‘Taramung’, 1891

There’s nothing quite like a maritime mystery to excite the press and provide them with a seemingly-endless supply of stories…as the loss of the steamship ‘Taramung’ illustrates.

One evening recently, I’d been trawling (sorry!) through a website listing worldwide shipwrecks looking for details of shipping losses along the NSW South Coast so they could be added to the southcoasthistory.org.au ‘South Coast Shipwrecks’ page and came across this entry:

‘TARAMUNG’ Steamer of 814 Tons that went over on her beam ends and foundered off the New South Wales coast in May 1891. Her crew of 23 were all lost.

No date, no place, no other details…so a search of ‘Trove’ became necessary.

Usually, references to shipwrecks in ‘Trove’ are limited, but there are pages and pages of them relating to the ‘Taramung’. From these we’ve pieced together this information:

The ‘Taramung’ was a 235-foot, 814-ton iron steamer that was built in Glasgow in 1880. Soon after she was launched she was purchased by Mr Patterson of Melbourne (see ‘Lady Darling’) and brought to Australia principally to transport coal from Newcastle to Melbourne. She became a familiar vessel working that route.

On May 30th 1891 she left Newcastle carrying 1,400 tons of coal. The captain was commanding his first ship (although this may not have been his first voyage in command of her). She did not arrive in Melbourne, so ‘the terrible word "missing" was written opposite her name, and the time of agonising suspense of alternating hope and fear commenced, until on Monday evening oars with "Taramung" upon them, and what was generally described as "wreckage" fell into the hands of a fisherman at Wreck Bay.’

The pilot steamer ‘Captain Cook’ was sent from Sydney to search for the missing vessel. It found nothing, although it searched all of the NSW South Coast. Newspapers then reported the captain of ‘Captain Cook’ ‘is certain that all the crew of the Taramung must have perished, for he says no boat could possibly live for an hour in the seas which he experienced on his run to Gabo, and the weather is said to have been much worse on about the date when the Taramung went down’.

Over the next week or so, more debris from the ‘Taramung’ was washed ashore between Wreck Bay and Point Perpendicular, confirming the ship had been lost and those on board had perished.

It seems around 23 seamen and one passenger had been aboard. The ‘Taramung’ did not normally accommodate passengers, but it seems a Miss Nellie Moss, of Brunswick, Melbourne, had been visiting her sister in Newcastle when she received a telegram advising that her father was dying, so secured the passage as this was likely to provide her the fastest means of returning home.

12 women were widowed and 18 children lost their fathers as a result of the tragedy. This led to ‘subscription lists’ (relief funds) being established in many cities and towns throughout NSW and Victoria.

What actually happened to the ship is unclear. She may have foundered in the gale, she may have hit rocks, as an item that appeared about a year after the event (29th April 1892) in the ‘Gippsland Farmers’ Journal and Tralalgon, Heyfield and Rosedale News’ suggests: ‘The lighthouse-keeper is of opinion that the Taramung never foundered at sea, but struck the reef at Perpendicular. The fearful gale prevailing at the time soon completed the work of the vessel's destruction. If the Taramung had foundered it would be utterly impossible for such wreckage to have reached the beach’.

There were suggestions that the steamer may have been overloaded, contributing to her demise, but this was dismissed by a Newcastle Marine Board of enquiry. ‘The Board, therefore, could offer no suggestion as to the cause of her loss.’

Three months after the disappearance of the ‘Taramung’ the ‘Newcastle Morning Herald’ ran a piece reading: ‘A Mrs. Gruoott, with four young children, arrived in Newcastle a few days ago, and relates the following story. She says that her husband, who had been a sailor, left the sea and got a job ashore up the Clarence River, where he resided with his family for some time. Work got slack, and he left with the intention of going to Melbourne where he expected to get work on the railways. He arrived at Newcastle in May last, and his wife had a letter from him, from Newcastle, stating that he was working his passage by the steamer Taramung to Melbourne. Since then she has heard nothing of or from him. The letter was dated the day before the ill-fated vessel left Newcastle on her last voyage…The unfortunate widow and orphans have thus been deprived of their breadwinner, and are now in destitute circumstances…It is a usual thing for men to work their passages on the intercolonial collier steamers whose names do not appear on the ship's articles, nor is there any notification of such given to the agents of the vessels by the captains.’

In 1891 a poem about the loss of the ‘Taramung’ won the poetry prize in the Newcastle Eisteddfod:

‘Did the good ship strike on a sunken rock?
Did the levin-brand from the wrathful sky
Flash down in a lurid, deadly stream
From the heavy, thunderous clouds on high?
Was it by fire? Or a starting plank?
Not a soul liveth who can tell.
All, all are gone--and the sounding sea
Evermore tolleth their knell.’