The fascinating history of a WWI ship that has rested on a beach for 86 years

It started life as a cruise-liner. Then it went to war as a floating hospital. Then it became a bombing target. Now it is a tourist attraction, slowly rusting away. STEVEN WALTON reports on the story of one of New Zealand’s most remarkable wartime ships.

The four-wheel-drive bus trundles along the endless Australian beach. Amid the sea haze, there is little evidence of civilisation. There is only shrubbery, sand and the ocean. The landscape is undisturbed, except for a small blot on the horizon.

Inside the bus are seven Kiwi schoolchildren and seven adults. They are a mixture of excitement and nerves. For months they have worked, planned and fundraised for this moment. They are almost at their destination.

The blot on the horizon gets bigger and bigger. Slowly, it takes shape. The bus pulls up alongside it. The passengers are greeted by the rusty, decaying skeleton of a once-grand cruise-liner, sunk deep into the sand. The wreck looks like it belongs to another time, another place. It feels like it shouldn’t be there.

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This is one of New Zealand’s most remarkable wartime ships, the SS Maheno. Its final resting spot is the sparsely-populated Fraser Island, off the Queensland coast. The group of schoolchildren and adults is from the South Island town of Maheno. They are here to visit their namesake.

“It was kind of cool,” Maheno School principal Ryan Fraser says. The seven kids, aged in their early teens, have spent months learning about the ship. “They were just taking it all in… It was bringing history to life.”

The SS Maheno has rested on Fraser Island, mostly undisturbed, for 86 years. In 1935, it was being towed from Sydney to a ship-breakers in Japan when a cyclone snapped the tow-rope, and it drifted to shore. It was too hard to move off the beach, so it was left there.

But rather than be forgotten, the wreck has become a source of fascination. It is the largest World War I artefact in Australia, and a symbol of the Anzac spirit. A dawn service is held at the wreck site every Anzac Day.

The Maheno has decayed and corroded over the years, but remains a popular attraction for the 400,000 yearly visitors to Fraser Island.

The rusting remains carry personal significance for many Kiwis. One woman living in Canterbury has spent years researching the ship and says she has a spiritual connection with it.

To her, the Maheno is a link to a man she never knew.

Luxury liner to hospital ship

The Maheno is best-known for its role in WWI.

Originally built as a fast, luxury trans-Tasman passenger liner, it was converted into a hospital ship and sent to Gallipoli in 1915. In a matter of weeks, the ship was repainted white and emblazoned with red crosses. Space was made for surgeries and X-rays. A padded cell was added for those suffering shell shock.

Once anchored in Anzac Cove, wounded soldiers were loaded onto the Maheno from trawlers and barges. The ship became a shuttle, regularly travelling between the battlefield and makeshift hospitals on the surrounding islands. Later in the war, it shipped injured Kiwis home.

When the war ended, the Maheno returned to trans-Tasman passenger service. It operated for another decade before age and the Great Depression caught up with it. By the early 1930s, the ship was not being used. In 1935, it was sold to a Japanese company for scrap.

The plan was for another boat, the Oonah, to tow the Maheno from Sydney to Japan. Off the Queensland coast, the convoy struck a cyclone in July 1935. The tow-rope snapped, leaving the propeller-less Maheno and its skeleton crew to drift helplessly. They were lost for nearly a day, until an aerial search spotted the ship run aground on Fraser Island. It was badly damaged. After a few days, it was embedded in sand, leaning to one side, and filling with water.

Newspapers quickly declared the wreck a lost cause. A refloating effort would cost more than it was worth as scrap. Salvage efforts continued for a year, but were unsuccessful. In the meantime, the ship became a one-off wedding venue. The Australian customs officer overseeing the wreck decided to get married on its slanting deck. During the ceremony, the Maheno trembled with each wave thudding against the hull. The bridal party had to lean forward while the celebrant leaned backwards.

Later, during World War II, the wreck’s relative stability and remote setting made it perfect for air force target practice. For about five years, bombs rained down on the Maheno. Remarkably, it stayed mostly intact, apart from a large crack in the hull. By the 1960s, deepwater fish could be caught off the stern. It was considered an anglers’ paradise.

An unforgettable Anzac Day

Since its wrecking, the Maheno has continued to forge connections. Among the most special is with the North Otago school in the town that shares its name.

In 2014, Russell Postle, of the Brisbane High-Rise Rotary Club, had an idea. The centennial of the Gallipoli landings was approaching, and he wanted to reunite the ship with its original bell. But the bell was in New Zealand, at Maheno School.

“The bell was sitting in a corridor, sort of up on the wall,” principal Fraser says, “It wasn’t being used, [it was] pretty dusty.” The pupils knew little of its significance.

Postle called the school and laid out his plan. Fraser remembers it well. “I was like, ‘Mate, that would be amazing’.” That connection led to Maheno School visiting the wreck in 2015. Subsequent trips followed in 2017 and 2019.

Fraser was ignorant of the wreck before Postle’s call. “I just love the story behind the ship,” he says. “There’s stories about how [soldiers] described Gallipoli as a hellhole and then when they went on to the Maheno ship, it was like a luxury liner… it was like a safe haven.”

During the 2015 trip, an Anzac Day service was held on the beach in front of the ship. It was a mind-blowing moment, Fraser says. School pupils rang a replica of the ship’s old bell and performed a haka. “For our kids to be there, I don’t think they’ll ever forget that.”

Postle too has fond memories of the 2015 service. He says he will remember it forever. Maheno School brought the original bell to the service and Postle organised for five replicas to be made too. One is now on Fraser Island and three are at nearby museums. The final replica went back to Maheno School, where it now gets rung to mark break times.

Postle still organises annual Anzac Day services at the wreck site, though Covid has hampered recent efforts. He has collected several artefacts from the ship too, including first class dining chairs and a wash stand from the captain’s cabin.

The wreck remains defiant, he says, despite its decay. “In the middle of all that heavily damaged area towards the stern, there’s still one of the bathroom floors [where] the tiles are still evident.”

A link to a man she never met

Many Kiwis will have links to the Maheno. It catered to thousands of soldiers.

But of all the connections, Jocelyn Head’s is among the strongest. She never met her great-grandfather, Robert H Neville, but feels a spiritual connection to him. In 1905, Neville oversaw construction of the Maheno in Dumbarton, Scotland, and took it on its maiden voyage to New Zealand. Head’s grandmother (Neville’s daughter) was on that voyage. Thirty years later, she was also on board for the ship’s final voyage.

The Maheno meant little to Head as she grew up in Australia. It was only once she came to New Zealand in the early 2000s and visited the town of Maheno that she began researching her family link to the ship. When her mother died, Head found among her possessions clippings about the Maheno, as well as a prayer book and bible that had belonged to Neville. Head also now has a chest Neville used on the Maheno. “Family history is important for me,” she says. “I want to be part of a connectedness, I don’t want to be just an island by myself.”

Head visited the wreck for the first time in 2011. It felt like she was home. She remembers others at the site wondering about the ship’s significance and where it had come from. She remembers thinking “I can tell these people the story”, and she did. “That really enlivened me and gave me a deeper connection with that ship.”

Head is sure there are other people with Maheno stories. “There’s so many others who sailed on the ship, others who had grandfathers who were captains of the ship … people who worked in the crew… There should be a Maheno reunion.”

She is somewhat saddened by the sight of the ship now. “To see it wrecking more, and one day it won’t be there, it’ll have wasted away and subsided into the sands.”

Still, Head is fascinated the remains are so accessible. “And if [the Maheno] hadn’t been dislodged during the cyclone, it would have been nothing now.” The ship would have made it to Japan and broken down into scrap, which likely would’ve been used in World War II. “The story would have stopped,” Head says. “But [it] keeps on going.”

The plaque and the future

For a long time, the Maheno sat on Fraser Island with no information explaining how it got there. That changed thanks to an encounter between two dentists.

Dr Ross Bastiaan is a periodontist who has dedicated his spare time to marking important Anzac military sites. Over 30 years, he has installed more than 290 plaques worldwide.

In 2015, he met New Zealand dentistry professor Mike Morgan, whose grandfather served on the Maheno during the war. “Mike said to me, would you be interested in doing [a plaque] for the Maheno,” Bastiaan recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah, sure’ … it was a really good story and I thought ‘this wreck is going to be lost’.”

In 2017, Bastiaan’s plaque – mounted on a rock sourced from Maheno – was unveiled at the wreck site. The bronze was mounted on a plinth looking straight at the ship. Bastiaan thought it was amazing to see the wreck surrounded by sand with sea lapping around it. “It was moving to understand the story … and how here it is all these years later and [it’s] just the skeleton of a wreck.”

Bastiaan says the Maheno is a lovely connection between Australia and New Zealand. “If more New Zealanders knew about it, they might include Fraser Island as part of their stay in Queensland.”

Today, the ship is a skeletal structure that continues to corrode. One day there may be almost nothing left. “Preserving something like that is extremely difficult and extremely costly,” Bastiaan says.

Australian shipwreck corrosion expert Ian MacLeod says the visible superstructure of the ship may last another 20 to 30 years. “And then a storm will come through and all the rusted bits will break off, and it’ll just collapse and get buried into the sand.”

The remains obscured by sand will corrode at a much slower rate than those exposed to seawater, he says. “The bottom third of it will remain for maybe 100 years.”

“And then it too will be gone.”