HMAS Choules (or Mallacoota) gets adopted

On 10 March 2021 HMAS Choules came back to Mallacoota to adopt the town as its ceremonial (perhaps spiritual is a better word) home.   We saw her well from the Lagoon boardwalk on our morning walk.  I had wondered about the name of the ship: all is explained in this very interesting Naval page.)

From the material copied to the Mallacoota Community Facebook group it was apparent that the main event was due to happen at Bastion Point at 2pm.  Just before 1pm things got a little noisy at home.
I had assumed this was an eminent person arriving but it was in fact one of the helicopters (an MRH -90 Taipan I think) used in the aftermath of the fire, being flown by the crew who flew it at the time. They had re-united for this event.  It was the pilot's last day in the Navy and he put on a show for the town.

As things were happening I took myself down to Bastion Point a little earlier.
The helicopter zoomed around quite a bit over land and sea ...

.. before going for a snooze on the afterdeck of Choules.
(A little out of sequence: I had ridden down to the ramp earlier and found this rubber duck checking things out.)
In the afternoon this landing craft (I believe used in 2020 to transfer evacuees to the Choules) was used to bring crew ashore.  Showing they trusted people in Mallacoota, they had left the key in the ignition.
Crew, chopper and the Howe Range
Quite a good roll up for an event in midweek with relatively little warning. ( I first became aware of it the day before.)
The blonde lay was the PR person from East Gippsland Shire who had managed the event.  I was a bit worried about the volume of her speaking notes but most of the paper was agenda and cast list.  Her comments were effective and brief.
The Mayor of East Gippsland (Cr. Mendy Urie) also spoke.  Again effective and brief.
The longest speech was by the former Captain of the Choules, Scott Houlihan.  I apologise to him that I didn't take his photo so I have cribbed this one from the Navy.  (Our local Commonwealth MP Darren Chester MP, also in the photo, had set the event up but didn't come out to Bastion staying at the Oval.)
Captain Houlian's speech was very interesting and mainly about his view of the events of early January 2020.  He, and the other speakers, made a point of talking about the 130 dogs and other pets which accompanied the ~1300 human evacuees.  somehow that made it a very moving event.  He  also talked about getting the Choules in action for the evacuation.  As it was around New Years Day most of the crew were on leave and scattered around, and he tasked someone with trying to round up enough crew to be able to sail.  In the event only 2 of the crew (out of, I think, 170) couldn't make due to being overseas.  The ship sailed from Sydney 17 hours after receiving its orders.  Quite astonishing.

The Taipan had landed at the Oval.

It seemed one needed to be in (school) uniform to get into the cabin!
So I contented myself with peering into the cabin.
An excellent event.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I rec...
Read more

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are ...
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the bird...
Read more