Members of the Merchant Navy Association are sailing into conflict once more, armed with a book on New Zealand's merchant navy history.
Merchant Navy Association Wellington branch president Ian Dymock has made
New Plymouth woman Lorraine Knightbridge an honorary member of the association for her new book "Sailing Seven Seas of History".
The book details the losses, trials and tribulations of merchant navy sailors sailing troubled seas in World War II on New Zealand-owned ships.
Mr Dymock has jumped on board with Mrs Knightbridge to help her apply for funding for the book, with the hope of getting the history of the merchant navy out to younger generations.
Their aim is not to sell the book, but to get the draft published and make it a freely available resource in high schools and libraries nationwide.
Mr Dymock said he hoped the book would draw attention to the merchant navy, and aid their fight to get September 3 proclaimed as Merchant Navy Day, a national day of observance.
"We don't want any money, no one's going to get rich out of the Merchant Navy Day. We just want the New Zealand merchant flag flown from Government buildings on September 3."
Mrs Knightbridge said she grew up with an army background and was inspired by the tales her father would tell her, particularly about the HMNZS Achilles, which she has included in a chapter at the end of the book.
Her passion for telling tales of navy history saw her writing and reading navy inspired poems at Anzac, seafarer and merchant navy events in New Plymouth for the past three years.
In her poems she tried to condense their history, which was so important and so valuable for future generations, she said.
"The things that Dad said to me over the years really stuck in my mind, particularly after he died, so I thought ok, I'm really interested…then I suddenly thought at the middle of last year that there was such a lot of information, and with poetry writing you're limited and you're condensing everything and prioritising in a short space.
"I thought, there needed to be something written down about the background to the poem, so that started me off on this quest of writing a book."
The book, which is her fourth, took almost a year to complete, said Mrs Knightbridge.
"A lot of the old sailors have only just really in the last few years stared to talk a bit about the war. You can understand why, war is a terrible thing, but you've got to try and get the good out of these bad situations and learn from past history. It became a real focus of mine to get that information out before another generation passed."
"What better way than to approach the high school's and the library's so that the information is accessible," she said.
Depending on how their funding goes, Mrs Knightbridge said she hoped to get the book published by Christmas.
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