The Nowra was a wooden two-masted fore and aft schooner of 60 tons, built in 1874, by M. Brown of Shoalhaven, New South Wales, on the dimensions of 68.4 feet in length, a breadth of 18.7 feet and a depth of 6.0 feet. ¹

The vessel at the time of its demise was owned by Susan Reeds and registered in Melbourne.

On its final voyage the Nowra was inward bound from Penguin in Tasmania to Melbourne with a cargo of potatoes, and a crew of three, under the command of Captain Lancaster. By the time the vessel reached Port Phillip Heads, it was experiencing hurricane force winds, making the vessel unmanageable.

The schooner was forced ashore on the London Bridge Reef, on the back beach to the east of Point Nepean, with the captain (Lancaster) and cook (Robertson) being drowned, and the remaining two crew being rescued.

Their rescuer was a local, Alfred Keys (1868 -1953) the telegraph operator at the Quarantine Station.

Details of the aftermath of this wreck are scant, with some stating that the vessel broke up very quickly and that the whole deck was deposited on the beach nearby. This would indicate that very little was successfully salvaged from the remains of the wreck. It was reported that the cargo was insured but the vessel was uninsured.

It must be noted that some press articles of the day wrongly referred to the Nowra as the Narra.

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1. Shipwrecks Around Port Phillip Heads (2006) by Don Love ↩︎

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