"Little Known of These Waters" by "Standby" (1945)

 "Standby" was the early pseudonym of RS Porteous, who became a well-known novelist in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. This was his first book. It is a collection of fictionalised sketches and stories of a certain brand of life in wartime - in this instance, the life aboard all the ragtag small merchant ships which had been pressed into service during the Second World War in Australia. The stories all relate to the part of this ramshackle fleet which operated around the coasts of New Guinea and northern Queensland, ferrying supplies essential to the war effort. They are stories of action with a very strong human element, and highly entertaining. They range between arenas of moonlit silence with darkened ships, eerie passage sought in stealth, to sailings being stymied by overconfident captains ignoring appalling steering or lack of good navigation. Obviously sea-weather predominates, as do all the tensions in small crews full of big characters who wouldn't normally have been seen as fit for military service. There is a consistent sense of derring-do being undone, underlined with humour and sometimes tragic pathos. The title apparently comes from a rubric on maps of (particularly) the New Guinea coast at the time, where charting was insufficient at best. "Standby" went on to publish a novel in 1949 with seemingly similar themes, Sailing Orders, which won second prize in a Sydney Morning Herald competition for the best novel about the war. Looking forward to that.