Ketch Hand : Life aboard the little ships of the South Australian gulfs

A “mosquito fleet” of mainly ketches was integral, essential and unique to South Australia’s early transport history. The small vessels (ketches, schooners, cutters) were the only link between city and country before road and rail arrived. They carried grain and minerals to the city and anything from machinery to groceries to rural ports.

The ketch race highlighted Port Adelaide’s famous regatta, on Adelaide’s Port River from 1838, two years after the colony started.

The fast and handy ketch adopted in South Australia was a shallow-draught rigged sailing ship, 40 to 80 feet long, sailed by a small crew (three being common). Most ketches came from timber-rich Tasmania, where they adapted Thames barges with centre boards instead of lee boards and had a large sail area spread across multiple sails. The wooden ketches were flat bottomed, allowing them to navigate South Australia’s shallow tidal gulf ports.

The ketches benefited from factors such as the 1860-75 Wallaroo and Moonta copper mines boom and the breakup of large pastoral properties on the peninsulas that increased settlements, ports and landing places. Railways before 1879 were eight unconnected systems that linked inland regions with the coast. During the 1880s-90s peak, more than 70 ketches and schooners traded out of Port Adelaide.

The smaller ketches became the Gulf Fleet, trading in St Vincent’s Gulf with general cargo to, and grain and wool from, ports on the eastern Yorke Peninsula. The larger and more seaworthy Coastal Fleet went all over South Australia and to Tasmania, Western Australia and up the east coast. They also worked the grain ports in Spencer Gulf and joined up with windjammers at Port Victoria and the other larger ports.

Rail and road competition cut the ketches fleet in the 20^th Century but six were still operating in 1970: motor vessels Acolade, Troubridge, Ulonga and Nelcebee, and sailing ships One and All and the Falie.