That’s often because the old salts have long passed on. That’s particularly the case for former deepwater sailors of the graceful windjammer era.

That romantic and exciting, if hard and dangerous, period when big, wind-driven sailing ships ruled the seven seas, ended soon after World War I.

The Port of Newcastle, in fact, was one of the last refuges of sailing ships in the world as ship masters competed unsuccessfully for cargoes with coal-powered coastal steamers.

Frequently, the only way for ship owners to survive back then was to take on long-haul voyages with bulk cargoes, say, taking a big coal cargo to a South American port With poor food, low wages, long hours (up to 84 hours a week of hazardous duty) in ships without engines, or even radios, and running before fierce ocean storms and sometimes even giant waterspouts, most sailors eventually chose to be paid off, or simply desert in a friendly port.

 But  ashore, what skills could  a sailor offer a prospective employee, outside of crewing on a coastal steamer? If he  were lucky enough, that is, to secure an easier job for better pay, better hours and far less danger, even if it meant hard yakka at the end of a coal shovel, feeding a furnace. 

And what was it like to be in Newcastle Harbour before 1920?  

These were some of the questions I once put to former deepwater sailor Wal Marshall, of Mirrabooka, on southern Lake Macquarie.  I met  Wal  in 1986 when he was  one of the senior members of Newcastle’s “Bar Bounders” club of former maritime men who met each month at the old (now gone) Tattersalls Club in Watt Street, Newcastle.

He was then one of the social club’s two remaining members from sailing ship days.  I came across my notes to his interview recently and thought they might provide an interesting insight into a bygone age.

Wal was a pleasant, ever-smiling gentleman when I met him. The veteran saltwater sailor, then 84 years old, had just completed his memoir of a life in which he referred to himself as a gypsy seafarer.

But I best remember Wal  for a shaggy dog yarn he told me with a straight face, only saying that “odd things happen when you’re out at sea”.

But more about that a little later.

 Wal remembered early Newcastle fondly, if somewhat obliquely, as he was away from the area most of the time.

Still he must have loved the area as he came back to settle here and years later invented a retractable TV mast. 

It was the legacy of memories of hanging on for dear life with one hand while hauling in wet sails in foul weather on swaying ships masts more than  27 metres up. His TV mast idea came of the realisation of how much simpler it would be to haul in sails if the  tall masts could themselves be lowered.

 “I knew Newcastle [in the dying days of sail] when the windjammers would be berthed three or  four abreast on the shoreline [awaiting coal cargoes]. And when Hunter Street to Darby Street was the only part of town worthwhile and quiet enough, except when the locals declared war on the ‘brass bounders” [sailing apprentices] for taking their girls,” he said.

“The Mission to Seamen was at Stockton and trams ran along Scott Street. They were wild days and nights ...”

Wal also remembered a well-known sailors’ lodging house in King Street, in the inner city, where no seafarers ever failed to pay their board. If they were unemployed, they all invariably later paid off their debt (called a dead horse) when back in work.       

His other vivid memories of the era included sailing into Port Stephens for a cargo of telegraph poles and a pauper’s grave for a sailor who fell from the top of a mast moored in Newcastle harbour to the hard deck far below. (There were no ambulances on Newcastle waterfront in 1920.)

Sydney town of that period was a  bustling city filled with traffic, but a city of early T-model Ford cars, doomed hansom cabs (horse-drawn taxis) and horse-powered brewery wagons and similar baker, milk and general delivery carts, plus toast-rack electric trams.

With so  many horse droppings about, however, each city block had its boy. Commonly known as “sparrow starvers” they were each equipped with a short-handled broom and dustbin to collect the horse dung and dump it in council bins.

 But how did a deepwater sailor earn a crust between ships in the dying age of sail?

 Wal  said he and a friend were almost penniless after landing in Melbourne in 1921, just after a shipwreck.

Fortune smiled on them when they found jobs as steeplejacks, working on a brewery chimney “150-foot [45 metres] high for a daily wage more than three times the average man’s daily wage”.

It paid so well because most people were scared stiff to climb up so high using only a block and tackle and 1.8-metre lengths of ladder.

“Naturally I was quite at home with heights ... and unlike being on a sailing ship mast at sea, a brick chimney is steady, not pitching and rolling,”  Wal said.

“The job was, to me, a godsend. As has oft been quoted, ‘as one  door closes, another opens’.’’

And that reminded him of the tale of the “dog barking navigators” and the ‘‘60-milers’’. These small colliers carried cargoes between Hexham and Sydney for more than a century. It was a coastal sea run of about 60 miles (about 100 kilometres).  

Even the last ‘‘60-milers’’, like the Hexham Bank, are now long gone. She caught fire at sea off Wollongong in 1978. Such ships often left Sydney at midnight arriving at their destination at 6am, then loaded up with coal, left again at midnight.

This coastal sailing, or “rock dodging”, probably in the 1930s, was an odd job for Wal , yet it was steady work.

“The current yarn in my day was the dog barking navigators,” he said, referring to the pets people kept at ocean cliff homes.

“Coming down from Newcastle at sea in thick weather [fog] the officer and helmsman would listen intently for the bark of a dog. When it was heard, the ship’s mate would say, ‘That’s the labrador, we’re off Norah Head, steady as she goes’.

“An hour or so later, another bark. ‘Ha! That’s the collie, we’re right off Barrenjoy’. An hour or so later, another bark. ‘Ha! That’s the fox terrier, we’re abeam of Sydney Heads, port your helm’.” 

 When asked about the truth of the tale, Wal  didn’t reply, but the ghost of a smile played around his lips.