field described by buoys and I unleashed balloons upwind across the water. Popped balloons were not to be counted in the final tally and you can imagine the mayhem that occurred.

It is deceptively easy to get bogged down in the dominant paradigm of Traditional Sail that is centered on the archaeology and history of square rigged ships and fore and aft rigged work boats. This is, admittedly, a broad generalisation, but it is also one that I would defend.

For me the biggest challenge will be avoiding overthinking and the urge to know everything immediately as we’re so used to do due to technology. The first days I’ll have to cope with not having technology at all, but it’s not something that scares me, it’ll be replaced with something better and special and I’ll get used to that.

People don't see the "true ecological price" of container ships. "The price of people falling ill due to the climate change, for instance. That's never paid for."

It began when George Holmes ordered a boat to be built by one of Sydney’s finest boat builders, Joe Donnelly, which first raced at the Balmain Regatta in 1898.