On This Day: Albany’s great wartime departure

The ships gathered in a sheltered Western Australian harbour, carrying thousands of Australians and New Zealanders towards war. Many aboard expected to reach England. Their journey would take a different course.

As the convoy sailed away, Private Archibald Barwick watched the Australian coastline disappear. By morning, he recorded, there was only open sea around them.

On November 1, 1914, the first convoy carrying Australian and New Zealand troops departed Albany’s King George Sound, 112 years ago today.

There were 26 Australian transports and 10 from New Zealand, mostly converted merchant ships. Nurses travelled alongside the soldiers, while horses and equipment filled the ships’ holds. Warships escorted them against the threat of German raiders in the Indian Ocean.

The troops believed they were heading to England before crossing to France. Instead, orders redirected them to Egypt, where they trained near Cairo.

Many would later serve at Gallipoli. The voyage that began in Albany became part of a much larger story of service and loss.

Barwick survived the war and returned home in 1919. His account preserves a simple detail from that departure: the long hours spent watching Australia fade from view.

A heavenly romance turns 80

On November 1, 1946, A Matter of Life and Death premiered at London’s Empire cinema as the first Royal Film Performance.

David Niven played an airman who survives an apparently fatal fall and falls in love with Kim Hunter’s radio operator. Made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the film placed earthly life in Technicolor and the afterlife in monochrome, linked by an enormous staircase.

A different kind of Shakespeare

On November 1, 1996, Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet opened in American cinemas.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes played the young lovers in contemporary Verona Beach. The film retained William Shakespeare’s language while replacing traditional period settings with a modern urban world. Thirty years later, that combination remains a distinctive approach to a story many readers first encountered at school.

Born on this day

Toni Collette turns 54, remembered for Muriel’s Wedding and The Sixth Sense.

Robert Foxworth, familiar to Falcon Crest viewers, turns 85.

Country singer Lyle Lovett, whose songs include Cowboy Man, turns 69.

Do you remember?

Did anyone in your family leave Australia by troopship, and what stories did they pass down?