An explosive feature by two Canberra filmmakers has achieved pride of place at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, and it’s bound to get up plenty of noses, writes arts editor HELEN MUSA.

Fire at Sea is the brainchild of military historian and author Kathryn Spurling and Canberra film director David Jenkins, whose business Ghetto Media is based at Canberra Technology Park in Watson.

So far, she reports, the ABC and SBS have taken no notice, so Spurling and Jenkins were all more pleased that the Melbourne Documentary Festival gave them a top spot, 8.30pm on the festival’s Saturday night. 

The film, fully titled Fire at Sea: The HMAS Westralia Disaster, exposes the story behind a catastrophic engine fire aboard HMAS Westralia on May 5, 1998, when four crew members – PO Shaun Smith, Ldg Seaman Bradley Meek, Able Seaman Phillip Carroll and Midshipman Megan Pelly – were killed. Pelly was only 22 and a recent graduate of ADFA.

Jenkins and Spurling look at the subsequent faulty investigation that laid the blame on at least one of the victims. 

The author of 11 military history books, Spurling is a former naval officer and navy war widow with an ex-naval officer son, so she might normally be on the side of the RAN, but she argues that the human cost of this disaster was overshadowed by bureaucratic battles and systemic failures.

Three years in the making, the 122-minute doco was made for under $15,000 and is based on Spurling’s own book, Fire at Sea: HMAS Westralia 1998.

Chronologically rather than thematically structured, it is enhanced with whiz-bang 3-D and animation technology by Jenkins so that the vessels, people and explosions of yesteryear leap to life. 

The story is personal for Spurling.

“I had taught at the Australian Defence Force Academy for 12 years when I met Midshipman Megan Pelly,” she tells me. “I shook hands with her at her graduation in 1997 and found her, like so many other female midshipmen, inspiring and thrilled to be part of the navy. “

But Pelly would not enjoy her career for long. Her supply officer familiarisation course required her to be aboard the ageing Westralia and then in May, 1998, when a fuel-line burst into flames, she died in the engine room. 

Not only did the inquiry play down the fact that the person who installed the fuel line was not properly qualified but it blamed Pelly for being in the wrong place at the wrong time – her parents were doubly distraught.

“That really irritated me, as I knew she would never disobey RAN standing orders,” Spurling says. 

Then she received an email from the wife of a survivor saying her husband was experiencing trauma because he had not been allowed to tell his version of events. 

Vindication was at hand, though, when Canberra barrister, Bernard Collaery, took up the case for the family in a 2023 coronial inquest and it was discovered that Pelly had been sent in illegally and was never evacuated.

Spurling got thinking about the story of the survivors, so approached Jenkins about doing a film. A former NZ Army reservist, he was immediately in.

“It’s our first feature-length documentary… We had no idea how big this would be and how long it would take”, she says. 

After three years working for virtually nothing because of the power of the story, they ended up with many hours of interviews with family members and the survivors who had contacted them, along with photos that could be intercut by Jenkins with his 3-D imagery and animation. 

Spurling wrote the script, then Jenkins brought in a favourite voiceover artist, Mike Jaffrey, as they agreed that a female voice just wouldn’t be right. 

And is the story done now? No way. 

Spurling is now writing a spin-off novel where the bad guy gets caught and the female hero finds justice.

“Fiction is different,” as she says.

Fire at Sea, Nova Cinemas, Carlton, Melbourne July 19 as part of the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.