IT is a rumour that has survived a decade that a TV producer asked the Newcastle Port Corporation if his network’s star duo could broadcast from the deck of the Pasha Bulker.
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Breakfast personalities were instead parachuted into Nobbys for special editions with the stranded ship as backdrop, as the nation’s gaze fixed on the storm-battered second city of NSW.
Watching from the crowded shore in those bright, crisp days was Mitch Revs, a Merewether pop culture artist who was in his final year at Kotara High.
“I was probably getting through my exams, trying to get the day off school,” says Revs, who has produced two artworks depicting the Pasha Bulker.
“The attraction was just the size of the ship for most Novocastrians. Once I’d seen it I didn’t want to go back because you’d get stuck in that part of town.”
Revs has thought about it more since he was a teenager. Delving through media coverage of the salvage, he realised that Greenpeace had laser-projected onto the hull, “Coal causes climate chaos”. Revs was intrigued that such a detail could be lost in a decade. If a Pasha came to ground today, would it gain more or less traction with us?
“I think if it happened now, with the way social media has exploded, people would pinpoint these things,” he says.
“But it’s kind of a distant memory, to be honest. Being 17, I was probably more interested in what I was doing on the weekend.”
The collective thrill of the Pasha Bulker’s grounding, that dissipated into a kind of post-salvage hollowness, was explored by playwright Alana Valentine in Grounded, original title Tanker Town.
In Valentine’s Newcastle the protagonist is Farrah Martin, a 15-year-old who wants to be a marine pilot.
Farrah is conflicted about her hometown in ways familiar to Newcastle teens – “I really like it here . . . but I would like to get away” – though unlike her fictional peers, she notices its harbour.
“I came to Newcastle in 2011 looking for a story I felt there was still a lot of interest in,” says Sydney-based Valentine, who won three Australian Writers Guild Awards for Grounded including best script.
“One thing I noticed was that a Thai takeaway had a giant picture of Nobbys beach with the Pasha Bulker, stranded.”
Valetine spent two months doing interviews in Newcastle before writing what was dubbed her “Australian Billy Elliot”.
She was flown by helicopter over rough seas onto a Panamax class bulk carrier. How many people, she wondered, even noticed the port before that day in June? Her subjects ranged from marine pilot Sandra Risk to the people she met at bus stops; everyone seemed to have story.
The playwright that concluded the Pasha storm and grounding had lodged under the city’s skin, but that it had a hard time explaining why.
“For me, the Pasha Bulker story has a wonderful way of distilling Newcastle’s guts and grit,” Valentine says.
“The day they brought it limping through the heads . . . I wouldn’t call it pride, but it was this moment where the city went on. The grounding brought into sharp focus the fact that Newcastle is a port city. I guess it penetrated so many parts of people’s lives.”
Notwithstanding the fact that nine people had died, many in the Hunter picked the grit and glass from their wounds and entered three weeks of heady, flinty pride.
“Our generation’s Newcastle earthquake” became a rallying point, as a group of TAFE students produced Blame it on the Pasha Bulker (Bossa Nova) to be played on high rotation on local radio.
Two days after the storm, thirteen-and-a-half thousand people somehow turned up to Energy Australia Stadium to watch the Knights lose to the Tigers.
Pasha stubby holders became the “wish I’d thought of that” item of the season, and reporters’ questions were taken by TV newsreader-turned-MP Jodi McKay and Ports Minister Joe Tripodi without a hint of the toxic schism to come.
Buses brought sightseers from Sydney to Nobbys beach, and when locals bemoan the lack of a similar drawcard now, most are only half joking. For weeks, Newcastle had Sydney’s gridlock.
The pervasiveness of social media worked against Murray McKean, who climbed the tower of Christ Church Cathedral the morning after the grounding to take some of its most famous photos.
McKean’s image of the red monster bearing down on buildings and people is so unlikely it’s often deemed “fake”, and appears repeatedly in clickbait.
“I get frustrated,” McKean says.
“I’ve seen it used by car dealerships, it’s been on wine bottles, there’s a guy selling T-shirts at Charlestown Square, it’s won six photography competitions that I know of.”
The most recent was in Berlin.
Thoughts return to the storm’s victims, but more readily to abstract reflection. Bob Evans, né Kevin Mitchell of the Perth band Jebediah, released a single in 2009 titled Pasha Bulker. He told the Newcastle Herald he’d used pictures of the grounded ship to confront his feelings of being “lost at sea”.
It’s a feeling the Hunter confronts annually, with each forecast about a week into June.
If there’s a lasting legacy of the Pasha Bulker, it’s that it led to the creation of a new coal ship queuing system, where instead of the 57 ships that were anchored close into the coast back in 2007, waiting vessels now drift far out to sea, either east of Newcastle or up near New Guinea, as they wait their turn to load. And the Pasha Bulker – repaired and refitted after the grounding and now known as the Drake – is still plying the coal trade, and was most recently in Newcastle in late March, taking a load to China.
If only ships could talk. And if only those tapes had been working . . .
