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ownersmust also drive their boat. The intent of that rule is admirable, but it is also relatively simple to circumvent. All an ambitious owner needs to do is pay a crack tactician to stand beside him throughout the race and call every shot. Any dummy can turn the wheel on command.
    If this problem is to be resolved at all, then the solution is more likely to be found in a ‘gentlemen v. players’ division of the fleets. Yachts carrying professional crews might race among themselves for a new set of prizes, while the traditional amateur crews would continue competing for the established trophies. No doubt the big-money boys would soon attract all the sponsorship and media attention, but I’ll wager the Corinthian lads will have a lot more fun.
    There’s a final, more philosophical aspect of all this that goes to the very heart of Australian mythology. Our libraries are crammed with books that unquestioningly ascribe the forging of national identity to the dual anvils of the outback and the bush. Every school child is taught how the country was ‘opened up’ through the heroics of the great explorers and the stoic rural toil of the early settlers. Our self-image of the Australian character is still defined by the sentimental verses of Banjo Paterson, a horse-loving city solicitor who glorified the bush and its people in romantic melodramas that epitomised the triumph of hardiness and willpower over a hostile environment.
    But who really established Australia? Sailors. Not just the great early navigators such as Cook and Flinders, but the thousands of brave and resourceful seamen who followed in their wake. It took immeasurably more courage and skill to bring an unwieldy, over-laden brig through a treacherous and uncharted new coastal entry than to endure a drought on the Western Plains. It was sailors who risked their lives establishing the hundreds of small ports that eventually became our towns and cities. It was sailors who repeatedly braved the hazardous 20,000-mile round trips to Europe and the New World to bring out our population and establish the greatexport trades of wheat and wool that underwrote Australia’s wealth. It was sailors who for more than a century guaranteed commerce and communications by crewing the thousands of small packet boats and coastal traders that linked the colony, long before interstate roads and railways.
    And where is the wealth of folklore and literature commemorating those true nation-builders? It hardly exists. Instead we deify homicidal bushrangers, suicidal swagmen, drunken gold-diggers and a clique of privileged squatters who sought to make quick fortunes on appropriated land they often then rendered unsuitable for cultivation or grazing.
    Sailors the world over have been an anonymous, itinerant and underpaid lot. In other words, an underclass. To the land-bound mythmakers their exploits were unseen and therefore uncommemorated. They appear in our folklore only as they seemed once they came ashore – a loud, argumentative rabble, impatient to quench their thirsts and sundry other appetites after long months at sea. Yet these commonly despised men were the class to whom the nation owes its existence. For me, there’s a bitter irony behind today’s reflex assumption that sailing is an activity reserved for ‘the elite’.

We throw’d over board our guns, Iron and stone
ballast Casks, Hoops staves oyl Jars, decay’d
stores &c … 40 or 50 Tun weight.
    Log of HM Barque Endeavour
    T HE NEVER-ENDING STRUGGLE against gravity is one of sailing’s defining inner conflicts.
    When Lieutenant James Cook frantically threw some of his precious cannon and stores overboard in June 1770 it was the last desperate gesture of a captain attempting to wriggle his ship free of the shoals that had trapped her on the Great Barrier Reef. Cook’s extraordinary seamanship managed to save the Endeavour , and Cooktown on the Endeavor River in far north