Rock Davis

The Davis family settled on the eastern side of Brisbane Water, and William became the first schoolmaster at the then small settlement of Kincumber.

[3] After moderate success, mining gold at Beechworth, Rock joined his brothers, Benjamin, Thomas, and Edward, as apprentice shipwrights, in the yard of Jonathan Piper (1810–1879), at what is now Yattalunga.

[5] The area had plentiful sheltered tidal foreshore, not far from the open sea at Broken Bay, and nearby sources of hardwood timber and stands of sub-tropical rainforest.

[8] Davis moved his operations to thirteen acres of foreshore land, on the western side of Brisbane Water, in 1862.

Into the early, 1880s, the area around Davis's shipyard and house was the only significant place of settlement in the southern part of the western shore of Brisbane Water.

To allow work to proceed in all weather, in 1864, Davis erected a large shelter, known as 'the Big Shed', which was a distinctive landmark in the area, until its demolition in 1923.

On the northern end of the shipyard was Davis's large house, constructed of brick and with a slate-tiled roof, very different to the other rustic dwellings in the area.

[15][16] Lying to the south of the shipyard was Davis's extensive vegetable and fruit garden, which was tended by a man of Japanese ethnicity, Harry Kowarta.

However, it soon became the largest of the yards on Brisbane Water, with Davis employing around 100 men in total, and his businesses were a mainstay of the local economy.

Ketches built at the yard included Champion (1880),[20] Greyhound (1885, later converted to a steamer),[21] Lokohu (1893),[22] Ben Bolt (1895),[23] Zeoma (1896),[24] Arab (1898),[25] and Wave (1902).

[30] Fore-and-aft rig schooners built at the yard included, Eva (1857),[31] the three-masted Neptune (1875),[32][33] Susie (1878),[34] Tivo (1894),[35] Nukamanu (1897),[36] Joseph Sims (1898),[37] Three Friends (1903),[19] and Goodwill (1906).

[56] The tough little wooden steamships that the yard made proved well suited to the 'Stone Fleet', which brought crushed stone from the southern Illawarra to Sydney.

[67][68][69][70] The small coastal steamer Belbowrie, had several lucky escapes,[71][72][73] before she went onto the rocks on the southern side of Maroubra Bay in January 1931.

It has a narrow inlet, at the location known as Half Tide Rocks, which has swift tidal currents and mobile sand shoals, and is exposed to south-east winds.

That entrance is flanked, to its south-west, by a long and wide sand shoal, upon which waves often break, that extends from Ocean Beach nearly to Little Box Head.

From 1879, Davis operated a shipping service across the relatively sheltered waters of Broken Bay, to carry passengers, mail, and produce to and from Gosford and Blackwall to the shore of Pittwater, from where it connected with an overland route to Manly, and thence Sydney.

Davis employed men cutting hardwood timber, around Brisbane Water and the various estuarine waterways that join it.

The main species of interest were Blue Gum, Turpentine, Blackbutt (ideal for ship frames), Red Mahogany (also a useful shipbuilding timber), and Ironbark.

The shipyard lay just above the narrowest part of Brisbane Water, the Rip, which due to its swift tidal currents was difficult to navigate.

However, three passengers, a mother, her infant child, and her daughter, were in the cabin when the ketch capsized, and became trapped inside the upturned hull.

Mrs Davis outlived all her children and was the oldest Australian-born resident of the Brisbane Water district, at the time of her death.

His coffin, draped in the Union Jack, was brought over the Brisbane Water, towed on a specially constructed raft, to St Paul's Anglican Church Cemetery, at Kincumber.

Due to the number of mourners and the quantity of flowers, the departure of his last ride across Brisbane Waters had to be delayed, while more watercraft were obtained, and his coffin did not reach the church until nearly sunset.

[3][104] One of his former employees, in 1923, gave this description of Rock Davis, "By many he was considered a hard man, but he was invariably fair and just in all his dealings, and although he did well for his own, his was the enterprise which kept many families around the old ship-yard, and other parts of the Brisbane Water district.

In my time he employed a great number of men, not only in the ship-yard, but cutting timber in the bush, on his ships, and in a variety of other ways".

The types of wooden vessels the Rock Davis yard had built, trading schooners, small steamships, and ferries, were being superseded by steel-hulled vessels—usually imported but otherwise built locally in more sophisticated shipyards—and the demand for new Sydney Harbour ferries was falling, in anticipation of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

[109][110] The land that includes the site of the never-dedicated cemetery, where Rock Davis's workers buried the victims of the wrecking of ss Maitland, is now covered by residential dwellings, at 42-50 Bogan St, Booker Bay, leaving only two Norfolk Island Pines from the old burial ground.

The last was the double-ended single-screw ferry, Lady Chelmsford, which plied the waters of Sydney Harbour, for over sixty years until 1971, first as a steamer and later as a diesel-powered vessel.