Abstract
One hundred and seventy five years ago, only 75 years after Cook started his voyage, on 19 July 1843 the SS Great Britain was launched. It was the world’s largest ship and the first to combine a steel hull with a screw propeller. (She was later converted back to use both sail and steam, as can be seen in the painting by John A Wilson of 1852, which is held by the SS Great Britain Trust). She was 98 metres long.
She made her maiden Australian voyage in 1852, carrying 630 migrants, and subsequently completed 32 voyages bringing 15,000 people to a new life in Australia. She was the creation of engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Some of her passengers included the English cricket team which toured Australia in 1861 (including the brother of WG Grace) and the author, Anthony Trollope (another of my heroes) in 1871. The SS Great Britain made her last voyage to Australia in 1876, one hundred years before I joined Ebsworth and Ebsworth and was introduced to the maritime legal world in 1976.
That seems to me to be an appropriate way to start an Address, which will travel through the early years of the MLAA and the Maritime Law Association of Australia and New Zealand (MLAANZ) from its origins in 1974, to be given by someone who migrated to Australia that same year on the Chandris Line ship RHMS Britanis.
I want to set down some recollections of the early history of the Maritime Law Associations, at the same time identifying the main achievements, as I see it, of MLAA and MLAANZ in their first twenty or so of the forty-four years and some of the people responsible for them.
This copy of the address was originally published in Volume 33 of the ANZMLJ (2019).