Author(s): Andrew Bell & Murry Robinson

Boats

In a world that has become used to being able to travel between even the remotest places in 48 hours, it is easily forgotten how, in living memory, passenger ships were the accepted and often the only way to travel. This book tells the stories of three ships which were the last to regularly link Australia and New Zealand. When they were placed in a sector of what was quaintly called the 'All Red (British Empire) Route' in the early 1930s, both the Federation of Australia's six states and the Dominion of New Zealand had small populations (Australia 6.5 million and New Zealand 1.6 million), their economies were small and yet to be developed, and their potential had been stultified by a world recession of unparalelled severity. It was only a privaleged few who considered travel as part of their regular lives and, beyond them, down aft and on lower decks were those searching for better lives as economic migrants.