June | 2011 | debbierobson

Well, I didn’t get to the Mitchell (State Rail doing track maintenance) but I did find a ship through the wonderful website AIF project. http://www.aif.adfa.edu.au:8080/index.html
Working between the AIF Project and the Australian War Memorial embarkation section http://www.awm.gov.au/research/people/nominal_rolls/first_world_war_embarkation/introduction.asp
I was able to find some details about the Hospital ship Kanowna. She departed Sydney on 25th September, 1917 and had nineteen doctors and six nurses on board. Definitely room for my character Miss Summerville to depart with them.

Now here is the new problem! After several days searching I was unable to determine that voyage’s ports of call or disembarkation. I couldn’t find anything on google, no shipboard diaries on Trove, the brilliant website of the National Library of Australia http://trove.nla.gov.au/ or the previous two websites. Peter Dennis of AIF had some suggestions regarding the NAA http://www.naa.gov.au/ and finally their ISS Department came up with the answers: a logbook of the Kanowna, a two page document detailing the 7th voyage of the Kanowna and a book entitled Sea Transport of the AIF – all available to view in Sydney. Yay! So I’ll be back down there again soon!

This is my first blog at wordpress and I’m planning to make regular posts on writing and networking. For previous posts you can catch me on goodreads.

For a month now I’ve been having trouble with my research for my novel The Grey Silk Purse. I need a ship to get my heroine Miss Summerville from Sydney to England departing October 1917. I’ve been through Trove to no avail. I can easily find details of say the RMSS Britannia departing Sydney, 14th December, 1887 with Mr P.S. Tomlin in command and Mr Peter Leverage officiating as purser on the voyage. Easy peasy! But for the year I want – not much else except the troopships and they are listed on the excellent Australian War Memorial webpage.

The penny didn’t drop until I spoke to Francis from the Vaughan Evans Museum at Darling Harbour. She informed me that shipping departures and arrivals were not advertised in the papers during wartime. Obvious now of course but gosh I wish I’d worked that out a few weeks ago, lol. She advised me to try the State Records Office and ancestry.com but it’s still going to be tricky. Hoping to come up with something in the next 36 hours as I’m heading to the Mitchell Library on Monday. Stay tuned.