More on the Don - A Scouting Future? - Fremantle Shipping News

Recently we posted MV Cape Don – Are Her Days Done? by Freo local John Adderley. John drew attention to the Sea Heritage Foundation in whose care the Cape Don has been for many years before the recent seizure by the NSW Government of the vessel due to pollution concerns. Then we posted a Letter to the Editor from Harold Van Haltren concerning the Cape Don and the Sea Heritage Foundation and the Cape Don’s future. Today we follow those pleas to save Cape Don with this Letter to the Editor from Oliver Roths.

Dear Editor,

I write from the other side of the country, where MV Cape Don has spent the past two decades at Balls Head in Sydney Harbour, to add a Scouting voice to John Adderley’s article “The MV Cape Don – Are Her Days Done?” and to Captain Harold Van Haltren’s recent letter.

First, congratulations to the Sea Heritage Foundation and the MV Cape Don volunteer community on being named a finalist for the Diversity and Inclusion Award at the 2026 DCN Australian Shipping & Maritime Industry Awards. For those of us who have worked alongside the ship’s volunteers, the recognition is thoroughly deserved. These are people who have given their weekends, their trade skills and a lifetime of seagoing knowledge to a ship that has not earned a cent for any of them. They have done it quietly, diligently and for years.

Second, I want to put on record what that community has meant to young people. I am involved with the Scouts Robotics and Innovation Group, through which Cub Scouts and Scouts from the Northern Sydney District learn to design, build, code and test robots. Our youth-led project is “Scout 1“, a water-surface cleaning robot that our Cubs and Scouts have prepared and deployed to help keep our harbour clean. A robot like that cannot be developed on a classroom floor. It needs a real waterfront, real tidal conditions, people who understand hulls, moorings, corrosion, batteries and salt water, and adults patient enough to let an eleven-year-old ask the same question three times. MV Cape Don and her volunteers gave us exactly that!

Our young people have benefited enormously from the collective gravitas of knowledge and expertise aboard that ship: master mariners, engineers, electricians and shipwrights who have explained why things are built the way they are, tested our ideas honestly and helped our youth fix what did not work. To every volunteer and benefactor who has assisted us to progress Scout 1, our Scouts, their leaders and their families are most grateful.

That is the point I would ask decision-makers to weigh. The public debate about Cape Don has understandably centred on hull condition, pollution risk and salvage cost. Those matters deserve a careful, independent and evidence-based answer, and I do not pretend to settle them here. But a decision about the future of MV Cape Don is also a decision about a living community of maritime expertise that has, for years, been passing its knowledge on to younger generations, from TAFE trainees and Indigenous students to university researchers and, in our case, children in Scout uniform. There is no line item for that knowledge transfer in a salvage estimate. Once that community is dispersed, it does not reassemble. Losing those possibilities would be devastating on many levels: for our youth, for maritime education in Sydney and for the ship’s home port of Fremantle, which has every reason to feel a stake in her fate.

I hope those deciding Cape Don’s future give proper consideration to how much has already flowed from her volunteer community to the next generation, and how much more could. On behalf of the Cubs and Scouts of the Northern Sydney District, thank you to everyone who has kept her going.

Yours in Scouting,

*By Oliver Roths, Group Leader – District Innovation & Robotics Group, Special Project Patrol – Earth Tribe, Cammeray Scouts Group – Cub Scout Leader, Sydney North Region

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