light cruiser HMAS Brisbane
heavy cruiser HMAS Australia
Melbourne, 8 November. Two hundred officers and sailors protested against their wage cuts caused by the financial emergency law. The officers claimed expressly that there was no mutiny although some warned claimed that if there came no solution a protest of 3,000 men was to be expected. The sailors appointed a so-called wealthy commission and returned to their ships as advised by their leaders to do so. The ships were to depart that morning to the Jervis Bay. The Royal Australian Navy consisted then of the four cruisers Australia and Canberra both of 10,000 tons, Adelaide (5,100 tons) and Brisbane (5,120 tons), seven destroyers Huos, Stalward, Success, Swordsman, Tasmania, Torrens and Tattoo, three mine hunters Geranium, Marguerite and Mallow and the seaplane tender Albatross.(1) Another Dutch newspaper
Het Vaderland: staat- en letterkundig nieuwsblad evening edition dated 10 November 1913 however called this protest a mutiny but reported that the fleet without incidents departed. According to the Australian minister of war was everything just a well prepared communistic propaganda action. A later tiding mentioned that despite precautions of the government yesterday at Sydney again sailors protested or in the words of this newspaper mutinied. Hundred men of the depot ship Pinguin refused for 30 minutes to work at sympathy with the 3,000 sailors who protested last Tuesday at Melbourne against the wages cuts. The
De Sumatra Post was a newspaper published in the Dutch East Indies while the
Vaderland was published in the Netherlands. The location of publication caused perhaps the difference between the words protest used by the first paper and mutiny by the last paper!
Note
1. Wage cuts caused in the Dutch East Indies the mutiny on board of the Dutch coastal defence ship Hr.Ms. De Zeven Provinciën in 4-10 February 1933 ending bloody when a bomb hit the ship with as result 23 sailors killed. Two years earlier were there also problems within the Royal British Navy.
