Guardians of the Strait: Bass Strait’s Wartime Waters

On Anzac Day, we pause to honour the courage and sacrifice of Australians who served in times of war. While many think first of Gallipoli or the Western Front, the story of Australia’s wartime endurance is also written in its coastal waters. For communities like Port Albert, the war came not only through the news or enlistment calls—it came with the tides, in the form of submarine threats, shipwrecks, and tireless maritime service.

This Anzac Day, we remember the overlooked front line: the Bass Strait.

Bass Strait: A Treacherous Lifeline

Bass Strait, separating mainland Australia from Tasmania, has always been a dangerous passage. Its shallow depths, unpredictable weather, and strong currents have challenged mariners since the first European navigators passed through in the 1790s. But during the Second World War, it became far more than a challenging waterway—it became a battleground.

The strait formed part of Australia’s crucial coastal shipping route. With rail and road transport limited, coastal vessels carried everything from food and fuel to minerals like manganese, vital for munitions and steel. These civilian ships, known as “the merchant navy,” became lifelines for the war effort, even as they sailed without weapons or defences.

The Enemy Arrives: Submarines and Mines

In 1940, the German raider Pinguin secretly laid mines in Bass Strait. On 7 November, the British steamer SS Cambridge struck one and sank off Wilsons Promontory. Two days later, the American ship MV City of Rayville met the same fate. These were the first Allied and U.S. shipping losses in Australian waters—sudden, shocking reminders that the war had arrived.

Two years later, on 4 June 1942, the Japanese submarine I-27 torpedoed the SS Iron Crown. The freighter, carrying manganese ore, sank in less than a minute. Of her 43 crew, 38 were lost. The wreck was only located in 2019, nearly 80 kilometres off the Victorian coast.

These attacks changed the nature of Australian coastal shipping overnight. Ships began to sail in convoys, naval patrols increased, and vigilance became the watchword of the coast.

Port Albert: A Quiet but Crucial Role

Though no major naval base, Port Albert—founded in 1841 and once the gateway to Gippsland—remained a maritime asset. Its location gave it access to lighthouse routes, fishing grounds, and regional logistics. During the war:

  • Lighthouse Support: Port Albert provided supplies and mail runs to isolated Bass Strait lighthouses, like those on Deal Island and Wilsons Promontory. These lights were essential for safe navigation, especially under blackout conditions.

  • Maritime Rescue Equipment: A Breeches Buoy Rocket Lifesaving Apparatus, installed at the port in 1871, remained operational during the war. This ingenious device could fire a lifeline to stranded vessels, allowing shipwreck survivors to be hauled ashore. The unit is now a centrepiece of the Port Albert Maritime Museum.

  • Fishing and Food Supply: Local fishing fleets continued to operate under difficult conditions. Their catches supported food supply during a time of rationing and uncertainty.

  • Community Enlistment: Men from the Alberton Shire and the wider Gippsland region answered the call to serve. Others supported from home through war bonds, civil defence, and local production.

The Merchant Navy: Australia’s Forgotten Service

Merchant mariners received little of the glory afforded to soldiers or airmen, yet their work was just as vital—and just as dangerous. Bass Strait mariners often sailed unarmed and without convoy protection in the early years of the war. When disaster struck, they relied on communities like Port Albert for rescue, repairs, and radio communication.

These “civilian sailors” kept Australia afloat—literally.

Legacy and Remembrance

Today, the Port Albert Maritime Museum helps preserve the memory of these maritime contributions. From shipwreck relics to photographs and stories of wartime service, the museum is a vital link between past and present. It tells the story not just of conflict, but of resilience—of coastal towns that stood ready, and of seafarers who kept the nation moving.

As we gather this Anzac Day, let us remember that the war was not only fought in faraway lands. It was fought here, too—in our skies, on our farms, and in the waves of Bass Strait. And it was in places like Port Albert that Australia’s strength and spirit found a quiet but enduring expression.

TL;DR

During the Early Cretaceous, Gippsland’s rift valleys nurtured some of the world’s earliest flowering plants. Fossils from the Koonwarra site reveal a lush forest filled with ferns, conifers, ginkgoes, and primitive angiosperms — as well as a diverse insect community that pollinated and fed among them. These ancient interactions shaped modern ecosystems.

How Ancient Plants Shaped Gippsland’s Lost World

Before birds took to the skies and mammals emerged from the shadows, a silent revolution unfolded on the forest floors and riverbanks of what we now call Gippsland. Somewhere between the age of dinosaurs and the last days of Gondwana, the world’s first flowering plants, angiosperms, began to bloom.

This wasn’t just a pretty change in the landscape. It was a botanical upheaval that transformed ecosystems across the planet. In the shaded, swampy valleys of the ancient Strzelecki Group, these pioneering flowers opened their petals for the first time, changing what the dinosaurs ate, what insects pollinated, and how life on Earth evolved.

Gippsland holds part of that floral origin story, etched into layers of fossil-rich rock and echoed in the temperate rainforests still clinging to its ranges today.

From Ferns to Flowers: A Global Shift

For hundreds of millions of years, the world’s green cover was dominated by spore-bearing plants, ferns, horsetails, and conifers. These plants thrived in moisture and shade, reproducing without seeds or flowers. But during the Early Cretaceous, around 130–100 million years ago, angiosperms began to appear.

The earliest flowers were small, simple, and often overlooked, not showy garden blooms, but modest experiments in reproductive innovation. Unlike conifers, which used cones and wind-blown pollen, angiosperms used insects to spread pollen more efficiently. They also enclosed their seeds in fruit, giving future plant life a new way to travel, thrive, and diversify.

This gave them a distinct advantage in the rapidly changing climates of the Cretaceous.

The Koonwarra Fossil Bed: A Snapshot of Early Flora

While the most famous Victorian dinosaur fossils come from Dinosaur Cove and Inverloch, the Koonwarra Fossil Bed, southeast of Leongatha, offers a unique look at the ecosystem plants were building.

Koonwarra is a lagerstätte, a site of exceptional fossil preservation. Its fine-grained mudstones have revealed:

  • Fossilised leaves and flowers, including angiosperms
  • Ancient insects, like beetles and wasps, likely early pollinators
  • Delicate fish skeletons and evidence of aquatic life
  • Even feathers, suggesting nearby bird-like dinosaurs

Among these discoveries are early flowering plants that help scientists track when and where angiosperms first took root in Gondwana. Their tiny, symmetrical petals and enclosed seeds mark a clear break from the world of cycads and ginkgoes.

What Grew in Ancient Gippsland?

The forests of Early Cretaceous Gippsland would have looked alien to modern eyes yet strangely familiar in places. Dominated by spore-bearing plants and early conifers, these were cool-temperate rainforests, damp and dense, filled with low light and steady rainfall. They formed part of the broader Gondwanan forest belt, a vital green lung for the southern hemisphere during the age of dinosaurs.

Fossil evidence from the Strzelecki Group and neighbouring formations such as Koonwarra reveals a wide range of prehistoric flora, including:

  • DicksoniaTree ferns, especially species similar to Dicksonia and Cyathea, populated the understorey. Their fronds, preserved in fossil beds, are nearly identical to those found in modern temperate gullies today.
  • Coniferous trees such as Bellarinea richardsii, a deciduous conifer described from the Tyers River Subgroup, are known from well-preserved foliage fossils. Other conifers like Podocarpus and Araucaria likely dominated the upper canopy, forming vertical complexity across swampy valleys.
  • cretaceous landscapeGinkgo-like plants, such as Ginkgoites australis, added to the prehistoric diversity. These broad-leaf gymnosperms, with fan-shaped leaves, were already ancient by the time flowering plants appeared.
  • Cycads and possibly Leongathia, an early gnetophyte genus, grew near rivers and floodplains. Gnetophytes are seed-bearing but unrelated to true flowering plants, representing a once-diverse group that is now reduced to a few arid-adapted species.
  • Early angiosperms are recorded at Koonwarra in the form of small, symmetrical fossil flowers and broad-leafed impressions. Though often unnamed, their form and structure point to primitive shrubs or herbs, among the earliest of their kind on the continent.
  • Aquatic plants, including algae and primitive duckweed analogues, thrived in the freshwater lakes and wetlands, often fossilised alongside fish and insects.

These forests supported a multilayered habitat with abundant resources, canopy shade, leaf litter, decaying wood, and stable water sources, ideal for a broadening array of invertebrate life.

 

Insects and Pollination: Partners in Evolution

As flowering plants began their slow but transformative spread through Gippsland’s forests, the insect world responded. Fossil beds such as those at Koonwarra have preserved a remarkable array of Early Cretaceous insects, offering one of the best windows into Gondwana’s ancient invertebrate biodiversity.

Among the named species discovered:

  • DuncanoveliaTarwinia australis, a primitive flea and one of the earliest known members of its kind, was unearthed at Koonwarra. Its presence suggests that small mammals, potential hosts, may also have lived in the area.
  • Duncanovelia extensa, a fossil water beetle, and Chauliognathus koonwarra, the world’s oldest described soldier beetle, demonstrate that the Coleoptera were already diverse and functionally specialised.
  • Eodinotoperla duncanae, a fossilised stonefly nymph, hints at cold, oxygen-rich freshwater streams, where it likely spent most of its life before maturing.
  • Koonwarraphis rotundafrons, an Early Cretaceous aphid, represents the complex evolution of plant-sap-feeding insects, perhaps already exploiting flowering shrubs.
  • Koonaspides indistinctus, a freshwater syncarid crustacean, and Victalimulus mcqueeni, a rare freshwater horseshoe crab, round out the aquatic invertebrate community, showing a well-established food web in ancient Gippsland lakes.

These insect species point to the growing complexity of pollination and plant-insect relationships. The emergence of flowers introduced nectar and pollen into the ecosystem, attracting beetles, flies, wasps, and other pollinators. Though true bees would not appear until later, these early insects were already interacting with angiosperms in ways that shaped the course of terrestrial evolution.

Climate and the Forest Environment

Early Cretaceous Gippsland had a cool-temperate, wet climate, with frequent rainfall and limited sunlight in winter months. Snow was likely, and the forest canopy created a dim, closed-in world ideal for mosses, fungi, and ferns.

Despite the cold, plants thrived due to long summer daylight hours and rich volcanic soils. The landscape included:

  • River deltas and swamps
  • Shallow lakes and boggy floodplains
  • Low hills cloaked in forest

This environment gave flowering plants the space to spread and adapt, gradually outcompeting slower-reproducing ferns and cycads in many niches.

A Living Legacy: Tarra-Bulga and Beyond

Today, places like Tarra-Bulga National Park preserve remnants of these ancient forests. While most modern trees and shrubs are newcomers in evolutionary terms, species like:

  • Myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii)
  • Sassafras, wattles, and southern laurels
  • Tree ferns and mossy undergrowth

All bear genetic and ecological links to the Cretaceous plant world. Walking through these gullies is a stroll through evolutionary history, a forest shaped over millions of years, with roots deep in Gondwana.

Why Flowers Matter

Cretaceous GippslandThe rise of flowering plants wasn’t just about colour and beauty. It changed:

  • Ecosystems, by supporting more insects and animals
  • Soils, by creating more organic matter and faster cycles
  • Climate, by influencing water retention and carbon cycling
  • Evolution, by opening up new niches for animals and insects

In Gippsland, it laid the groundwork for everything that came after: the mammals, the birds, and ultimately, us.

The Bloom That Changed the World

The ancient forests of Gippsland didn’t just hide dinosaurs and giant amphibians, they cradled the first blossoms of a planetary revolution.

Flowering plants were quiet innovators, steadily overtaking the old fern-and-conifer world, and bringing with them complexity, colour, and new life.

Next time you walk through a gully in Tarra-Bulga or see a native flower blooming near the coast, imagine its ancestors, tiny, tenacious, and quietly rewriting the rules of life beneath the feet of dinosaurs.