Britons pass the collection plate to honour our greatest maritime explorers

ONE English shire produced three of Australia's greatest maritime explorers - but a memorial to that historical oddity is in danger of crumbling away.

Maritime legend ... Portrait of Captain Matthew Flinders by Toussaint Antoine de Chazal.

THIS Australia Day weekend, a collection plate will be passed around a church congregation on the other side of the world in honour of Australia's greatest maritime explorers.

The names Banks, Flinders and Bass may be well known particularly in Australian schools where they form part of every student's curricular.

But the men are also local heroes to the people of the port town of Boston in Lincolnshire on England's east coast.

The connection between the men - who all came from the same district - and their seafaring achievements in Australia could be lost however with the Australian government refusing to help pay for repairs to a memorial honouring them.

Local parishioners, some still recovering financially from crippling floods in the township over Christmas, will be asked for spare change to ensure the memorial that sat below St Botolph's Church's 86m-high tower can be repaired and replaced.

It was an Australian memorial put up in 1945 by the then Australian High Commissioner JS Duncan but that has not been enough to spark any financial help.

"It is a shame if that connection is lost," St Botolph's appeals director Peter Coleman said yesterday as the memorial was taken down by stonemasons.

Mr Coleman said he had appealed directly to the Federal Government and the High Commission and both turned him down and now he has to turn to locals for help.

"We are a little disappointed (by the Australian government's response) but we quite understand that money is tight everywhere these days," he said.

"It doesn't help us and it's a shame because it is such an important memorial and is listed in the National Maritime Museum as one of the country's most important maritime memorials."

He said a local parishioner was travelling to Australia next month to seek help directly from charities and grant groups.

Mr Coleman said locals were doing it tough recovering from the recent floods so it was hard to ask them to spare a penny toward the expected $14,000 cost.

"Parishioners here are interested in this kind of element of the church, the problem is that we have obviously got, with the flood we have had, a lot of other issues at the moment," he said.

The memorial had prominence sitting below the tower which is a major tourist attraction in Lincolnshire.

Since the appeal was launched the Britain-Australia Society had given $1900 to St Botolph's.

A spokeswoman for the Australian High Commission said it was unable to provide funding but recognised "the contribution of the Lincolnshire community to the founding of modern Australia".

That recognition included fundraising by the High Commission for a statue of Flinders in central London to be erected later this year, she said.

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