The demise of Union Shipping

By Michael Field

Once its every move would have won big headlines in Suva and Apia and Auckland but the seemingly inevitable demise of Union Shipping later this year is just a footnote to history.

Founded as the Union Steam Ship Company in -1875 in Dunedin, New Zealand, it came after 1881 to dominate Pacific shipping with its rival, Bums Philp, which has also disappeared from the region.

Union Shipping, which now runs two ships across the Tasman Sea, is owned by New Zealand’s ailing Brierley Investments Ltd which is trying to cash up its non-per forming companies in a struggle to survive.

The Sunday Star-Times in Auckland reported Union Shipping was on the verge of being scuttled with the loss of 200 jobs.

The newspaper quoted company sources as saying the company would be gone by

August.

Negotiations were already underway with potential buyers of its two surviving ships, Union Rotoiti and Union Rotoma.

“There’s sadness about what is happen ing,” a company source said. “Probably up to 90 percent of all the sea staff in New Zealand have worked for the company all their working life.”

The view of the company is somewhat different in the Pacific. “The Union Company was unfavourably identified with the colonial administration in the minds of many Island leaders and there was a wide spread desire for a new start, especially since the Union Company was at times less than sympathetic toward Pacific sensibili ties,” author Tony Nightingale wrote in his recent history on the Pacific Forum Line.

He noted the way that the company put

up its freight rates after the 1971 Fiji dock strike while other companies did not. The company was known

throughout Polynesia for its passenger cargo ships Matua and Tofua.

Its most infamous ship was Talune which introduced Spanish influenza to Samoa, Tonga and Fiji after the callousness of its master in refusing to co-operate with port health authorities. Thousands died in each country.

In the early 1960 s the company was taken over by Britain’s P and O. However the banana trade which kept the trade going was in trouble with disease hitting the Pacific crop and cheap exports arriving from South America.

In 1972 New Zealand and Australian interests took over the company and ended the passenger services in 1973 and intro duced containerisation.

However the company was forced, both by politics and economics, to pull out of the Pacific and surviving only on the Trans- Tasman run. ■