Fraser Island’s famous shipwreck, the SS Maheno, was the focus of the 2015 ANZAC Day Centenary service on the island, bringing to life the largely unknown links between the vessel and the Anzacs at Gallipoli and celebrating the special bond between Australia and New Zealand forged on those fateful shores 100 years ago.
The SS Maheno, named after a tiny rural town in New Zealand’s South Island, entered service in 1905 as a state-of-the-art luxury cruise liner operating between ports in Australia and New Zealand. She was the world’s first triple-screw turbine driven steamer and claimed the honour of being the first such ship to cross the Pacific and the fastest on the trans-Tasman run.
On the outbreak of World War 1, the liner was converted into a hospital ship, with eight wards, two operating theatres and a complement of eighty medical staff. By 26 August 1915, she was stationed off Anzac Cove loading casualties from the Battle of Hill 60 and spent the next three months transporting sick and wounded from Gallipoli to bases in Malta or Alexandria. After a brief refit in New Zealand, the Maheno returned to service on 3 July 1916, treating and transporting thousands of casualties from the bloody battlefields of the Somme. From December 1916 until the end of the war, she made seven voyages between the UK and New Zealand bringing home sick and wounded troops.
After a further sixteen years of commercial service, the Maheno was retired, stripped of all valuable fittings and sold for scrap. On 7 July 1935, she was being towed to a Japanese scrapyard by the SS Oonah when the vessels were caught in a cyclone 50 miles off Fraser Island. The towline parted in heavy seas and the Maheno, without power or steering, was cast up on Fraser’s 75 Mile Beach. Attempts to refloat her failed and there she has lain ever since, abandoned and rusting, an iconic tourist attraction on the world’s largest sand island. (Ironically, the Maori word ‘maheno’ means ‘island’.)
Earlier this year, the ship’s original bell, property of the Maheno School in New Zealand, was delivered to Olds Engineering of Maryborough to manufacture two replicas, one for Fraser Island and the other for the Queensland Maritime Museum in Brisbane. On 25 April, at the official mid-morning Anzac ceremony, students from Maheno School rang the bell, perhaps for the last time, and performed a traditional haka to a crowd of more than 400 people assembled beside the shipwreck under a cloudless Fraser Island sky. Later, as the final notes of the Last Post drifted away on the sea breeze, and the crowd stood silently in remembrance, all that could be heard was the rustle of our two nations’ flags at half-mast and the whooshing of waves coming once again to bathe the remains of the once proud Maheno.