For a law-abiding citizen, there was a necessary precondition to enable this post’s photos:  to be “on the water” in Port Adelaide, looking at the starboard side of the relevant ship.

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You are looking at Port Adelaide’s most arresting (and “enigmatic”)  21st century structure.

You may be relieved to know that it has nothing to with nuclear power!

As a construction industry journal headline put it, on the 2nd day of February 2023:

Hallett Group erects world’s largest drive-through Domesilo concrete facility

The timing of that story’s publication was exquisitely unfortunate.

On that very day – barely a week after the balloon-like structure’s erection/inflation – it burst, very spectacularly:

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Q: what does the “skin” of the world’s oldest such “surviving” clipper ship look like, at age 160 years?

A: have a close look at this post’s photos of the City of Adelaide. (taken in Port Adelaide on 07 March 2024)

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You are looking at the older of the world’s two surviving examples of their particular, “elite” type of sailing ship.

The younger one is the Cutty Sark.

The City of Adelaide was launched five years earlier, in 1864, in Sunderland.

It was custom-built to transport passengers and cargo to and from South Australia.

For its first 23 years of service, City of Adelaide sailed to and from Adelaide, annually.

An amazing “fact”: almost quarter of a million Australians can trace their heritage to passengers and crew of the City of Adelaide.

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This post involves the same vessel as did the previous one: the Santiago.

On 12 January 2023 – more than 166 years after the three-masted barque was launched – the Santiago suddenly lost its status as “probably the world’s oldest substantially intact iron-hulled sailing ship”.

For many years it had been patently obvious that the world’s last such hull would collapse – and restoration/preservation of the vessel would thereby become impracticable/impossible – unless timely (and expensive) efforts were made.

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I took this post’s photos in March 2024.

The pictured vessel was launched in 1856.

It was the largest, the oldest, and – in 1945 – it was the last of many vessels abandoned in Port Adelaide’s ships’ graveyards.

On the 12th day of January 2023 its iron hull collapsed, more than 166 years after its construction,  and after nearly 78 years spent embedded in silt, on the mangrove-rimmed North Arm of the Port River.

(the hull’s front section is now upside down, as you can see in this post’s images)

Until 12 January 2023, that hull was probably “our” planet’s last intact example of its rare kind.

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The pictured vessel was dumped in the Garden Island Ships’ Graveyard between 79 and 115 years ago.

My hunch (which could be dead wrong) is that it once worked as a barge in Port Adelaide, and that its hull was mostly wooden.

The greater portion of its former mass is now gone.

However, it is likely that this wreck directly supports a larger number of living organisms than it ever did – several generations ago – as an “intact”, “working” ship.

If you zoom in and look closely, you’ll see evidence which supports this assertion.

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You are looking at the most readily-recognisable of the Garden Island Ships’ Graveyard’s 25 wrecks.

Most of this one has either corroded away, become enshrouded by mangroves, or been submerged in silt, but the remnants of its sternpost and rudder still stand tall.

The screw steamer Glaucus was built in Sunderland, England in 1878.

From the 1880s until the early 1930s it worked in Australian waters – initially as a very accident-prone coastal trader, then as a grain storage hulk.

Glaucus’s final accident led to its beaching in a ships’ graveyard, rather than it being broken up and its iron salvaged.

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Port Adelaide has five “abandonment sites”, aka “ships’ graveyards”.

They contain the remains of at least 40 vessels, all dumped in the first half of the 20th century, in various arms of the Port’s mangrove-rimmed tidal creeks.

25 of those abandoned wrecks are in just one “gravesite” – the Garden Island Ships’ Graveyard, in the Port River’s North Arm.

It is a “treasure trove” of maritime history, albeit a progressively-vanishing one.

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As Neil Young once put it, rust never sleeps.

(the title of his still-celebrated 1979 LP was borrowed from an ad for a “rustproofing” product)

The featured image may tell you what kind of “graveyard” is a striking feature of Adelaide’s Port River.

If it does not, this series’ next chapter will make it readily apparent.

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