Talk About A Beat Up!

Not only a beat up but a tad xenophobic and Colonial to boot

Here’s today’s front page of the publication that was once a respected daily, The West Australian.

It’s all about the arrival of HMS Anson. First The West’s sub-header alleges the Anson was ‘shadowed all the way to port in Perth’. Then it’s about the Anson being located ‘close to where a Chinese-flagged bulk carrier has been lurking for this past week’. So Chinese vessel not only ‘lurked’ near Anson but also, apparently, ‘shadowed’ the Anson to Garden Island and HMAS Stirling.

HMS Anson off Garden Island yesterday. Courtesy Royal Australian Navy

The Chinese-flagged vessel in question is the Yu Xiao Feng. This is her and this is where she was this morning.

And this is the entry on Fremantle Ports Voyager system today with her arrival and departure details.

We very much doubt, as the West’s article implies in quoting the UK’s Special Representative for AUKUS, that the bulk carrier was here to spy. Chinese flagged ships come and go to and from Freo regularly. If they are here to load wheat, they park down near the Kwinana Grain Terminal before loading the cargo. That’s where we load wheat onto bulk carriers.

For the record Fremantle Ports’s reports show that last financial year, East Asia and Japan (taking in China) was the highest ranked region in Freo’s ‘Principal areas of trade’, at 32.4%

It has to be said that the quoted remarks of the UK’s Special Representative for AUKUS have a wonderfully Colonial ring to them, suggesting how we Colonials should behave. They even have a faintly xenophobic ring to them.

If it’s also to be suggested that the Yu Xiao Feng was ‘shadowing’ the Anson into Port, one wonders how that can be when the Chinese-flagged ship arrived before the Anson arrived.

I can’t imagine for a moment Australia is about to cease selling wheat to China, or that Chinese-flagged vessels are going to cease coming alongside at Kwinana Grain Terminal here in Western Australia to load the wheat for export.

Let’s get over the beat up, the new-fashioned Colonialism, and the hints of old-fashioned xenophobic reaction to Australia trading with China.

By Michael Barker, Editor, Fremantle Shipping News.

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