THE VOYAGE



MORTS DOCK:
SCRAPED



OVERHAULED - SUEZ - SCRAPED - CLEANED

 “The great feature of Waterview Bay [Mort Bay] is the extensive foundry establishment and dry dock, known as Mort's Dock and engine works. It is here that the mail steamers are overhauled on their arrival from Suez. Entering this dock, they are scraped, cleaned, and painted, and made ready for immediate despatch as soon as the time of departure arrives.”
Connecting global material movements has been researched by landscape architects like Jane Hutton in Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements
“How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed?”



CLEANING - 40 TONS OF SHELLS - BARNACLES - SCRAPED - CLUSTERS

“The four-masted barque Buteshire [...] was floated out of Mort's Dock this morning. The vessel had been at sea for nearly a year, and her cleaning in dock resulted in 40 tons of shells, and barnacles being scraped off her bottom. Some of the shells were as large as an ordinary vase, and they clung to the ship in clusters, as many as half a dozen in a bunch. Several were secured by visitors' to the dock as curios.”
- A BARQUE'S BARNACLES: FORTY TONS REMOVED in Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate,  2nd April 1910.




TIMELINE

1835-1854: Reclamation occurred for the dry dock itself. (reclamation in syd estuary)

1854: The coast was further extended (ibid)

Pre-1857: Reclamation occurred to establish the dry dock (Godden Mackay Pty Ltd 1991).

1854: Land acquired by Captain Thomas Stephenson Rountree and Thomas Sutcliffe Mort (ANU Archives).

1855: Mort’s Dock opened.

1867: it was principally an engineering facility.

1869: Suez Canal construction is complete

1879: Waterview Bay is renamed Mort’s Bay

1901: The precursor to Woolwich Dock which was established

1950s: ANL uses the dock as container storage

1961: oil leak and fire at morts dock (lawteacher)

1969: ANL infilled the site and (likely) buried a lot of archaeological evidence