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In Remembrance

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"

Taroona (Tasmanian Steamers)

Serving on the Bass Strait run when the war opened, Taroona was requisitioned in January 1942 by the New Zealand Naval Board to take New Zealand troops to Suva. Following brief operation back on the trans-Bass Strait service she was again requisitioned in March, this time by the Australian Government, for conversion to a troopship, with capacity 678 personnel. Her first trooping voyage, to Port Moresby, saw her aground for several days near the harbour entrance, her crew tense but fortunate while enemy bombers chose the Port Moresby airfield as their target. Then shuttling northwards from northern Australia ports she carried thousands of troops, surviving unscathed, her ninety-four voyages involving 173 operational area port calls.

Taroona resumed on the Bass Strait service in 1946.

THE FLEETS

In Remembrance

Taroona (Tasmanian Steamers)