Exclusive: After 54 years Alan Hellier tells the story of his escape from Australia’s worst peacetime military disaster – and how he still believes the full truth is yet to come out

Voyager disaster: 'The coxswain said "Sorry lads, we're done for" and sang Abide With Me'

Voyager disaster: 'The coxswain said "Sorry lads, we're done for" and sang Abide With Me'

Alan Hellier still has the watch he was wearing on the night of Australia’s worst peacetime disaster in the military. It has been stopped since 8.54pm on 10 February 1964, the minute he was submerged in waters of the Pacific along with fellow crew members on HMAS Voyager, fearing – expecting – that he wouldn’t get out alive. He was probably the last to escape.

Hellier, a senior radio operator, had just finished his shift and was sitting at a table in the Voyager’s cafeteria when the destroyer was struck and cut in two by the much larger aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne. He heard a loud bang, and the force of the impact catapulted him towards the steel base of a gun, badly cutting his head.



Hellier believes the deaths of his fellow crewmen may have been avoidable

The front section of the ship rolled over onto the side and then righted itself, but then water suddenly poured into the room. As the water level rose fast, it became clear the ship was sinking.



“The coxswain turned round and said, ‘I’m sorry, lads, we’re done for,’ and started singing Abide With Me,” says Hellier.

But Hellier had discovered a small hatch in a wall behind some lockers in the officers’ mess a few months earlier, when the ship had been in Williamstown dockyard during a refit. His head wound bleeding profusely, he made his way towards the hatch.

“The water was up to our waists when I decided to take off.

“I knew where there was a very small hatch. I headed for that because I thought I was small enough to fit through.

“It was bedlam. There were bodies everywhere and people screaming. They had drowned on impact because the water was rushing in and they got knocked over.”

The Voyager submerged and his watch stopped.

“People were in front of me. I helped push a couple in front of me through the hatch. I just said, ‘Go! Go! Go!’,” he said.

“I turned around and there was no one else coming out. One body floated past me. I was last out.”

Hellier surfaced and swam. “I got out and got myself free and then turned around. The bow was there, and it went down, and came up again. Then it went down forever. Once she bobbed the second time no one got out.

“It was a moonlight night. The water was warm.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alan Hellier’s watch stopped at 8.54pm on 10 February 1964 as it was submerged by water. Photograph: David L Kelly/The Guardian

Eighty-two of the Voyager’s 314 crew were killed on impact or drowned, trapped in the bow section which sank only 10 minutes after the collision. The stern section of the ship remained upright and floated for about two hours, allowing other crewmen on board to jump into the ocean, swim to HMAS Melbourne and climb scramble nets onto the aircraft carrier.



The episode, off the coast of Jervis Bay in New South Wales, is infamous and the subject of two royal commissions. But Hellier still believes the full truth has not been uncovered.

The second royal commission was ordered in response to claims by a senior officer that Voyager’s captain Duncan Stephens, who died in the disaster, was frequently drunk and unfit to command the ship. In the hours before the collision, it emerged, Stephens ordered a triple brandy which a steward took to him. But Hellier says he knows the captain did not drink the brandy. “The triple brandy was for me.”

Hellier says he worked closely with the ship’s officers in the officers’ sea cabin, encrypting and decrypting messages. That day he vomited in the captain’s cabin and Hellier says the captain ordered the brandy for Hellier to settle his stomach. Hellier drank it.



“I knew him well. I spoke to him every day at sea. I know he definitely never drank at sea and never on the bridge,” he said.



You always have to be on the ball when you’re working with a carrier Alan Hellier

Hellier did not give evidence about the triple brandy to the royal commissions, claiming he was told by a lawyer to be very careful what he said in evidence.

“The QC said ‘You’ve got to be very careful what you say because you’ve got a lot of career to go in the navy and you’ve got a wife and young children and you’ve got to think of the good of the service’.”

Hellier says he understood the instruction as code for: “Be very careful what you say because it will come back to bite you on the arse.”

Now 81, Hellier lives in Brisbane. He has agonised in silence, bound for 50 years by the official secrets provisions he had to sign as a naval radio operator. But he is determined now to put the record straight as far as possible. He believes critical information was kept from the royal commissions, that faulty communications equipment may have been a contributing cause of the collision, and that the deaths of his fellow crewmen more than half a century ago may have been avoidable.



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Hellier was one of the longest servicing crewmen on the Voyager at the time, a veteran of 10 years in the navy. He served in naval wireless stations in Canberra, Darwin and a British naval base in Singapore, he had sailed with the Voyager for 18 months before the collision, including nine months of exercises as ship’s main wireless officer plying from Japan to India. It was during this voyage that the Voyager’s UHF tactical primary radio circuit was plagued by unpredictable dropouts of its signal.

“We always had one problem with this transmitter,” he says. “The senior ship gives all the directions on that frequency for course and speed and to change positions.”

At the end of 1963, most of the crew left the Voyager. The ship was refitted at the Williamstown naval base and recruits were posted to the ship for training in 1964. It was there that Hellier discovered the hatch that saved him. During the refit, the UHF transmitter was taken off the ship for routine testing and returned approved for service, despite Hellier asking for it to be replaced.

“They only changed the aerials on it. The signal would just drop out,” he says.

When the Voyager put to sea in February 1964 Hellier says the tactical primary circuit was still faulty. Hellier’s knowledge of procedure also gives a clear indication that the manoeuvre during which the Voyager was crossing the path of the Melbourne at the time of the collision, was unprecedented.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hellier gave evidence to both of the royal commissions that were held into the disaster: the first within months of the collision, in 1964, and the second in 1967. Photograph: David L Kelly/The Guardian

Evidence given to the royal commissions indicates the Voyager was travelling away from the Melbourne to loop around to the right into its formation position, when it suddenly and inexplicably turned left, into the path of the Melbourne.



Hellier believes the cause of the collision could have been a misinterpretation of a course and speed direction given by the Melbourne, possibly complicated by a drop out of the radio signal. “The transmitter could have dropped off for a split second. The transmission could have been garbled,” he says.

If the Voyager had been given a course and speed that would steer it across the bow of the Melbourne, Voyager should have queried it because that was never done, he says.



If Voyager was directed to the other side of the ship, its procedure was to fall behind and move into the other position, not cross the bow of the larger ship, Hellier says.



“We had never been asked to cross the bow of an aircraft carrier. Very often they do give wrong directions. You always have to be on the ball when you’re working with a carrier. If you got that order, you’d automatically query it and ask the skipper.”

Hellier gave evidence to both of the royal commissions that were held into the disaster: the first within months of the collision, in 1964, and the second in 1967.

Although he was questioned, Hellier believes his evidence was disregarded because he was only 28 at the time, despite his having 10 years of experience in communications in the navy, and that his specialised knowledge of the Voyager’s communications systems was not adequately placed before the royal commissions.

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After the collision, the Melbourne let down lifeboats for the Voyager survivors, and lowered scramble nets over the side for the sailors to climb up the side of the aircraft carrier. Hellier climbed into a lifeboat. It was half full of water, so he got out again and found another lifeboat. This one took him to the side of the Melbourne and he climbed the scramble net to safety. The bow of HMAS Melbourne was badly damaged but was seaworthy enough to steam slowly to Sydney.

From there, Hellier travelled by train to Brisbane, where he was reunited with his wife.

Voyager survivors were given a mere seven days survivor’s leave before being given new postings. Hellier was posted to sea on the navy frigate HMAS Quiberon and remained in the navy for 12 years, rising to the rank of a petty officer. He left the Navy when he could no longer cope with being in confined spaces. He became a postman for the rest of his career.

On 10 February at Jervis Bay, the Huskisson RSL will hold its annual reunion for Voyager survivors and the families of those who died. And in Brisbane, Hellier will gather with close friends who survived the Voyager disaster and remember those who perished without warning in the hell of those warm, moonlit waters.