By Pauline Isabel Dowling
Pauline Isabel Dowling found out when she began her unexpected trailing career, which started when she decided to take a ship to New Zealand rather than face another 30-hour ordeal on a long haul flight. That ship was the ACT 7, a Blue Star Line container ship, travelling from Tilbury to Auckland. The journey should have taken four weeks, but the ship lost its steering gear in Botany Bay and was tied up in Darling Harbour in Sydney for almost three months, and for much of that time she was the only female on board.
It’s genetics. It’s fate.
Whatever it is, she now trails, going to work with her mariner husband like a breathing, talking, additional piece of luggage, challenged daily to be dignified, sane and fulfilled. It’s a strange life, not without its merits and certainly not without interest.
Going Bananas: My Trailing Career (Volume 1) describes her first, and last journey on a banana boat, the MV Avelona Star.
Pauline herself says about the book:
'Going to work with my husband was a weird idea, but, if I wanted to see Captain Stuart McCormick Ross for more than four months a year, it had to be done. Fortunately I loved being at sea and him. I was on many ships, but this is the story of a banana boat, the MV Avelona Star. Many people have written about banana boats, but few partners have spoken up. Fewer still have told the political story of not only bananas, but the dramatic and shocking decline of the British merchant navy. Sounds dull but it certainly wasn’t.'
