WHAT'S NEW

The slipway was installed in the 1890s by Francis Henry (Frank) Schwonberg, using a newly acquired hard hat diving suit to install the rails below water level. Frank’s father, Joachim Nicolaus Schwonberg, migrated to Australia in 1846 from Hamburg, Germany, at the age of 32, as a proficient ship builder and naval architect.

He went first to Adelaide where he built a yacht called Maid of the Mill and completed the construction of the Government cutter the Yatala, acknowledged as a very good and fast vessel. Joachim moved to Sydney and Brisbane Waters where he married a widow, Eliza Cantle, who had come to Australia from Sussex, England, in 1848 with her husband and two daughters. Frank Schwonberg was born at Brisbane Waters in 1853.

The family moved to Grafton in 1859 and Joachim was employed as foreman at the timber mill and factory owner by Kirchner and Sharpe. The partnership between Kirchner and Sharpe dissolved, and Joachim and family moved to Maclean in 1865 or 1866 and established a shipyard on the current site of the slipway and SES offices.

From the 1890s the slipway was used for the maintenance of many vessels, and the adjacent Lot now occupied by the SES would have been used for the construction of new vessels. The photograph shows the SS Woolwich on the Schwonberg Slipway for renovations, probably in 1914 when a wheelhouse was added on the roof of the top deck (shown here before the addition of the wheelhouse).

Joachim and Frank built many vessels, including cane punts, river droghers (workboats) such as the Fairtrader, and the well-known passenger ferry the Ibis, which operated on the Clarence for over fifty years, initially by Captain Frank Schwonberg, and ended its days at Copmanhurst. Another vessel, the Gannet, was sold to the CSR as a cane tug, and an auxiliary yawl called the Gulnare, built by Frank Schwonberg, greatly impressed Mr C.C. Bell, a pearl fisherman from Darwin, and he purchased the Gulnare in 1933 for his Darwin operation.

As well as boat building, Frank Schwonberg and later his youngest son Bruce, used the hard hat diving suit for underwater salvage and inspection work in the Clarence. Both men raised a number of vessels, most notably Frank raised the North Coast Steam Navigation Company’s S.S. Kallatina in Grafton, in front of a large crowd of spectators. Frank and Bruce’s diving equipment is now on display in the Marine Discovery Centre at Terrigal, NSW (see photograph).

On the closure of Schwonberg Shipyard operations in 1937, Bruce moved first to Cootamundra, but that would have been too far from the ocean for him, and he moved to Sydney and worked as a professional diver.

Diving bell used to install rails under the water and general underwater repairs.