Kanimbla

A coastal liner in naval service

The ship was built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast for McIlwraith, McEacharn and Company, launched on 15 December 1935 and completed the following year. She reached Melbourne in June 1936 and ran a passenger service between Cairns and Fremantle with berths for 203 first-class and 198 cabin-class passengers. She registered 10,985 tons, measured 468.8 feet with a beam of 66.3 feet, and made nineteen knots on diesels of 10,000 horsepower.2

She was requisitioned on 5 September 1939, converted at Garden Island in Sydney and commissioned into the Royal Navy the next day as HMS Kanimbla, with a largely Australian crew. She patrolled Asian waters, boarded ships of occupied Europe, and led the amphibious force that captured Bandar Shahpur in August 1941. In 1943 she became a landing ship infantry and transferred to the Royal Australian Navy, serving through the South West Pacific until the war ended. As a transport she could carry 1,380 military personnel, and it was that capacity, not her prewar passenger accommodation, that made her useful in 1947.2

How the passages worked

The Australian displaced-person scheme began before Australia had ships of its own on the European run. Selection took place in the camps of the western zones, applicants signed a two-year labour contract and passed medical and security screening, and the first parties were carried out by American transports arranged through the Preparatory Commission for the International Refugee Organisation. Kanimbla's role in 1947 was the last leg: she took the arrivals from Fremantle round to Port Melbourne so that they could be entrained for Bonegilla.5

One of the Baltic passengers on that December 1947 leg recorded that after four days at Perth they boarded the Australian warship Kanimbla, which looked much worse than the American ship they had crossed on, but that the Australians seemed much friendlier, and that the passage to Melbourne took a week. The Australians produced a daily newspaper on board and asked passengers to translate it for those without English. It is the only description of conditions aboard her as a displaced-person carrier that has been read.5

The 1948 voyage was different in kind. On 11 October 1948 she landed passengers at Fremantle directly, and the group included men who had come from Germany. The transcribed roll for the arrival records nationality against each name, which the rolls of most later ships do not.34

Dated passages

The first Australian party of displaced persons, 839 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, reached Fremantle on 28 November 1947 aboard the American transport General Stuart Heintzelman. Four days later they transferred to Kanimbla, and she landed them at Port Melbourne on 7 December 1947, where the Minister for Immigration met them before they went by train to Bonegilla. The Royal Australian Navy's unit history describes the same passage as the first group of European post-war refugees to arrive in Australia being transported from Fremantle to Melbourne.56

The second episode is the arrival at Fremantle recorded by the passenger roll as 11 October 1948 and by the Western Australian landing table as 12 October 1948, with 429 people landed in the state. It stands between the two Heintzelman arrivals and the run of large chartered ships that began in 1949.31

Kanimbla paid off at Sydney on 25 March 1949 and her displaced-person work ended there. She was reconverted by the Cockatoo Docks and Engineering Company and handed back to her owners on 13 December 1950.2

The Royal Australian Navy's unit history adds an episode between the two dated arrivals. In 1948 Kanimbla carried personnel and stores to the United Kingdom for the commissioning of HMAS Sydney, and returned with British personnel who had enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy together with 432 displaced persons. A commercial ship history gives the same account.68

An article held by the Naval Historical Society of Australia records the outward leg of such a voyage: Kanimbla sailed from Devonport on 9 September, called at Gibraltar and reached Genoa, where she embarked displaced persons being brought to Australia. The excerpt available gives no year and does not name the Australian port of landing.7

Ukrainians on board

The 11 October 1948 roll is one of the very few from an Australian displaced-person arrival that records nationality. Of 129 transcribed entries, 35 are recorded as Ukrainian, second only to Polish at 39, with Latvian at 18, Lithuanian at 13 and Estonian at 8. The second name on the list, Ilia Apostoluk, is recorded as Ukrainian. The transcription is partial and the landing table gives 429 people put ashore in Western Australia from this arrival, so the 35 is a count within the surviving transcription rather than a total.31

The Ukrainian Association of Western Australia records the same arrival as a group of sixty men from Germany, politely welcomed by the state authorities. They formed a dancing group and a choir and gave what the association describes as the first Ukrainian concert held in Western Australia, then were split into three work parties: twenty to the Kalgoorlie gold mines, others to the railways, others to the construction of the Mundaring Weir. Some of the Kalgoorlie men later moved to Mundaring Weir, which became the largest concentration of Ukrainians in the state. As further arrivals followed they were housed at Graylands, Northam and Cunderdin.4

The community that grew from that group organised quickly. A first committee was elected in October 1949 with thirty-six people present, the first annual meeting in February 1950 drew seventy-eight, and the Ukrainian Association of Western Australia was formally incorporated on 1 September 1951.4

Afterwards

Returned to McIlwraith, McEacharn in December 1950, Kanimbla went back to commercial passenger work, carrying European migrants to Australia and later Australian tourists to Japan and elsewhere in Asia. In 1961 she was sold to the Pacific Transport Company and renamed Oriental Queen, ran Pacific liner routes, and was sold to Taiwanese breakers in 1973.2

Her importance to this history is out of proportion to the two voyages. The December 1947 passage delivered the first party of the scheme to Bonegilla, and the October 1948 arrival is the point from which Ukrainian organised life in Western Australia dates itself, tied to the hostels at Graylands, Northam and Cunderdin and to the work camps at Kalgoorlie and Mundaring Weir.54