Fairsea

A carrier hull turned into a migrant ship

The ship was laid down as Rio de la Plata for the Moore-McCormack Line's New York to South America service and launched in 1941. She never took up that route. She was completed instead as an escort aircraft carrier, commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Charger and returned quickly to American hands, serving through the war as USS Charger. After the war she was used briefly as a troop carrier.12

Alexandre Vlasov bought her in 1949 for his Alva Steamship Company, renamed her Fairsea and had her reconstructed at Genoa. The rebuild produced very basic accommodation for about 1,800 passengers. Her registered tonnage was 11,833 tons gross, she measured 492 by 69 feet, and Doxford geared diesels on a single screw gave a service speed of sixteen knots. She was the first passenger ship of what became the Sitmar Line.13

The reconstruction was undertaken for a purpose that did not yet exist on paper. The ship lay idle for a short period while a contract was obtained from the International Refugee Organisation, and only then began work as an emigrant carrier.1

How the charter worked

Passengers did not book a passage on Fairsea. They were selected in the camps by Australian officers working alongside IRO staff, signed a two-year labour contract for work directed by the Commonwealth, passed medical and security screening, and were then moved by train to an embarkation centre near the port. Fairsea's usual loading ports under the charter were Naples and, from late 1950, Nordenham and Bremerhaven. The Bremerhaven sailings drew on the northern German camps and resettlement centres, the Italian sailings on the assembly and staging camps that fed the port of Naples.41

On board, accommodation was segregated dormitory space rather than cabins. A Hungarian passenger who sailed in 1951, within the charter period, described the ship as a converted troopship with no cabins, just large open spaces with triple-decked bunks too cramped to sit up in, men in one section and women in the other, and a single long run of toilets and showers. The later comforts often recalled by British assisted migrants belong to the ship after her 1957 refit at Trieste, when air conditioning, an extra deck and new public rooms were fitted and capacity was cut to 1,460. They are not evidence about the displaced-person voyages.13

Reception followed a fixed pattern. Passengers landed at Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle or Fremantle, were counted off against the ship's roll and were moved by train to a reception and training centre, most often Bonegilla, and from there to holding centres and to the jobs their contracts assigned them.47

Dated voyages

The maiden emigrant voyage left Naples on 11 May 1949 with 1,896 displaced persons of all nationalities and reached Melbourne in the first week of June. Sailings then followed at roughly two-monthly intervals: Naples on 17 July 1949 to Newcastle on 19 August, Naples on 22 September to Melbourne on 19 October, Naples on 3 December to Sydney on 31 December, Naples on 7 February 1950 to Fremantle on 2 March. The Fremantle call on 2 March 1950 landed 1,898 people in Western Australia before the ship continued east.426

From December 1950 she loaded in Germany. A voyage from Nordenham and Bremerhaven departing on 20 December 1950 reached Melbourne on 22 January 1951; the passenger roll for it was compiled from National Archives of Australia series A12052. On one 1951 voyage a record 1,902 passengers disembarked at Melbourne. The IRO contract ended in 1952, after which Sitmar sold fare-paying passages on the same ship; the transcribed roll for her Fremantle arrival of 2 October 1952 is entirely Dutch, and belongs to that later commercial traffic rather than to refugee resettlement.421

Not every sailing completed as planned. A Ukrainian woman who left Germany with a two-year-old son in October 1949 recorded that her ship, the Fairsea, broke down in the Suez Canal and had to put back to Naples, where her party transferred to the Castel Bianco and finally reached Port Melbourne on 24 May 1950.7

Ukrainians on board

The transcribed Fairsea rolls for 1949 and 1950 carry sequence number, surname and forename only, without a nationality or birthplace column, so they cannot be used to count Ukrainians. The Ukrainian presence on her voyages is documented instead by community records and by the camps that received her passengers.4

The clearest case is the sailing that arrived at Newcastle on 19 August 1949. The Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations records that 1,096 migrants disembarked there and went by steam train straight to Greta Migrant Camp, the first draft of displaced persons to be landed outside a capital city. That figure covers all nationalities. What is specifically Ukrainian in the record is that a mixed Ukrainian choir appeared at Greta that month, organised by Roman Hrobelko during the voyage itself, and that Volodymyr Yankivskyi and Leonid Medvediv later conducted choirs at the camp. A choir assembled at sea implies a Ukrainian group large enough to rehearse on the passage out.5

Other Ukrainian passengers reached Bonegilla and, after 1953, the new migrant centre at the Broadmeadows army barracks. The interrupted October 1949 sailing described above is the one Fairsea voyage for which a Ukrainian passenger's own account has been read.7

Afterwards

When the IRO charter ended Fairsea stayed on the Australian run. A ship history of the line dates the end of the contract to February 1952 and records that Sitmar then opened an office in Sydney and began to offer passage on the ship to Australia. Sitmar sold paid passages, and from 1955 the Australian government chartered her to carry assisted immigrants from Britain. The 1957 Trieste refit changed her appearance and her interior, and a further upgrade in 1961 reduced capacity again, to 1,212. She made eighty-one voyages to and from Australia between 1949 and 1969.138

The end came at sea. On 23 January 1969, about 900 nautical miles west of Panama, fire destroyed her engine room. She was towed to Balboa, reached on 3 February. Repair was judged uneconomic for a hull already twenty-eight years old, and on 9 July 1969 she left for the shipbreakers at La Spezia.21