HMAS Sydney: Garden Island to Jervis Bay

New experiences are best broached with impressions fully formed. And my impressions of navy-life, as I shuffled aboard HMAS Sydney this week for a voyage to Jervis Bay, were as lurid as they were predictable. If the world of think-tanks is one of relative comfort, the Navy belonged to an altogether different class of institution, one inhabited by boarding schools, prisons and commercial law firms. Theirs is of course a more orderly world: formal, ritualistic, demarcated by clear lines of authority and respect.

In a few cases I was right. Sailors and officers eat and socialise separately, on different levels of the ship – like the manor-house in Gosford Park. The latter gather in the nautical equivalent of a club-house, a warm blend of tweed, carpet and timber; the former in more synthetic surrounds, a mess-hall reminiscent of an old hospital cafeteria, blue vinyl and linoleum broken up by the occasional glint of stainless-steel. Fleet Command has tipped its hat to greater equality in recent years: everyone is now supposed to get the same food. But the rolling eyes of the galley-hands - flashing quiet indignation - suggest a rule honoured more in breach than observance.

Aside from this, hierarchy does not stand out aboard the Sydney. Far more pronounced is the ship’s innate hostility to its human inhabitants. Down below, nausea and claustrophobia jostle for position. Every surface is hard, or jagged, every protuberance an invitation to concussion. And the human spaces – the office, the sick-bay, the cabins – feel like they’ve been allocated begrudgingly, as an inconvenient afterthought to the placement of sensors and weapons. They feel temporary, too, like they could be downgraded at a moment’s notice to an even smaller space, should the guns and radars demand a bit of extra leg-room. Forget the ranks, this is Sydney’s real hierarchy.

By contrast to its psychological animosity toward the human body, Sydney’s biology is an almost flattering homage to it. The ship’s vital organs - the bridge, the operations room, the engine plant – are inseparable and symbiotic, operating with unnerving synchronisation. This doesn’t prevent their respective teams from claiming absolute centrality, of course, which for some reason I found faintly endearing. But it does impart on the whole competition a kind-of comical futility.

The ‘Ops-room’, darkened for cinematic effect and crammed with back-lit consoles, is, according to its steely occupants, ‘the difference between Sydney and a cruise-liner.’ The bridge exudes similar self-importance, albeit leavened with the odd self-deprecating counterpoint. The centre-piece up there is an absurdly small steering wheel - three inches in diameter, shaped like an old fashioned helm and operated nonchalantly by the helmsman’s index finger. This one’s steering a guided-missile frigate, the one that came off the production line before it is surely dangling off someone’s key-ring.

There’s not much for me to say about the engine plant. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting. I was just so preoccupied down there acting out my own version of hyper-masculinity – grunting and nodding knowingly, pretending to understand the mechanical intricacies of gas-turbine engines - that I really couldn’t take it in.

It’s ok, though. Thankfully, I had my impressions to fall back on.