She was a brave little ship, and neither she nor her 24 crew deserved the terrible fate they suffered off Portsea on November 20, 1940.
HMAS Goorangai was built by the NSW government at their Newcastle dockyard and launched in 1919, the year after the Great War ended. I don't how the government used her but in 1926 she was sold to Cam and Sons for use as a fishing trawler. She was 36 metres long and so was a good size for a trawler. Her top speed was just under 18 kilometres per hour.
In 1939, though, the Federal Government was looking for ships to press into government service, no matter the length or the speed. Cam and Sons lost Goorangai and seven other small ships to the RAN. She became HMAS Goorangai on September 9, 1939, as an auxiliary minesweeper. Between being acquired by the government on August 8 and her commissioning she had been rapidly refitted with minesweeping gear, a 12-pounder deck gun and racks for launching the depth-charges she carried.
Suddenly she had a crew of three officers and 21 sailors, and it is hard to imagine where they slept. Thirty six metres long does not make her very large. As a trawler she'd have been home to five or six fishermen at most.
The crew were all from the Navy Reserve as the RAN was hard-pressed to crew the vessels it had before the war, let alone the fleets of requisitioned ships.
This little ship was sent down to Port Phillip as part of Minesweeping Group 54.
While HMAS Goorangai was in Port Phillip her role suddenly became critical. The SS Cambridge was sunk off Wilson Promontory on November 7, 1940, and then the SS City of Rayville was sunk of Cape Otway by a mine, on November 8, 1940, the next day. It was clear the mines had been laid, but it was far less clear where to look for and destroy them, though there are choke points where the traffic is heaviest, and clearing Wilson Promontory is one of those obvious places.
HMAS Goorangai was soon trailing its minesweeping 'cutter' alongside HMAS Orara and HMAS Durraween. HMAS Orara was a requisitioned passenger liner with capacity for cargo. At 73 metres length overall, she was just over twice the size of HMAS Goorangai. She survived the war and went through several civilian owners before meeting her end in 1950, off the Yangtze River. Ironically she was sunk by a mine.
HMAS Durraween was built in Canada as a fishing boat, in 1918, and eventually came to Australia as apart of the fleet of the Red Funnel fishing company based in Sydney. HMAS Durraween, slightly longer than HMAS Goorangai, survived the war and eventually died at the hands of the shipbreakers.
Minesweeping Group 54 recovered and destroyed 43 mines in Bass Strait, probably saving several ships and many sailors. Other mines would have broken free, as they did, and some of those would have washed up ashore, sometimes exploding on contact.
HMAS Goorangai faced sudden death every day she was sweeping for mines, but it was not a mine that killed her.
On November 20, 1940 she was over at Queenscliff and about dark she steamed out across the bay to her night-time mooring at Portsea. She was showing a limited number of lights because of the wartime 'brownout' regulations. That should hardly matter as it was only a short run across to Portsea.
Meanwhile the passenger liner MV Duntroon had left Melbourne on a voyage to Adelaide and then Perth (some sources say she was carrying troops to Sydney). She was of 10,000 tons, and 139 metres long. Later she, too, was to be requisitioned but for now she was operated commercially, though some records indicate that she was already designated as His Majesty's Armed Transport (MAT) Duntroon. She, too, was travelling with limited lights showing.
At 2037 hrs, a little after 8.30pm the MV Duntroon struck HMAS Goorangai just forward of the funnel and cut her in half. She sank in less than a minute.
Under the existing wartime rules Duntroon was not allowed to stop and search for survivors but she did what she could. She lowered lifeboats, but in the darkness – she was not allowed to use her searchlights.
She also fired rockets and sounded three blasts of her whistle to alert people ashore. That is usually a signal that ship is about to go astern, but there obviously is no set signal for a collision. Then she turned and headed back for Melbourne for repairs.
The lifeboat from Queenscliff came out very quickly but could find no survivors. The crew did recover six bodies.
HMAS Goorangai's mast was still showing above the water level so she was easy to locate. She lay in only 15 metres of water. Unfortunately she was lying in an approach to the South Channel.
After divers had inspected her, partly in an unsuccessful effort to find more of the dead sailors, it was decided that the wreck would be blown up to clear the channel. It was to a sort of final indignity for the little ship.
In January 1941 divers set explosives aboard the wreck, and when they were detonated no part of the wreck was higher above the channel floor than two metres.
There was the inevitable inquiry but there was no-one to tell HMAS Goorangai's story, The inquiry blamed both ships for the collision but Duntroon's captain was later fully exonerated because it seemed that the little ship he sank was not carrying her lights in the right places. He claimed to have believed the two ships were on a parallel course because of the positioning of those lights, and by the time he realised their courses were crossing it was to late to avoid an impact.
In November of 1943 the HMAT Duntroon, with the same captain, also ran down a US destroyer, the USS Perkins. Perkins went to the bottom and four sailors died. She did do great service as a troop transport and in bringing home prisoners of war.
But Goorangai still lay in thousands of fragments on the floor of Port Phillip Bay.