Backyard Boats of a Bygone Era

Grant Wilson

Tasmania’s history of boat building is the richest in the country. But it’s the unknown boat builder who sets us, and their vessels on a journey through generations. I feel this story needs to come with a disclaimer. It will contain nostalgia, daydreaming and imaginings that will have you drifting off to a place in time that I can only picture through stories and stereotypes. It’s the 60s. Inland Fisheries had their first official meeting, Black Tuesday Bushfires raged across the state, Daylight savings was introduced along with the breathalyser and the state abolished the death penalty. Hooray. But out in York Plains, deep in Merino country, on the grating of a shearing shed a wooden boat was being born.

From Convicts to a Country Boy

There were a few ups and downs in Tasmania’s early boat-building days. All the ingredients were there to build boats of world-class. The best timbers, the greatest engineers, a workforce 1000s strong and enough whips to keep them working no matter the weather. But boats were breaking in half less than a nautical mile from where they were launched, or worse, on the other side of Hells Gates. Turns out, if you take men and women from the other side of the world and dump them on the cold, leach-infested coast of Southern Tasmania. Feed them rations that would starve a wallaby and lash them with whips until they build you a boat. They don’t put their heart and soul into the task at hand. In fact, they weren’t even putting nails in. So something had to change, the convicts wanted better conditions and the government wanted better boats. A deal was struck and for the most part, both sides held their promise. Out of this came boat after boat built to the highest specs and with it a reputation that the best boats, from the best timber, came from Tasmania.

We can thank those convicts, along with the temperate rainforests that grow these magical timbers for setting up an industry that still thrives today. Our state’s boat building industry is so important that if you are constructing a vessel and need a piece of timber just the right size, with just the right grain from the right type of specialty timber and it can’t be found anywhere. A man with a big steel ring full of keys will take you into a vault and find the exact board you need. Prove it’s for a boat, prove you can’t source it anywhere else, give up your first born and you might just be leaving with what you need. It’s called the Wooden Boat Board Bank, and I’m told there is a secret handshake. Feeling the nostalgia yet? Didn’t think so, that’s why we need to talk about Athol Dove and his Clinker ‘Split The Wind’.

Click Goes the Shears - Clack goes the Hammer

I can imagine the look on Betty’s face when Athol drove his Holden into the yard with a stack of planks poking out the window. Betty was Athol’s wife and ran the local Newsagency while Athol was the town electrician, but during his days of running wires and fitting off power points, he was daydreaming of bigger things. If you are the kind of person who likes a good project, is passionate about a hobby or dedicated to a sport then you will know what it’s like to drift off thinking about these things. It’s hard to imagine the time and research that went into building your first boat in the early sixties.

We live in a time where we can have answers to all life’s difficult questions in an instant, the thought of going to a library or buying a book to research something is completely foreign to me. It’s sad I know because I imagine there is a thrill trawling through books looking for that eureka moment when you find your answer. Or reading the same chapter multiple times until what you are trying to learn is embedded in your mind. As opposed to watching a video online, it’s not as glamorous.

For Athol, it was quite handy owning a newsagency, I imagine him walking through a section and eyeing off the woodworking magazines. Maybe ordering special copies from different publishers as he built his arsenal of information, in preparation to plunge the saw into the first plank. From what I’ve heard and seen of his work, Athol seemed like the kind of man who had all the time in the world. I imagine he was quiet, calm, patient and placid. But with a drive to complete what he started to the finest of standards, bloody handy traits if you want to build a boat I’d say. Athol set up shop in his father-in-law’s shearing shed, tools meticulously lined up on a shadow board. Boat plans are pinned out on the wool table and a blank space on the shearing board for a boat. Hundreds of hours would have been spent building his boat. Because when it comes to building a boat, boat building is the last step of the process. First, you need to construct a form to build the boat around and knock up a steam box to steam the planks for bending. Beg, borrow or steal all the hammers, saws, planes, thicknessers, jointers, rasps, clamps and other miscellaneous tools you might need. Gather your nails, screws, copper rivets, glues, timber and paint. Then finally you might be ready to think about building a boat.

It’s fair to say that during this period if you didn’t know where Athol was, look in the shearing shed. I can easily imagine a very idyllic scenario. Shearers lined up at their stands, backs bent and sweat on their brow. The buzzing of their narrow handpieces all but drowns out the AM radio in the corner, yet they all seem to know the cricket scores and cheer every time the West Indies lose a wicket. Richie Benaud was making a name for himself as captain and won the series 2-1. Roustabouts pick up the fleece and throw it high in the air, landing it on the wool table for the wool classer to skirt and place in a bin to be pressed into the bail.

Over in the corner sits a half-built boat, currently being used to store a few of the finer fleeces to enter the Campbell Town Show. When knock-off time comes around a few of the shearers walk over to the boat, long neck in hand, and start asking “What’s this Athol?”

“Did you build this mate?” and of course, there’s always one “ What the bloody hell do you want a boat for?” Athol just smiles and sweeps up the last of the wool, waiting for them all to leave so he can get to the real work of finishing his dream. On a summer’s day sometime in the early sixties, His dream was realised.

Breaking the Champaign

A Holden sedan leaves the yard towing a freshly painted dinghy. Athol in his terry towelling hat, stubby shorts and blue singlet. Betty in a floral blouse, sun hat and sunglasses. Picnic basket overflowing with scones, jam and cream and a billy soon to be brimming with tea. The family heads to the lakes. Past Mike Howes Marsh, home of the famous Bushranger. Through the corners of Old Mans Head, before finally arriving at Interlaken. Home to the famous trophy waters of Lake Crescent. It must be an amazing moment to finally float the vessel you have been working on for what may have been years, all that build-up and anxiety quickly turning into joy and relief as she slides off the trailer and sits proudly in the canal.

Once the boat was loaded with the food, family and fishing gear, Athol would have wrapped a cord around the crank of the Wing petrol engine and pulled it into life. Taking the 300-odd metre ride up the canal and into the lake itself. Who knows if there were any fish taken that day, do doubt using those classic flatfish lures every grandfather had in the tackle box. But Athol got to live out his fantasy, and now 3 generations and 2 families later I’m living out mine.

Restoration

Athol soon parted with ‘Split The Wind ’ selling the boat to his mate Bruce - my grandfather. Bruce was very much a social butterfly type. He and my Grandmother June would hold dances at all the local halls, then hold the afterparties at their home in Parattah. During the last song, Bruce would Waltz June around the floor of the hall twirling his hand above his head signalling to everyone it was time for a ‘Nightcap’. Everybody knew Bruce and

June and in turn, knew the little wooden boat parked in their yard.

In the second chapter of Split the Winds life it spent a lot of time down the Tasman Peninsula catching flathead by the garbage bin full at Sommers Bay, Murdunna. And many hours trolling Lake Sorell catching mostly garbage. My father jokes about the boat catching “300 tonnes of flathead and 3 kilos of trout”.

The Third chapter isn’t very glamorous for the little clinker. After Bruce passed away the boat sat idle, his grandchildren would often play in the boat while it was on the trailer. But as time went on and those children grew into adults, the adventures that were imagined on that boat faded along with its paint. The tyres gradually deflated, and the grass grew tall, mother nature was trying to pull that little clinker back into the soil to reclaim what was hers. But I had other plans.

As I drove into the yard with Split The Wind on the back of the Ute and my partner looked out the kitchen window, I like to think she had the same look on her face that Betty did all those years earlier. The look of “What is that and what is he doing with it?” so was quickly unloaded in the shed before I was told to get rid of it. I had very little knowledge of clinkers and restoring them when I began this project. I call it a restoration but looking back it was more of giving it a well-needed birthday. Out with the heat gun and I start stripping the paint off the hull, night after night once the kids were in bed I’d be scraping like a mad man. As I work my way in towards the skeg I hit a patch of rot, an inexperienced boat restorer’s worst nightmare.

“That’s it,” I tell myself “The boat is ruined, there is no way this could be repaired for under $10k” this project was a disaster. Or so I thought, a good night’s sleep and a phone call or two later, I enlist the help of Denman Marine. After a quick inspection of the boat, he informs me that it’s barely rotten and if I had stopped poking it with a screwdriver there would be no need for a repair. Whoops. But now there was and he was happy to repair it, for a fraction of the price I had dreamed up. A couple of months later and the boat was back in my shed, upside down and ready for a coat of paint. 6 coats of paint to be exact, with sanding in between every coat.

The boat got its official relaunch this year at the opening of the trout season on Tooms Lake, lined on the shore with all the other boats in various shapes and sizes. I was proud to hear people talking about the little clinker, and I was more than happy to talk about it with them. No fish were taken on that trip, but I left smiling from ear to ear. Looking in the rearview mirror, probably more than I should have been, staring at my wooden boat wondering what adventures lay ahead.

Reflections

The fruits of being back on the water again.

It might seem a bit selfish of me to talk so much about Split The Wind. It wasn’t built by Reg Fazakerley, the famous Tasmanian clinker builder. It’s not worth any more than a few thousand dollars and only holds sentimental value to a small handful of people. It would hardly get a second glance parked on the Hobart Wharf at the upcoming Wooden Boat Festival, and in a race, it would cross the finish line in last place because it’s been said: “it would hardly split a breeze let alone the wind” but this boat, along with thousands

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of others, was built in the backyard of a Tasmanian home. And enjoyed by thousands of families.

Whether it be through fishing, water skiing or cruising the waterways of our amazing state. But for every 10 boats that made it to launch day, there is still one half-built boat in the back of pop’s shed that he’s too old to finish but too committed to give up. That unfinished boat still has a story to tell, perhaps it’s the butt of a joke that comes up every Christmas because he promised it to his kids 30 years ago. Or maybe it will go where all good wooden boats go it die, in a child’s playground half full of sand with an old steering wheel bolted on the front. Whether it be a King Billy Clinker, Double Diagonal Planked Huon Yacht, a Plyboard Mirror Dinghy or Cedar Strip Canoe. People are drawn to wooden boats; they ooze character and charm. Just like the people who built them.

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