Australian-owned ships and their crews - deck, engine-room, catering and pursering departments - helped win the Second World War, particularly, but not only or exclusively, in the Asia-Pacific theatre of operations.
This website details the ships involved and the corporations that owned them. It will provide for some recollections and diary records of experiences of the people who crewed them and it acknowledges the allies alongside whom they served.
It is dedicated to mercantile mariners who, across the ages, have carried the world's goods from producer to user, but in particular it is intended as a tribute to all the Merchant Seamen who served in the 1939-1945 conflict, and indeed universally and especially to those who did not return, those who have no known grave but the depths of the oceans.
"They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters"
Requisitioned by the Royal Australian Navy in 1939 as a minesweeping flotilla leader, Orara was involved in survivor rescues late in 1940: on 7 November, near the sinking of the Cambridge off South East Point, New South Wales and on 5 December from the Nimbin off Coffs Harbour, New South Wales.