A flat swan-song

Press, 16 September 1976, Page 1

A flat swan-song

By

MURRAY SIMPSON,

shipping reporter

The Rangatira issue was quietly swept under the carpet yesterday when she berthed at Wellington for the last time, and she is expected to slip away again tomorrow, without ceremony, to an uncertain future in the United Kingdom.

Her swan-song was a curiously flat affair. No amount of frantic dancing at the stewards’ party, staged in the lounge, nor the drinking that went on all night in the officers’ bar, could dispell the sense of bitterness and anger at the arbitrary' whims of costaccountant bureaucrats that had brought an institution to an untimely end. Comments by the Rangatira’s master (Captain J. D. Cleaver) at a press conference shortly before she sailed from Lyttelton expressed, in moderate terms, what almost all who manned her felt that night. It was a wrong political decision to scrap the vessel, he said. The Rangatira was the end result of 81 years experience on the inter-island service. She w'as as comfortable as could be expected and, in one of the roughest stretches of water in the world, she was superior in handling to any of her predecessors. After a-few initial problems the Rangatira had run for three years without a breakdown, he said. Smaller ships could not hope to work the run efficiently and reliably. “We are sailing in the open Pacific. You need an ocean liner to do it.” “I feel we need some sort of passenger service between Wellington and Lyttelton,” he said. “For six months of the year we are full — and for the rest we average between 200 and 300 passengers.” However, even on her last run, her passenger lists swelled by a contingent of camera-humping shipping buffs and a crowd of reporters and photographers, the Rangatira could muster little more than 300 souls. Souvenir-hunting was not in evidence. According to

Captain Cleaver, most of the portable items likely to be the target of people seeking mementoes had been quietly removed and placed in safe keeping over the previous few weeks.

Few seemed intent on seeing the last night out to the bitter end. The stewards’ party began to disintegrate shortly after 1 p.m., and by 3 p.m. the vessel was silent. Only a handful of hardy souls, determined to see the night out, remained on their feet in the officers’ bar when the Rangatira finally berthed in Wellington shortly after 7 a.m.

Few more than 30 people greeted the Rangatira’s last arrival in Wellington. But the company was distinguished. There was the former Minister of Transport (Sir Basil Arthur) the M.P. for Island Bay (Mr J. G. O’Brien), and a number of other Labour executives and city councillors. The Labour contingent was there to show its complete support for a Ranga-tira-type service, said Mr O’Brien.

“The loss of the Rangatira is the price we pay for foreign ownership of such important industries,” he said.

Mr O’Brien said he was not necessarily saddling the Union Steam Ship Company with the responsibility of severing a “vital internal safe line.”

“We are simply at the mercy of the desire for profitability, whatever the

consequences, which motivates the National Party and the Union Steam Ship Company,” he said.

Sir Basil said he would have retained the Rangatira until a suitable passengerfreight ship was found. The Labour Government had been scouring the globe, right until the elections, looking for another vessel, he said. “However, the types of ships we were looking for were not for sale because they were making too much money.”