Kangaroo Island volunteers' 'mad dream' to rebuild 19th-century US sailing ship
From Our ABC by Caroline Horn
Rod Howard with plans for the second Independence. (ABC South East SA: Caroline Horn)
It started as a quick job to replace a rotting model boat at the entrance to the town of American River on Kangaroo Island. The playground-style boat is an outline of the Independence, a 14-metre sailing ship built at the site of American River by US sealers from Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1803. Sealing was taking place in the Southern Ocean decades before the first official English colonists arrived in what is now Adelaide and proclaimed the new colony of South Australia on the other side of Backstairs Passage.
The rebuild of the model boat led to a wilder idea: the construction of a second Independence; a full-size, operational replica of the sailing ship.
"When we finished putting it [the model boat] up there, chatting over a beer as you do, some foolish person said, 'Well, why don't we build a real one?'" said Greg Roberts, one of the "founding fathers" of the Rebuild Independence Group.
They got permission to use land at the wharf and some money to put towards building a shed, and in the 10 years since a community has grown around the construction.
Short, brutal and bloody
The original Independence was built in only five months by the ship's carpenter and some of the crew of a larger boat, the Union. The Union's captain Isaac Pendleton had learned from French explorer Nicholas Baudin of the existence of a large island, south of the South Australian mainland, where seals and other wildlife were plentiful. With the prepared wood, Thorne and the others completed the boat in about five months.
"They probably worked seven days from sun up to sun down," said David Churchill, the rebuild project's original planner. "We probably don't beat our volunteers enough or starve them," joked Anne A'Herran, heritage officer for the group.
Painting of The Independence. Picture by Nicholas Pike