Precisely 120 years ago this week, a steamship named the Petriana became lost in fog, missed the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, and smashed into a reef off the Portsea Back Beach.
Divers can still find remnants of the ship, though diving can be a tricky business in those restless waters.
Nearby, at Cheviot Beach – named after another shipwreck when 35 people died in 1887 – prime minister Harold Holt disappeared forever beneath the waves in 1966.
An army search party equipped with two-way radio look for Harold Holt on Cheviot Beach.Credit: The Age Archives
No one died when the Petriana foundered on November 28, 1903.
But it deserves to be remembered for no less dramatic reasons. It caused the first major oil spill in Australian waters, for a start. An unnamed observer described the environmental disaster as aesthetically captivating, writing that the oil produced “a film of great beauty, radiating all the colours of the rainbow”.
The wreck of the SS Petriana.
But it was a different matter of colour that remains the prime reason why the Petriana should lodge in Australia’s historical memory. The wreck exposed to the world a sickness within Australia’s treatment of those it deemed undesirable because of the colour of their skin.
It is no news, of course, that Australia institutionalised racial discrimination for two thirds of last century through what became popularly known as the White Australia policy.
At the same time, however, Australians prided themselves on their willingness to put their own lives at risk to rescue shipwrecked sailors and passengers.
How Alfred Deakin used a shipwreck to lay bare the White Australia policy and win an election
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01.12.2023
Precisely 120 years ago this week, a steamship named the Petriana became lost in fog, missed the entrance to Port Phillip Bay, and smashed into a reef off the Portsea Back Beach.
Divers can still find remnants of the ship, though diving can be a tricky business in those restless waters.
Nearby, at Cheviot Beach – named after another shipwreck when 35 people died in 1887 – prime minister........
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