[Hardie, Jennie, 1981, Nor'-Westers of the Pilbara Breed, Shire of Port Hedland, Western Australia, pages 120-122]
S.S. Koombana Goes Down
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With the first decade of the 20th century behind it, Port Hedland, fed by a pastoral industry thriving after a long drought and by lucrative tin mining, continued to develop unobtrusively, but by 1913 the effects of a world contemplating war were beginning to be felt.
Pilbara diarist Tom Anderson wrote in March 1913: ‘The outlook in the State is not good, owing to the Banks and all business people pressing those who owe them money’. He commented on the incompetence of the ‘so-called Labor Government’ and the fact that the Premier (Scaddan) was away trying to borrow money. ‘If he fails to get it’, Anderson wrote gloomily, ‘then pressures all round will continue. If he does get it, then greater pressures later on. Three hundred thousand people cannot pay interest on unlimited millions badly spent.’
By August 1914, England was at war with Germany and, fired with loyalty to their King and mother country, the cream of Australia’s young men went off to fight a bloody war. From the stock camps, homesteads, mining leases and townships of the Pilbara they left in droves, leaving their women and the men less fit than themselves to keep the home fires burning.
Only 24 hours after the Great War had started, Tom Anderson, after a six-months holiday in a brooding United Kingdom, left for Australia. ‘The first day after leaving Suez’, he wrote, ‘we passed 15 transports crowded with Indian troops, and convoyed by warships, on their way to France. The following day we passed another lot of seven and, in the Gulf of Aden, seven more. On each occasion we passed close to these ships and gave them a cheer--the best we could do’. Arriving back in Fremantle in September, he noted two Japanese cruisers which had turned up from Singapore to help convoy our first force of 3,000 Australian troops on their way to fight in Turkey.
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Working in a structure that was originally intended to house a brewery, W.R. King did his best to keep the townfolk abreast of the worrying times through the Pilbara Goldfields News, which he had brought to Port Hedland from Marble Bar in 1912. Young Dallas King, son of the editor, was enlisted, after school, as a compositor and errand boy. Daily news slips printed with the latest war telegrams were delivered round the town by the boy. If news of any incident of extreme urgency came in, such as the day the German raider Emden was sunk at Cocos Island, he would be told to ring the cast-iron bell outside the shop to alert residents that there was more ‘stop press’ news at the shop.
