Anne Rood grew up in an era when women smiled to hide their talent.
The oldest of five girls, her childhood was spent sailing on the River Derwent with her sisters. They were “water babies” – rowing about in boats, spending holidays on the east coast, where she has lived for the past 25 years, and holidayed before that.
An early family photograph shows Ann, aged 3, holding a model yacht in her lap, and proves her lifelong passion. “I’ve always been mad about yachts,” she says. “We learnt about sailing just by being told. Father would say, ‘Get that sheet in now,’ or ‘We’re going to port, get ready!’ or ‘Drop the anchor there.’ He never failed to use the proper term.”
The family lived right on Lindisfarne Bay, with the River Derwent lapping almost at their front door, and kept a boat in Newtown Bay. One of Anne’s clearest memories as a teenager, is standing at Battery Point watching John Illingworth’s Rani, winner of the first Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, cross the finish line in 1945. Another is rowing around Newtown Bay when the Derwent was clean.
“We’d take the boat over to Lime Kiln Bay (now Geilston Bay) to a beautiful little bay opposite the zinc works, which was only a small operation then. There was a shelf of rock you could tie up to and the rock went straight down, so we were in deep water right up against the shore. It had been an Aboriginal site. We’d get crayfish there with just a piece of string and a bit of meat on it. Recently my granddaughter gave us a trip on the MONA boat, and I could not believe the turbidity of the water. You wouldn’t want to eat anything from it now.”
When Anne married Trevor, who was in the NZ navy, their love of sailing continued on Baranne, a 31’ 6” Huon pine yawl built in Franklin and which they kept for 20 years. She and Trevor took turns at the helm; being on the water “always felt like a world of your own making”. They cooked over a gas stove on a gimbal in the cockpit or went ashore to barbecue on Bruny Island or Eaglehawk Neck. She has a photo, framed at home on a dresser, of the boat at a beautiful anchorage at Dover.
“It was the safest anchorage on the whole southern shore, where trees met overhead; the safest place to go in any weather. Now there’s a fish farm there. There’s a road in – it’s been logged. What we’ve done in the name of money and greed!”
Anne loves especially when the engine is off and all you can hear is the rush of water. “That wonderful ‘sssshh’ that you don’t get with stink boats. It’s gorgeous. You watch the sail, the wind tends to alter direction, and you’ve got to feel it.” She was taught all about wind direction by an old salt who said, “Turn your head until you can feel it on both ears.”
Anne learned the lesson. “When you’ve got the direction, you can feel it on both ears – it works every time.”
Before going out on the water she’d always check the tide, especially in the Derwent where they are conflicting. “If I remember rightly the river flows out if you’re facing south on the east and the current comes up on the western shore. And it’s made a very deep area off Sandy Bay – the deepest part of the river is where the lifting arch of the original bridge was.”
When Trevor was president of the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania, Anne recalls it being male dominated, “and not the social place it is now – it used to be much more focused on the sailing”.
“They were a bit stiff and starchy in our day. I would have been able to mix it with the best of them, but you weren’t considered a member. The wives were ‘associate members’ if we wanted to be. It’s very different now thank goodness, and I think probably because of us and the opinions we gave. People were beginning to respect the fact that some women were better helmsmen than men. We could see that we could change it, but tactfully. If we’d stirred, we just would have made lives difficult for our husbands.”
Trevor died too young, 20 years ago, and, at 88 Anne Rood no longer sails, spending more time with her extensive library, where she relives life on the ocean waves, and tending her native garden.
Her grandfather is perhaps the real reason sail and adventure thrive in Anne. John Ernest Philp was a Hobart shipping agent, track cutter, writer and authority on shipping and whaling in the early days of Tasmania. He named Lake Vera in 1910, after his wife. Anne serves tea in china teacups featuring her grandmother Vera’s delicate paintings of Tasmanian flora. Vera was taught to paint wildflowers by celebrated artist Louisa Anne Meredith, an expert on the subject.
When her ashes are scattered with those of Trevor over the ocean in Great Oyster Bay, Anne Rood will take with her those lessons she picked up from the old salts. Lessons about the weather: if the wind comes from the north make sure you are on a route that will give you shelter in a gale; unless it’s a storm, a southerly will die out after dark.
And lessons in life: self-reliance, understanding yourself, and how even in what seems like comparatively calm conditions, crisis can erupt.
“It’s funny how the temerity comes later in life,” Anne ponders. “You just get undone and undone by things.”
She can still do a clove hitch without any trouble and while being photographed for this article on Spiky Bridge, to re-live their honeymoon photo, Anne was invited by a tourist to come sailing with him in Kettering where he had a yacht. Funny that, she said in the car on the way back to her home in Dolphin Sands, she rarely gets an invitation like that here.
“The attitude of the men is interesting. They’ll ask their mates out fishing, but not their mates’ wives.”
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers - Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.