Todd war diary, 3 August 1914-29 February 1916 / Arthur Todd - Page 225
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[Page 225]
greater task which was awaiting her; and she left Fiji for Sydney on the 15th October, arriving home six days later. She crept into harbour almost unobserved in the forenoon of the 21st, and went into dock. All hands that could be spared went ashore to look upon their favourite haunts again, after the sight of many horizons with never a column of smoke upon them. After a hurried scrape and refit, and a couple of days to complete with stores and coal, the ship was ready for sea again. A few blasts from the ferryboats' sirens, a few fluttering handkerchiefs on the headlands, some cheers from soldiers on South Head forts, and the long cruise of the Sydney was begun, a cruise which at the time of writing1) is still unfinished: but it is being finished without most of the four hundred people who made up her complement on Sunday 25th October, 1914.
To the peaceful landsman, as the writer was then, a warship is at first and awe-inspiring abode, for one's cabin is underneath a six-inch gun and above a shell magazine, while the approaches are stacked with rifles and bayonets over which an armed sentry keeps guard. All the rifles and other lethal weapons are stowed in racks around the flats off which the officers' cabins open: a relic, no doubt, of the days when the ship's company mutinied when so disposed. I had reason to curse these rifles later, for when the ship rolled they rattled, when she lurched they fell down, and on rough nights at sea one spent much time picking them up. But it was worth
1) book, except the last couple of chapters, was written in the summer of 1917-18