The Wreck of The Excelsior

If you've come to hear a story about a shipwreck on the high seas with crashing waves, howling wind, and tales of miraculous escapes to safety, you'll be sadly disappointed.  Instead, 'tis a pedestrian tale of the life of the screw steamer Excelsior, built in 1897 By Gourlay Brothers in Dundee, Scotland.  The Excelsior worked out of Sydney and Tahiti before moving to South Australia where it was owned by the Darling flour millers and then the SA Farmers Union Cooperative.  In 1933 it was sold to the SA Harbors Board and converted to a coal hulk for the purpose of carrying coal to the steam powered dredges working in Port Adelaide.  Progress marched onward, diesel-powered dredges took over from coal, and in 1945 the Excelsior was unsentimentally dispatched to Mutton Cove, on the northern end of the Lefevre Peninsula, and left there.

I rode my bike out to the Excelsior on a day when winter tussled with spring and neither one could win. Mutton Cove lay at the end of a long meander between canyons of shipping containers through the business end of Port Adelaide. The road ended at the Snapper Point car park where two fishermen tried their luck and a tug chuntered busily past in the channel after successfully chivvying a container ship in to port.

A footpath took me out to the wreck were she sat rusting quietly amongst mangroves, an unexciting wreck quietly rusting after an unexciting life.

 

Beyond the wreck the footpath beckoned me into the Mutton Cove Recreation Reserve with promises of a pathway through the swamp and the possibility of birds and wildlife.

 

 

Birds and wildlife were in short supply.  The path delivered me, via a ragged gap in the chain link fence, onto the bike path leading to the Osborne ship building facility and directly to a dead end because the Osborne ship building facility was not going to let people like me ride their bicycles through, or past, any secret ship building business, thank you very much. I had to turn around and go back the way I'd come.

Path, wreck, shipping containers, etcetera, past the old docks and Harts Mill across the water.

Past the old lighthouse and the fish market shed, slated for demolition much to the distress of everyone who used to come to the markets there every Sunday morning.

 

 

I rode my bike all the way home. I meant to catch the train but I didn't want to wait at the station so I rode to the next station, and then the next, and one thing led to another and the train overtook me between stations and that was that. So home I went, all the way, and I had very tired legs when I got there. 

 

At least I wasn't rusting away in a mangrove swamp though, so there's that to be grateful for.

 

On the way home: more old things quietly getting older while developers hope they'll all fall down and no-one will have the tedious responsibility of restoring them.