Self Examination-AWBF features Australia
The Jock Muir designed TREVASSA in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, South of Hobart.
Over the past few events the Australian Wooden Boat Festival has chosen a specific country to showcase during the celebrations. The last event (four years ago due to lockdowns) highlighted boats, designs and culture from the United States.
This quote from the 2019 festival program gives you the idea.
The United States, like Australia, owed its early growth to wooden ships and the people who built them. We have a long, shared history with North America. In fact it was American whalers that gave Tasmania its first real industry, making it more than a remote British prison at the far side of the world. Over the last 200 years, American shipwrights have devised clever solutions to unique conditions and, some would say, sparked the renaissance of wooden boat building in modern times.’
Other nations such as Japan, Indonesia and the Netherlands have been featured, but given the difficulties in travel and transport over the last few years, the festival organisers made a cleaver decision for 2023, to highlight Australian designers and builders and with the release of the full program on line we can now see how they are intending to do this.
The well established symposium will feature many highly respected Australian wooden boat authorities, but perhaps the most prominent promotion of Australian maritime culture will be seen in a new marquee, to be located at the entrance to Kings Pier, where nearby boats (designed and built by these characters) will be berthed. The display, supported by the Australian National Maritime Museum, will feature the all the expected designers such as the Halvorsens, Jock Muir, and Alan Payne, and a few that may be a little less well know, such as Len Randell and Ray Kemp.
And if you want to get in a little deeper, you can sign up for guided tours of three of the featured designer’s vessels.
Norman R Wright & Sons (QLD): Vessels on display, BALI HAI II , MAGELLAN, TILTING AT WINDMILLS, CONWAY and BOXER.
BALI HAI II at 82 feet
TILTING AT WINDMILLS in the Sydney Hobart Race
Jock Muir (TAS): WESTWIND (Jocks first big boat), WESTWARD (only Tassie boat to ever win two S2Hs), and TREVASSA
WESTWARD construction at Battery Point almost complete
WESTWIND from the spreaders
Len Randell (WA): RUGGED (being shipped all the way from Perth), SMOKY CAPE (Jack Earl’s last boat), DUET and SWIFT.
RUGGED, then and now
SMOKY CAPE from 1973