Australian wheat trade

The trade that annually brought grain from Australia to Europe was the last deep-water trade on which sailing ships could compete with the powered ship. The ships left Europe in September or October and reached South Australia around December or January, having sailed around Africa and eastwards over the Indian Ocean. They then spent a few weeks loading grain in the Spencer Gulf, usually in ports such as Port Victoria or Port Lincoln, and then went back, around Cape Horn, often destined to Falmouth `for orders.'

Every year until the outbreak of World War II a lot of sailing ships came to the Spencer Gulf to take aboard a load of grain. In the 1930s most of them were owned by Gustaf Erikson, Mariehamn, but also cargo-carrying schoolships from Sweden (Abraham Rydberg and C.B. Pedersen) and Germany (Magdalene Vinnen, and sometimes Laeisz' Priwall and Padua) sailed on this trade.

Erikson's ships usually had no cargo on the outward voyage; it started to get very hard for sailing ships to get cargos, but sometimes they brought Finnish timber to South Africa.

The homeward voyage always turned into an inofficial race, called The Grain Race. The voyage was considered a fast one if it had lasted less than 100 days. The record was set by the Parma in 1933, 83 days. By contrast, the Winterhude once made a voyage twice as long, 165 days!

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