Tragedy of Dianne: could six fishermen have been saved?
Six men vanish in the seas off Queensland, the latest in a string of similar disasters. Now the elephant in the room has surfaced.
They pretend she’s not there. They wash their fish holds and scrub their prawn boxes and tug their safety ropes — once, twice, three times — pretending F.V. Dianne is not being shiplifted from the waters of Bundaberg Port before their eyes, dripping with sea slime and wet rust and unthinkable loss.
“You ever been in true darkness?” asks Andy Redfearn, a veteran dragger, a trawlerman lifer wedded, until death do them part, to the long-deceitful seas off Central Queensland. Late February. High winds and heavy rains are flooding roads along the coast. Bundaberg locals have been standing under umbrellas on the port shoreline watching recovery teams balance Dianne on the port’s boat hoist. Redfearn loads his scallop trawler, roped to a weathered and splintery grey marina mooring. “I mean, the true dark,” he says.
The true dark. Not just the dark when you close your eyes and stare at the back of your eyelids. The true dark that the boys of Dianne would have faced when their sea cucumber diving boat capsized at about 7.30pm on October 16 last year, roughly three nautical miles off Round Hill Headland, off the sleepy and idyllic seaside Town of 1770, 130km north of this Bundaberg port where Dianne put to sea on what was supposed to be an eventual journey home to Cairns. It’s believed the vessel began sinking 30m to the sea floor around midnight, possibly more than five hours after overturning. The vessel’s EPIRB device — an emergency radio beacon that would have alerted rescuers and given the boat’s position — had not been activated, as often happens in cases of rapid capsizing when the EPIRB can’t be accessed.
There were seven men on board. Most of these “sluggers”, as specialist sea cucumber fishers are called, were known to the seasoned draggers of Bundaberg Port, friends of friends, mates of mates. The bodies of skipper Ben Leahy, 45, and crewman Adam Hoffman, 30, were later found inside the vessel by police divers. Crew members Zac Feeney, 28, Eli Tonks, 39, Adam Bidner, 33, and Chris Sammut, 34, were presumed to have died. Only 32-year-old crewman Ruben McDornan survived, somehow escaping the capsized vessel and clinging to the upturned hull for hours before succumbing to the pull of the sea and floating aimlessly in nothing but shorts before a passing catamaran chanced upon him — an encounter the yacht’s seasoned skipper, Mal Priday, considers a “one-in-10 million” event. “I’m so happy to see you guys,” McDornan gasped as he climbed aboard.
“Go into your room at night, turn the light off and shut your eyes,” says Andy Redfearn, by the side of his trawler. “Then spin around a few times with your eyes still closed. That’s how dark it feels down there. The boat rolls over and what was up there is down there.” He points north-east and south-west. “You’ve been flung out of your bed and the boat is still moving and lurching and you’re upside down but you’re not even sure which way’s up. Quite possibly there is water roaring in. Blankets are in the water, shit just goes everywhere. The exit stairs that were over there are now up there. You’re lucky if you don’t drown in minutes.”
He shakes his head. “Dianne,” he says. He pauses. “Cassandra.”
There’s a memorial ship’s bell on the port shore in tribute to the lost men of Cassandra. Two cans of XXXX Gold and a potted cactus rest this morning above the words: “F.V. Cassandra. Tragically lost at sea. 4th April 2016.” The prawn trawler capsized off the east coast of Fraser Island; air and sea searches failed to find its missing crewmen, David Chivers, 36, and Matt Roberts, 60.
“Munnsy,” says Redfearn. He’s going through a list in his mind. His friend, Brett Munn, 53, was skippering the 17m prawn trawler Seabring when it capsized in open waters off Indian Head, Fraser Island, in November 2016. Two deckhands escaped the vessel and were rescued; Munn was last seen in the wheelhouse before it overturned.
“Night Raider,” Redfearn continues. In the same month that Seabring was lost, the fishing vessel and its three-person crew disappeared off the Fraser Coast. One member of the crew, Doug Hunt, was a 38-year-old contract deckhand doing the leg from Hervey Bay to the Sunshine Coast to earn some bonus money to buy Christmas presents for his six children.
“I had to be strong for the kids,” Hunt’s partner, Tracey Lee, says on the phone on a brief break from her job as a real estate agent. “I didn’t have a choice. Just the financial burden alone was horrific. I just had to keep going.
“I’ve had to put all the kids in counselling. They feel like their dad is a bit of a Bear Grylls character and because there’s no closure, well, mainly the youngest one, he feels like Dad could be on an island somewhere. Because there’s no answers. It’s hard. I try and gently say, ‘Well, that’s highly unlikely’, but I can’t confirm that for sure.”
A long pause down the phone line. No answers.
The hulking vessel Dianne is transferred to a secure dry dock facility across a narrow road tracing the Bundaberg Port. A team of Queensland Fire Service officers inspects its structural integrity before a Disaster Victim Identification team in white biohazard suits moves deeper into the boat’s forecastle, the sleeping quarters. “There is a possibility the men may be on board,” says Bundaberg Police Inspector Pat Swindells. “Now it is very important that we get as much information as we can. It will give the families some closure and they can continue on with the grieving process.”
“Bit macabre, eh,” says fisherman Scott Donnelly, 46, reading a spy book and having a smoke on the deck of the moored trawler Sea King. He’s on a break from prepping for a four-month haul through Princess Charlotte Bay at the base of the Cape York Peninsula. “I’m here getting the boat ready to go out and I’m watching that f..kin’ thing being dragged out.”
He doesn’t want to see Dianne. For the commercial fishers of the Bundaberg coast, to see Dianne is to be reminded of the fact they work in the most dangerous job in the country, a job in which at least 19 people have died in the past five years; where skippers and deckhands endure levels of mental stress twice that of our nation’s farmers, sometimes for pay cheques as little as $40,000 a year. To acknowledge Dianne is to acknowledge Cassandra and Night Raider and Seabring. To see Dianne is to see a commercial fishing industry upturned and bobbing in the true dark of what Deakin University anthropologist Tanya King calls an “industry-wide health crisis”. Issues around commercial fishing safety, marine emergency response systems, government regulation and mental health meet brutal feed-the-family realities in a perfect squall that Scott Donnelly and Andy Redfearn and all of Australia’s commercial fishers motor into daily.
“There’s a lot of reasons people die on boats,” Donnelly says. He’s heard all the speculative sailor’s whispers that have swirled around this port about why Dianne went down. The 30-to-40-knot winds that night drove a monster wave that tipped her over. Engine trouble. Excess weight on top of the boat. The engine hatch was open, rough weather water filled the inside of the boat, too much ballast on one side. A toppled fridge blocked the exit in the forecastle. Just seaside whispers. Only the formal inquest into the tragedy, potentially months from completion, will come close to providing the answers most here hope will end the speculation.
Donnelly shrugs, drags on his cigarette. “You’re always a statistic on a trawler,” he says. “And you go out there knowing you’re running pretty thin odds.” Unlike many of those across the road gathered around that rusted vessel aloft in the dry dock, Donnelly knows exactly what caused Dianne to go down. “It’s the job,” he says.
Joel Feeney is diving again. He recently recovered from stage three testicular cancer and returned to the job he loves, diving for aquarium coral in the Great Barrier Reef. He says it was “tricky” going back into the water after Dianne went down, taking his beloved brother, Zac, with it. His sister, Jackie Perry, is still in Bundaberg Port waiting for investigators to bring news of their findings to a handful of attending relatives. Feeney has stayed home in Cairns. He knows Zac’s not in that boat. “I’m a fisherman,” he says. “I know the boat. I know those boys, too. If it was up to them they would have wanted the boat left down there, let people go fishing and diving around it.”
The Feeney family lived for and by the sea. The boys learnt to dive with their dad, a veteran pearl diver. Their sister worked on yachts all her life before becoming a NSW-based mum to three children under three. She always felt the ocean was where Zac belonged; his home.
“Now this feels to my family like a betrayal from the ocean, you know,” she says. “Multiple deaths. These young men. No bodies back. We love the ocean but it took this person we love. The most generous, humble, kind man.”
Now she wants him back. Her brother Joel understands this. “It’s the healing,” he says.
“People keep calling Dianne a trawler,” he adds. “It wasn’t a trawler. It was a dive boat. These boys loved diving. They all had amazing breath-hold times. These boys were fit. They looked like a bunch of male models. Outside of maybe some people on the Olympic swim team, no one else could have made it out. If they couldn’t make it out, no one could have.” He thinks for a moment. “The weather changed quite badly, quite quickly,” he says. “Big seas. Whatever’s happened on that boat, it wasn’t a case of them being unprofessional seamen. There’s still an inquest going on, I know, but I just feel that it’s a case of wrong place, wrong time, and some huge wave got through the reef and hit them at the wrong angle when the boat was maybe already leaning slightly to one side with a bit of a following sea.” He pauses. “And it’s just gone over.”
Joel Feeney can move on from the worst kind of sea luck. But he can’t move on from the marine emergency response systems in place when that sea luck turned on Dianne. “I remember the point, quite clearly, where things changed for me,” he says. “I was at sea when I was told about the Dianne. I came back and Zac’s girlfriend, Jess, who lives in Cairns like me, we went down to the police station together with a few other family members — all the boys are from Cairns — and we all sat down with the police officer. They said where they were looking for the boat and we wanted them to get divers in the water and they were like, ‘No, we feel that if they were on the boat they would have already drowned’. And that’s when the guy said, ‘Based on what we know through the VMS …’ And as soon as he said ‘VMS’ that’s when I piped up and I said, ‘So you knew that the boat stopped sending a signal at seven o’clock?’ and the guy said, ‘Yeah, we did’.”
VMS. Vessel Monitoring System. Commercial fishing boats are required to carry the transmitters so that fisheries and environmental regulators can track a vessel’s activities; they were introduced by the Australian Fisheries Management Authority in the mid-90s. “We had the VMSs forced upon us,” explains Andy Redfearn in the Bundaberg Port. “Part of making us come along nicely was the fact they sold them as a safety device. It’s bullshit. All that happens is they know where we are to come and check us again and again and again. Those boats, when they tipped over, the VMS signal was lost and no one did anything.”
Joel Feeney knew well the safety deficiencies of VMS. A close friend, Kane Fairley, had intimately described his family’s pain when his brother Chad, 30, was lost at sea when the prawn trawler he was crewing on, Returner, sank off the Pilbara coast in 2015. Family members of lost crewmen later sued Western Australia’s Department of Fisheries, citing, among multiple grievances, unacceptable emergency response delays.
“The family can’t say too much because there’s an ongoing court case but, basically, the search for Returner wasn’t started until days after the VMS had stopped,” Feeney says. “Same with the Dianne. It’s very important to know that in the case of Dianne, it was afloat [but capsized, and not transmitting a VMS signal] for possibly five and a half hours. We know this through Ruben. Those boys were possibly alive for five and a half hours before it sunk. That’s a long window for things to happen.”
Capsized vessels generally lose power instantly. Antennas and relay equipment “that were once 10 or 15 metres in the air are now 10 or 15 metres underwater”, Feeney explains. “VMS is very simple,” he adds. “It sends a ping to a satellite which gets relayed to a government agency and tells it where the boat is once an hour. All of a sudden the boat flips, loses power. Come time for that hourly ping, the signal doesn’t get through.” It’s in this window of time that too manylives are lost.
The lack of a VMS signal is, in itself, a sign of trouble. There’s just one problem, though. “The government does not use the VMS for safety,” Feeney says. “If they choose to use the VMS for safety — which they might after enough public opinion — if something goes wrong and they save someone, well, they’ve saved someone, but if something goes wrong and they don’t save someone, and they had the technology there, then, well, maybe they’re liable. As silly as it sounds, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by using VMS for safety. The only time an alert will ever go to fisheries, and AMSA [the Australian Maritime Safety Authority] told us the same thing, where they will be straight on the ball is if that boat enters an illegal fishing zone.
“In the case of Dianne, they only knew the boat was down because some random yacht found Ruben floating in the ocean 12 hours after the boat flipped. The only time VMS has ever been used is when they’ve known, afterwards, that something has gone wrong and they’ve gone back and used it [to determine the broadcast location of the last ping]. They found the Returner and the Dianne using the VMS, but only after they realised something was wrong. That’s what we want changed.”
“I have two VMSs on my boat,” says Andy Redfearn. “I want it so that if both my VMSs go off, I get a phone call [when paid crew are using his boat]. But that doesn’t happen. Both my VMSs go off, something horrible has gone wrong.”
One solution, says Feeney, would be to put technology in the hands of the crew’s family members on land: a simple program that sends a series of texts to a loved one saying the vessel’s VMS has stopped transmitting. “That technology exists,” he says. “If it goes to a fisherman’s wife, bang, she’s on the job. If it goes to someone emotionally invested in the boat or people, naturally, they’re going to look into it a lot more thoroughly.”
When his brother Zac was confirmed lost at sea, Feeney started walking through shipyards talking to trawler workers about safety. “I found there was a huge breakdown in communication between fishermen and the Australian Maritime Safety Authority,” he says. He and his sister Jackie immediately set about addressing this breakdown. They started with the numbers. They wrote to then federal transport minister Darren Chester requesting maritime capsizing statistics for the past five years. The dearth of specific data on commercial fishing in Australia, says Deakin University’s Tanya King — who recently conducted a survey of roughly 1000 commercial fishers on their mental and physical welfare — reflects the near-invisibility of these workers in the public consciousness.
Marine Safety Queensland says there have been 111 incidents of commercial fishing vessels capsizing, flooding or swamping in the past five years in Queensland alone. Safe Work Australia statistics place commercial fishing with agriculture and forestry as the most dangerous industries in the country. The sectors’ combined fatality rate is 14 deaths per 100,000 workers, with 418 workplace fatalities recorded between 2007 and 2016 and more than 3510 workers’ compensation claims lodged in 2015-16.
“But the right stats don’t get registered because the fishers are generally self-employed,” notes King, who has worked in and studied commercial fishing for two decades. “We don’t get the same kind of work cover data that we get from other industries — the fishers kind of slip under the radar, so they get lumped in with agriculture and forestry. We’re working on trying to get data that’s fisheries-specific.”
Broad data sets, she says, speak nothing of “the elephant in the room of commercial fishing”. Suicide. Depression. Her studies and surveys, using Kessler 10 assessments (a 10-point questionnaire used by organisations such as the Black Dog Institute as a measure of psychological distress) to compare the mental health of commercial fishers against the general population, have revealed a rising maelstrom of pressures on our trawler men and women. Traditional pressures — boats capsizing, falling overboard, being struck by a boom, dealing with outdated and poor safety systems, and relentless 4pm to 10am shifts — are now compounded by what King calls “modern uncertainties”: threats to livelihood from shrinking fishing zones, reduced trawl hours, rising licensing costs, Australian consumers not buying locally caught fish.
“Political demands, NGO demands are increasingly having a big impact on stress in the fishing industry,” says King. “It’s the perpetual insecurity of their livelihoods. It’s the constant threat of being put out of work that is causing the crisis in mental health that we’re seeing in the industry around Australia.
“And they’re not wusses, you know, these are tough blokes. Everybody who works in this industry knows about the elephant. There is, justifiably, a huge amount of media devoted to the farming sector on these issues, but there is zero compassion for those in the fishing industry who are primary producers, who are food providers, and their levels of psychological stress are, statistically, twice as high as that of farmers.”
Boats go out when the sky is telling them they shouldn’t. The prawns are boiling and the boys stay out longer than they should because one more hour means one less debt. “Blokes out-fishing the capabilities of their boats,” says Andy Redfearn. “Blokes leaving safe ports in shitty conditions. We’ve all done it. If you have an opening, you go.”
They go in old, sometimes rusted, boats because nobody can afford to build and license a new one these days and because some skippers are just plain greedy and don’t want to update their vessels. They go with old safety equipment. They go.
“We’re the third largest fishing zone in the world,” Feeney says. “We love our fish. We pride ourselves on being a fishing nation. But I feel our marine safety technology is basically still using an EPIRB. And, even though the EPIRB’s been working kind of all right, that technology has been around for 30 years. You name one other industry in the world where new technologies aren’t implemented regularly. Just compare marine safety to something like the mining industry.”
Six boats along the Bundaberg Port from Andy Redfearn’s scallop trawler is a freelance deckhand who wants to stay anonymous because he wants to tell the truth about trawler safety. There are roughly 9000 working deck and fishing hands like this man across Australia. He says he’s been crewing for trawlers along the east coast since 1989, with a 15-year stint in the mines in the middle of that time. He’s seen brawls at sea, accidental drownings, physical abuse, mental abuse, unspeakable bullying, skippers with faultless safety records and skippers who should be 12 times dead.
“The courses they drummed into us on the mines,” he says, shaking his head. “If you scratched your nose and didn’t watch where you were going, bang, run over. You’re dead. When they die in the mines they die big time and it’s not pretty.” He points to the Pacific. “But it’s more dangerous out there,” he says. “It’s the most dangerous job in the world. Everything is a risk when you go to sea.”
But the greatest danger isn’t found in the ocean, he says. It’s found on land before the vessel even leaves port. The stubborn old skipper refusing to move with the times. The bigger the legend, the greater the danger. “It’s the stubbornness of old fishermen against people who have been around a bit and have come back into the industry and f..kin’ realise that it’s not a safe environment when you don’t have safe people you’re working with.”
Stuart Richey well knows such “old-time skippers”. He is an old-time skipper himself. He has spent more than half a century of his life fishing for squid, scallops and salmon in Bass Strait. Now the recently appointed chairman of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, he agrees commercial fishing is the most dangerous job in Australia. “But, I’m sorry, it doesn’t have to be,” he says. “These old-time skippers still don’t realise that they have an obligation under workplace health and safety laws to look after their crew and provide a safe workplace. To them, it’s just a fishing boat. ‘We’ve gone out. We’ve always done it this way. We’ve never worn life jackets on deck, why should we wear them now?’ Well, the world’s changed.”
The sinking of Dianne rippled through the commercial fishing industry. It will become, many believe, a watershed moment. It wasn’t lost on anyone that the tragedy occurred at a time of great reform within an industry that, says Richey, has long stagnated in a “nightmare” of state-specific safety and registration systems. Now it’s to be nationalised. “By July 1, AMSA takes over everything. We’ve inherited 27,000 boats which used to be with the states. We’re getting one consistent national standard, which is huge.”
Richey has arranged a sit-down with Joel Feeney to hash out VMS technology and ways to improve maritime emergency responses. “I can see where Joel’s coming from but at the moment VMS is purely a fisheries management tool,” he says. “It is set to send off an alert if a fishing boat goes into a closed area or into a protected area. Unfortunately, it’s not monitored currently 24 hours a day so that if the VMS stops transmitting the fisheries might not even know for 24 hours or more.”
But there’s a flip side to the VMS debate. Sometimes skippers don’t want their movements to be monitored, and will intentionally turn off the VMS. “There is still a little cone of secrecy around their secret fishing spots,” Richey says. “They don’t want people to know where they’re fishing.”
Richey does not discount one day using VMS as an emergency response tool. Right now, his focus is on fishers compulsorily carrying more modern “float-free, auto-activating” EPIRBs. “In the past, the EPIRB has normally been in the boat’s wheelhouse,” he says. “A vessel sinks very quickly and you have no time to activate the EPIRB. At least if it’s float-free, there’s a better chance of it making it to the surface.” But the take-up of this technology will be a matter of cost-versus-safety. “People aren’t making a lot of money. To me, cost doesn’t come into it, but for some it does. We start mandating more stuff but for them they’re thinking about whether they have food on the table or not.”
Jackie Perry is on her computer at home in theNSW Riverina. No bodies were recovered from Dianne during her trip north to Bundaberg Port. “But I had to be there,” she says. “It was good for me. I loved him so much.”
She pauses, thinking of her brother Zac. “I don’t understand why he got taken. But that’s why we have to do what we’re doing. If more people die out there, then we’re going to feel responsible.”
Between fixing meals for her three kids, she’s preparing a detailed submission that she and her brother Joel will hand to Stuart Richey and AMSA. It’s the product of six months’ research; letters to ministers, endless data crunching and badgering government agencies and coroners’ offices to cough up statistics regarding maritime emergency responses across Australia.
Part of her submission is a 2006 coroner’s report from then Queensland coroner Michael Barnes into the suspected death of trawlerman Rodney Baker whose vessel, Gulf Stream, sank off Moreton Island in 2004. “Commercial fishing boats are required by law to use electronic locating technology so that authorities can keep them under surveillance to ensure they are not fishing in closed waters,” Barnes stated in that report. “It is unacceptable that the same technology is not mandated to be used to guard the safety of the crew.” The coroner wrote that 12 years ago.
Perry goes through a list in her mind. She taps her keyboard, adds another passage to her report. “In Queensland alone there have been at least four trawlers lost in the last two years,” she writes. “The Cassandra. The Night Raider. The Seabring. And the Dianne. Twelve lives. Twelve men who had families who loved them dearly. Sons, brothers, husbands and fathers. Twelve men who should still be with us today. Something needs to change.”
She thinks for a moment, adds three more words. “Isn’t it obvious?”
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