MV Koolama I

Many of the small settlements along the WA Coast have charming names- Comet Bay, Twilight Cove, Israelite Bay and Champion Bay are just a few. These places are named after the sailing craft that used to service the coastal settlements in the early days.  

While roads were few and far between, the main connection the settlements had was via coastal shipping, but these services were notoriously irregular and unreliable. Add to that the danger of a largely uncharted coast and you have some idea of how fraught the business of shipping was for most of the 19th Century.  

By the early years of the 20th century the demand for a regular shipping service to the ports of the northwest coast was becoming more and more pressing with the development of the pastoral and pearling industries.  

In 1912, the State Government established the State Shipping Service. The service operated during the First and Second World Wars when shipping was at a premium. 

By the 1960s it was thought that the Service might be wound up, but the iron ore boom, with the demand for concrete, steel, bitumen and prefabricated structures, saw the business continue. In June 1995 the WA government announced that the State Shipping Service would cease operations.