Sydney Heritage Fleet
The different way to volunteer
Sydney Heritage Fleet has a workforce made up of its volunteer members. It is their work you see when you take a trip in one of our heritage steam vessels Lady Hopetoun or Waratah, or visit tall ship James Craig, wander through the collections of small boats and heritage engines or join James Craig as crew!
Could you be one of them?
You might be anywhere – up the main mast on James Craig, cataloguing photographs, cleaning the bilges, guiding visitors, answering the phone, compiling statistics, organising an outing, counting nuts and bolts, making a film, crewing or maintaining one of the heritage vessels, or you might be involved in maintenance or restoration – a never-ending job for which we are famous!
As you can guess, restoration involves riveting, welding, sheetmetal work, wood-working skills and so on. What you might not realise is that we can teach you many of these skills and activities within the Fleet.
Our historic fleet also needs the special skills like steam engineering and riveting which are almost extinct and we aim to keep them alive on our vessels and in our Heritage Docks & Workshop by passing them on to others.
Besides these specialist skills, we also need plain ordinary jobs done; keeping things shipshape, for instance; painting and scraping; ‘rustbusting’; and tender loving care of the vessels and artefacts entrusted to us.
Intrigued?
Your time will be valuable to the Fleet – however much or little you have to give, and whatever your experience. Our volunteer members are aged from 16 to over 90 – both men and women.