- TIMBERBIZ.COM.AU - A La Une - 07/Feb 00:45

Opinion: Dave Hutchens – The Ballast Myth

The ‘Ballast’ Myth – A lazy belief that came from an old yarn and is popular with web content providers looking for the exceptional and the ironic as a tagline for a timber story. “The past actually happened, but history is only what someone wrote down.” Comedian A. Whitney Brown As someone interested in history, I’m drawn to how people in the past saw their own lifetime – rather than how we see their lifetime through the lens of subsequent change. Without an interrogatory approach to the past, history may be stripped of its complexity, and the events of the past reduced to simple constructs and repeated myths. The timber industry has quite a few, and one of the more dogged myths about timbers like Oregon and Baltic Pine is that they arrived in Australia as ballast on sailing ships. Unfortunately, for tireless promoters of the theory on websites and in design magazines, it is a myth. It lacks both gravitas and relevance and it fails to address the realities of maritime trade in Australia from an early colony to the later era of building towns and cities. Here’s a working definition of ballast: Ballast is used to stabilize a ship in transit. Wooden sailing ships were extremely buoyant, and tall masts made them top-heavy. Ballast was added or removed from the hold at the bottom of the vessel depending on how much cargo, supplies, people, and weapons were on the ship to make sure the ship stayed upright in heavy seas. Once a ship got close to its destination, the ship would dump the ballast, often just outside the harbor. Ballast had to be heavy, available, and very cheap to procure. Otherwise, it needed to be saleable at a ready market price at the destination. Rock was obviously popular, but the dumping of ballast was eventually banned in many ports, and ships’ captains turned their gaze towards cargos that could be easily on-sold like ore, bricks, coal, terracotta tiles, or crates of cast iron products that could be stored low on the keel and not move about in heavy seas. If it wasn’t placed low on the keel, it wasn’t ballast it was simply cargo. But if it was cargo used as ballast, it was essentially still just cargo for anyone who wasn’t present on the sea voyage. The strategic placement in the ship’s hold was unimportant to an Australian buyer of heavy cargo. It was left to the bosun to work things out in the hold. And would he have kept a log of this activity or seen it as nobody’s business bar him and the cap’n? Should it hold any fascination for the eventual owner of the timber a century and more later? Can anyone nowadays be sure any item of cargo had a ballast function on the trip over? It’s unlikely. There is online just a broad assertion the cargo was ballast – with a minimal understanding of the business of mercantile sailing. There is not much ‘awesome’ here to go ‘wow’ about. It might have been more fascinating if the cargo had been up on a moonlit deck, which is precisely where timber was carried. On the deck. For timber arriving from Washington State in North America, special schooners were built in the late 19ce to suit the timber trade, and it is likely the cargos were a dedicated timber-only load on the outward leg to Australia. Sailing historian Hewitt Jackson notes that these lumber ships were built without the between-decks of the conventional schooners, and close to half their cargo was stowed on deck. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Coast_lumber_trade) The other element of this ‘Ballast’ Myth is inferred but never clearly stated. It ignores the essential requirement of ballast that it needed to be heavy and softwood timber isn’t yet implies that it arrived as free goods or for minimal cost or charge. You hear: Cost me an arm and a leg but it originally came out as ballast! The problem with this claim is that it’s too vague. The essential detail is missing and here’s the probable detail. In the early 19th-century shipping trade, if a ship was unlikely to get viable or profitable cargos on the ballast leg of a return trip, a ‘ballast bonus’ was sometimes paid as part of the freight cost on the other leg. The money leg. It meant the ship’s captain could be competitive with pricing cargos on the ballast leg since he already had a retainer and perhaps merchants of cast iron goods in Melbourne paid less for their heavy cargo inbound than wool buyers paid in Liverpool per pound or bale outbound. A sort of trade imbalance characterized shipping to the colony before the repeal of the British Navigation Act in 1848. Up to that date, trade could only be conducted by British ships, and Australia, as a small colony, was powerless to explore markets using foreign ships. However, according to John Bach in A Maritime History of Australia, the trading ban was enforced with less rigor in the last years of the Act. All sorts of private arrangements emerged. The ‘ballast bonus’ and variations of it, may have originated the ‘Ballast’ Myth regardless of the uncertainty about whether shippers passed on any discounts to the buyer or retained them. It should be remembered that trade in timber in this early colonial period up to 1848 was small in volume. The era of building growth and expansion in Australia that brought the Pacific trade and increased European trade spanned 1860 to 1901 in the colonial period and then post-1901 – the Federation era – when Australia had the freedom to pass her own Navigation Act. The west coast Oregon trade by sail was strongest in this new 20th century. In summary, timber cargo is unlikely to have arrived as true ballast in Australia even in the early colonial period. It wasn’t heavy enough in comparison to other cargo types carried concurrently. Most imports to Australia weren’t ballast. Some were. […]