Ca. 1914-1918: Officers and Men. Two species on board the battlecruiser HMAS AUSTRALIA [I] - RAN Historical.

1560. Bare feet and filthy clothes on one hand, and imperious overbearing body language on the other.

 

This photograph says everything about why there was eventually a mutiny on Australia's first flagship: the silly question of the men demanding more Shore Leave to entertain family and friends on their return from the war was almost incidental.*

 

* PLEASE SEE IMPORTANT COMMENTS FROM ONE OF OUR MOST IMFORMED AND DEDICATED EX-RAN RESPONDENTS, LES ROBERTS, IN COMMENTS BELOW, ADDED IN BY KOOKABURRA FROM A PRIVATE E-MAIL. LES FEELS - PROBABLY JUSTLY - THAT I HAVE BEEN MUCH TOO HARSH IN MY 'INSTANT' OR KNEEJERK REACTION' [MY WORDS] TO THIS PHOTOGRAPH, AND I GUESS IS SAYING [CORRECTLY] THAT I'VE NOT PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD THE PAY PARADE PROCEDURE TAKING PLACE HERE.

 

THIS IS A LONG AND COMPLEX ENTRY THAT HAS ELLICITED A LOT OF COMMENT, AND I DON'T QUITE KNOW HOW TO UNSCRAMBLE IT TO ACCOMMODATE THIS ALTERNATIVE VIEWPOINT FROM A TRUE NAVY MAN. SO I'VE ADDED THIS AS A 'LAST WORD' TYPE COMMENT, NOMINALLY UNDER MY KOOKABURRA USER NAME, BUT AS STATED, IT RECORDS LES'S VERY VALUABLE EXPLANATION OF A PAY PARADE AND WHAT IS GOING ON HERE. K,

 

The original entry continues ...

 

Again and again, in both the young Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy [as it was once called] , there was a clash of class and cultures in the period when their ships were still mainly run by British officers. Mutinies also occurred in the Royal Indian Navy [as it once was] and in the late-emerging Royal New Zealand Navy, under somewhat different circumstances.

 

There were at least half a dozen 'mutinies,' or crew protests over various conditions, in the RAN during WWII - and a similar number in the Royal Canadian Navy - which experienced a really odd peacetime spurt of it again in the late 1940s, leading to Rear Admiral E.R. [Rollo] Mainguy's landmark Inquiry.

 

The 1949 Mainguy Report on 'certain "Incidents" on HMCSs ATHABASKAN, CRESCENT and MAGNIFICENT' can be read here:

 

www.navalandmilitarymuseum.org/resource_pages/controversi...

 

This is not meant to be an attack on the 'Mother Navy' and its ancient traditions, but clearly an unsatisfactory situation of 'foreign' control would prevail until the naval colleges of Australia and Canada began to turn out complete generations of their own officer class, and men that shared their own distinctive national values.

 

Even then, in the Canadian case, the Maingay Report suggests inherited RN attitudes towards the men by Canadian officers needed reform - and got it.

 

Canadian author Alan Filewood, in his work 'Theatre, Navy and The Narrative of 'True Canadianism', raised the question of whether RCN meant the 'Royal Canadian Navy' or the 'Royal Colonial Navy.' In that work Filewood asserted that the last issue — an assertion of "an uncaring officer corps harbouring aristocratic British attitudes inappropriate to Canadian democratic sensitivities" — went beyond the question of sailors' morale and touched on the basic identity of the Canadian Navy and indeed, on the national identity of Canada as a whole.

 

'It was to have ramifications in the process undertaken in later decades, painful to many of the officers concerned, of deliberately cutting off many of the British traditions in such areas as ensigns and uniforms.'

 

At its best, which was usual, the interaction between the Royal Navy and its Dominion offshoots worked fraternally and wonderfully well. At its worst - which was also somewhat too often - it was disastrous.

 

On Christmas night - Boxing Day, 1941, in Cairns Harbour, the commanding officer of the Armed Merchant Cruiser HMAS WESTRALIA, Captain Hudson, RN, had bridge wing machine-guns trained on his own crew, who - with the ship run out of fresh food after trooping duties to Timor - had been fed only prunes and rice for weeks. Naturally, dysentry was rife.

 

As he approached Cairns the ship's aircraft was flown off ahead to order fresh food supplies. But when Christmas lunch arrived, it was the Prunes and Rice Special again. Then the men were refused Christmas Day shore leave...

 

Don't ask what happened. The Frame-Baker 'Mutiny' book source for this says HMAS WESTRALIA's logs for Christmas 1941 have simply disappeared from the RAN's records, and the outcome of that particular incident is simply not known here.

 

Photo: RAN Naval Historical, it appeared in Ross Gillett's book 'Australian and New Zealand Warships 1914-1945' [Doubleday, Sydney 1983] - taken from a p25 montage.

 

A two-part COMPENDIUM of 100+ HMAS AUSTRALIA [I] images on the Photostream begins at pic NO. 5476, here:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/6785541017/in/photostr...

 

 

 

 

Done