In January 1908 the company's freighter Koonya earned a footnote in Antarctic history by towing Shackleton's Nimrod from Lyttelton and became the first steel-hulled ship to cross the Antarctic Circle. In the early days of radio, Union Company ships tested frequencies, passed on distress messages and even kept the infant West Coast radio stations supplied with new records fresh from Australia. Union liners took our troops away to both world wars and even to Korea, where the old Wahine sank en route. The Union Company was at the thick of the three biggest waterfront disputes in our history, 1890, 19. With fingers in so many pies, the company and its ships frequently played bit parts in other people's dramas. In its time, Union ran a hotel in Fiji, owned offices and wharves in Australia, a printing works and coal business in New Zealand and a chain of branch offices that stretched throughout the South Pacific. Many more worked ashore, in the company's grimy, sweaty marine repair workshops down at Port Chalmers, at the Patent Slip and the laundry in Wellington or in the scores of booking offices and shipping agency offices. Many more, the officers, seafarers or the firemen and the trimmers that had to be plucked from wharf side pubs just ahead of sailing time, did not.
Some masters, Arthur Davey, Coll McDonald or G.B.
Thousands of New Zealanders earned their livelihood with the company. For about half of its existence the Union Company was the largest private employer in the country. Many of us had a far more immediate connection with the company. Most manufacturers and retailers sent and received their goods and raw material aboard its ships or those of its subsidiaries and associates. We crossed the Tasman and the Pacific to North America in its ships and we often booked passage 'Home' to Britain in its offices. Students came and went between the islands, rubbing shoulders with commercial travellers, business folk and holidaymakers. Sports teams and school parties saved up and took express train/steamer trips from southern towns for visits to the capital. Until commercial aviation became affordable, everyone had to travel with the Red Funnel Line or its Anchor Line subsidiary in order to cross Cook Strait. It is no exaggeration to say that the company touched the lives of nearly every New Zealander. There were many Union Companies, for it meant different things to so many people.
Union sold its last large ships, leaving just a seagoing tug and barge to briefly carry its flag across the threshold of the millennium. In 1999, however, that all came to an end. At Auckland, the company's Pacific Island freighters brought a touch of the exotic with their cargoes of tropical fruit and sugar. They said that the capital's residents set their watches by the ferries that ran like clockwork between Wellington and Lyttelton. In earlier decades their Bluff and Dunedin counterparts would have followed the movements of the Union liners on the old 19th century 'horseshoe run'. Until the 'fifties' Aucklanders or Wellingtonians would have been on the look out for the trans-Tasman stalwarts Maunganui or Monowai, bringing mail, foreign papers, passengers and gossip. On the other side of the island you would have wandered along the wharf at Oamaru to see the Waipiata, the Kanna or the Katui discharging factory goods from Auckland and Wellington and loading flour and lime for the return trip. Until the 1960s, you might have seen up to half a dozen colliers at a time lining the quays at Greymouth and Westport, their no-nonsense funnels and derricks throwing up a great red and buff-coloured forest of steel. In its 125 very eventful years the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand sent its ships to just about every port in the country and to many overseas. Description The Southern Octopus by Gavin McLeanĪs 2000 drew to a close one of the world's historic shipping companies was in the final stages of itself becoming history.