The Flinders Ranges do have a bit of coastline – the strip from Port Augusta to Port Pirie. Just north of Mambray Creek the Range comes to within a kilometre or so of the sea at Yatala Harbor, the scene of our present tale.
Thomas Hannan (Thomas Andrew Hannan c.1836-1910) arrived in South Australia on the Navarino in 1837, aged one. His parents took on dairy farming at Onkaparinga, and one of his later childhood chores was to ride his horse down to Adelaide with a load of up to thirty pounds of butter for the market.
Thomas married Ann Murphy at Kapunda in 1858. Two years later, with an infant son in tow, they went to the Victorian gold diggings. They were soon back in South Australia, presumably none the wealthier, and the next twenty or so years seem to have been spent working on sheep stations.
By the mid 1880s they were living in Port Augusta. Thomas owned or leased a scrub block near Yatala Harbor, at that stage covered with mallee eucalypts. He purchased a small cutter, the Star of Peace. The mallee timber made good firewood, and he used his cutter for weekly trips to ship the cut mallee to a woodyard he had opened in Port Augusta. His son had the job of delivering the wood to customers around the town.
On the evening of 15 December 1887, Hannan had his cutter anchored in Yatala Harbor, the keel resting on the sand, in about four feet of water. He had about 8 tons of firewood already loaded on board. As luck would have it, at about 8 pm, an earthquake struck. Modern estimates put the quake at about 5.2 on the Richter scale – it was felt from Burra to beyond Blinman, a distance of some three hundred kilometres.
He described a loud rumbling sound, and the surface of the water gave the appearance of boiling. The cutter was bumped violently against the bottom with such force that the caulking between the upper timbers of the hull crumbled and fell out. The whole of the cutter quivered, the mast shook, and the tensioned ropes cracked like whips. Hannan was quite apprehensive that the sea floor was going to open up and swallow the boat.
Fortunately, the seafloor didn’t swallow him and his boat. Unfortunately, when the tide came in, the water poured in through all the new gaps in the planking, completely filling the boat.
Next morning, the outgoing tide left her high and dry. Thomas enlisted the help of some local farmers who had come to the beach for a swim. Together, they pumped out the hull and re-caulked the seams with white lead. The following high tide floated her again and she safely sailed back to Port Augusta.
The Hannans’ Later Years
The firewood business provided an income for a few more years. Then Hannan put the Star of Peace to use in shipping ironstone from Eyre Peninsula to the silver- lead-zinc smelters at Port Pirie. Eventually she was wrecked on the coast near Point Lowly.
In their later years Thomas and Ann moved to Glanville, Port Adelaide, reduced to living on government rations. Ann died at Glanville in 1908 aged 74, and Thomas died in hospital at Fullarton in 1910, also aged 74.
some web links
TA Hannan reminiscences 1887 – An Old Colonist
TA Hannan’s firewood advertisement 1887 – Firewood! Firewood!
TA Hannan and the earthquake that sank his cutter – The Earthquake at Sea
TA Hannan reminiscences 1906 – SA Old Colonists’ Association