Bluey Ducker 0414 953 355. Hagerty, 17, went home to Newcastle where he had grown up in the busy port city and had dreamed of a life at sea. You have corrected this article This article has been corrected by You and other Voluntroves This article has been corrected by Voluntroves $ Close Captcha. HMAS Voyager was a Daring-class destroyer of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), that was lost in a collision in 1964.. Create New Account. English (US) Español; HMAS VOYAGER . “In front of you is an instrument like a sun clock with an arrow and, as you turn the wheel, the arrow turns as well.“All I know was we were looking for a wind to come over the Melbourne’s bow so the planes could take off easier with the wind under their wings.”Hagerty’s notes document the names of the three men in the wheelhouse: himself (ordinary seaman Degenhardt, he has since taken his father’s surname, Hagerty); leading seaman Frank Sharkey and able seaman Stanley Hale.Hagerty noted the engine doing 160 revolutions per minute and that at 8.45pm Hale had the wheel and that “every minute” Hale was given orders to change the course and speed.Hagerty wrote that at 8.50pm they were given the order to steer 15 degrees to starboard and then, almost immediately, to steer 10 degrees to port.He then records there were no orders given for two or three minutes.Unbeknown to him the ships were closing in on each other. Once he returned to duty the following week, Hagerty was assigned to the navy’s new hydrographic survey ship, HMAS Moresby, in preparation for her commissioning in March 1964.He was having nightmares about the disaster but was not given medical help. The three men in the wheelhouse were standing no more than a few feet apart but Hagerty does not know what happened to his fellow crewmen.
“He had never done night exercises on a destroyer in his life,” he said. If the Melbourne says ‘we are turning’, it’s his job to pass it on to us [in the wheelhouse].”Hagerty believes Easton deliberately intimidated him to deflect blame for the disaster from a fellow British officer.Although he survived the disaster, Hagerty says the trauma he experienced has affected him throughout his life.“I’m alive but I didn’t survive,” he said. Easton, now deceased, later attained the rank of admiral in the British navy and was knighted for his service.Hagerty was the only survivor of the three men in the wheelhouse of the ship who heard and responded to the final course-and-speed orders given to them in the seconds before the collision. “He is supposed to be looking and seeing what is needed to be done. The ship must have been underwater quite a way for the wheelhouse to be flooded.”His legs were scratched on the back but he could swim. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. “Every day he would quiz me and suggest I was a bit confused. For Survivors, Friends & Family. Not Now. Hagerty, a member of the HMAS Voyager Survivors Association, is the second survivor to talk to Guardian Australia. 6 talking about this. Voyager was cut in half and sunk with the loss of 82 lives.But Hagerty, now 71, has found the courage to reveal what he believes is crucial evidence of a cover-up of the true cause of Australia’s worst peacetime disaster.Hagerty believes the collision was caused by a faulty course-and-speed order given by the Voyager’s officer of the watch, Lt David Price, a British naval officer on secondment to the After the collision, Hagerty says, he was was taken to Sydney’s naval base HMAS Watson and cowed into silence by its captain, British officer Capt Ian Easton, also on secondment. “He was a good man.
Constructed between 1949 and 1957, Voyager was the first ship of her class to enter Australian service, and the first all-welded ship to be built in Australia.