The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [204]
The other major, and analogous, change was the arrival of specialised ships which are purpose built to carry only one cargo. First were oil tankers, which in the 1930s carried oil from Abadan. These are real monsters. The biggest today is apparently the Jahre Viking, which is 458 metres long, weighs 565,000 dwt, has a beam of 68 metres, and a draught of 24 metres. So vast is the deck space that the crew get around on motorbikes. Other purpose-built single-cargo monsters carry dry cargo, such as iron ore, bauxite, coal and phosphate. Another variant are the unsightly car carriers operating from Japan and South Korea to all parts of the globe, which essentially are floating car park buildings. My local newspaper recently described one entering Sydney harbour. 'She's pig ugly – a charmless, grey, round-fronted flat-backed 50,000 tonne brick with off-white funnels slapped drunkenly around the deck.' But they are efficient. This one carried 3,300 Japanese cars to five ports around the Australian coast. The round-trip was to take only 35 days. The master and engineer were Japanese, the crew Indian and Filipino, the registration Panamanian.43
These mono-cargo ships need new jetties specialising in the rapid loading of one specific commodity. Examples are Kharg Island for oil, Paradeep, Dampier and Marmagao for iron ore, or Aqaba for rock phosphate. These loading places are very different from traditional ports. Dampier, in northern Western Australia, will stand as a case study of this new phenomenon. In 1966 Hamersley Iron, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto, began to develop iron ore mines in sites 300 km inland from the coast. Six are operating today, with a seventh due to come on stream soon. The statistics are impressive. Ore is carried to the wharves at Dampier in trains 2.5 km long, consisting of 226 wagons, each of which carries 105 tonnes of ore. Nine trains a day make the journey. At the port, in Dampier Sound, two wharves are used, one 295 metres long, the other 325 metres, which respectively can handle ships of 180,000 dwt and 250,000 dwt. Two wagons, carrying 210 tonnes of ore, are emptied on the manual wharf, the smaller one, in 130 seconds. On the automated bigger wharf it takes only 90 seconds. Up to 500 ships call at Dampier each year, the largest being dependent on tides, as the departure channel is only 15.5 metres deep. Every year no less than 55 million tonnes of ore are exported to destinations all around the world.
All this is impressive enough. However, what is most interesting is that Dampier, like the oil terminals in the Gulf, is hardly a port at all, at least not in the way we have described Indian Ocean ports in earlier periods. The process of loading is very highly mechanised, especially on the newer, longer, wharf. A minimum number of skilled workers drive the machines. None of them normally board the bulk carriers. All this contrasts strongly with earlier times, when stevedores linked wharf and ship. Similarly, ports used to be distinguished from inland towns by their cosmopolitan nature and heterogeneous population. This no longer applies. These huge ships are fully loaded in 24 to 30 hours, and their maximum turn-around time is 36 hours. Few of the crew have time to land. The crews are almost entirely non-Australian, so that visa requirements also hinder going ashore. There is a complete dichotomy between the crews and the wharf workers: the former never go ashore, the latter are only very remotely connected with the sea in any way at all. Even the bulk carriers in a way seem to deny the sea. They are ugly, but efficient, monsters whose sailing is in no way constrained by deep structure matters: the sea has been defeated.44
The social changes which have resulted are also dramatic.