Andrew Hazewinkel

This 15 minute film was created as the centerpiece of the exhibition and publication project What The Sea Never Told, commissioned by the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.

At the invitation to develop a major work for solo presentation by the then gallery director Danny Lacy, I decided to work with a story that continues to haunt the seaside community that I grew up in, Mornington.

The film is conceived as a kind of immaterial monument, a companion piece to the marble monument that stands at the end of Main Street Mornington, overlooking the harbor. Since the age of six I walked past that stack of engraved stones on my way to and from school each day. The monument memorializes the 1892 drowning of fifteen boys and young men from my hometown when it still was a fledgling fishing community.

A brief synopsis of events: 21/5/1892, winter. The newly formed Mornington Football Club sailed across Port Philip Bay in a local fishing vessel (named Process) to play a match against their sporting rivals Mordialloc. The game was a draw, no winners, no losers. Following the game as night was falling, the Mornington boys set sail for home. Given the weather conditions of the night the crossing should have taken two, perhaps two and a half hours. The boat never arrived. Only one body was ever retrieved.

I spent my boyhood, adolescence and emergent manhood living in Mornington. Through those ages I swam at the same beaches and in the same creeks, walked the same cliff paths, snorkelled the same reefs, climbed some of the same trees and sailed the same waters as the fifteen drowned young men. In this way I have always felt a special kind of kinship with them and this is from where the impulse to make this work originates.

The project and this film’s title is drawn from a small book title Love’s Tribute, or What The Sea Never Told written by Alice Caldwell who lost three brothers in the tragedy.