THERE is a brilliant language-trend tool on the internet called the Google Ngram Viewer. It trawls vast collections of books, documents and other textual resources to produce a graph gauging the use of a word over time.

Many careers in this industry are punctuated by conferences, roundtables and annual reports which likely reflect the same trend illustrated by the Ngram Viewer for the words underpinning this feature: diversity and inclusion.

With “equity” added for good measure, the graph below shows how society’s use of these words has changed over time. “Inclusion” was scarcely mentioned at all before the late 1800s. “Diversity” has the most notable increase, peaking in 2004 and beginning to climb again in 2019 (which, unfortunately, is the most recent year available in this tool). Anecdotally, it would seem both words are on the rise in 2024, in corporate strategies, conference agendas, award categories – even the pages of this magazine.

But they are only words.

 

In a male-dominated industry, it’s easy to let our understanding of diversity default to gender diversity. It’s a change that is welcomed and desperately needed. But conversations leading up to the development of this feature suggested there is still a need for industry to challenge and broaden its idea of what diversity is.

Industry is sharpening its focus on age diversity as it confronts the reality that its future is in the hands of a generation that, for the most part, has had very little exposure to maritime career pathways. Cultural diversity, religious diversity, neurodiversity and socioeconomic diversity are also beginning to receive more attention.

But the many facets of diversity need to be understood as something deeper than a list or a check-box exercise. Thought, experience and personality all add another dimension to the composition of an inherently diverse industry.

A word on groupthink

The Australian Mariners Welfare Society has evolved alongside the global seafaring workforce since the organisation’s inception in 1863. It was known as the Sydney Sailors’ Home in those days, providing accommodation for visiting crewmembers. AMWS’ focus has since shifted to supporting seafarers worldwide through project grants for welfare providers and maritime scholarships for prospective industry entrants. The latter enables AMWS to engage people with diverse backgrounds – usually young people – who otherwise may not have found themselves in maritime.

AMWS chair David Parmeter said the organisation’s vision is to ensure all seafarers and their dependents, irrespective of their nationality, gender or beliefs, are treated with dignity, respect and compassion.

Mr Parmeter has previously served as chair of Maritime Industry Australia and as managing director of Teekay Shipping. Having observed the shift in industry’s understanding of diversity over time, he said organisations and institutions need to be reflective of the society they are a part of and the world they exist in.

“Otherwise, we will become extinct; we all become irrelevant,” Mr Parmeter said.

“That’s not to say that there aren’t good people out there who make a very important contribution irrespective of what their background is … it’s more a commonsense observation that we live in a diverse society; there’s a whole range of different views out there,” he said.

“If you just exist in an enclave, that’s what you’re going to be.”

Mr Parmeter has found that diverse backgrounds and experiences represented in a workplace can help challenge the norm and inform better decisions.

“I suppose what any industry or culture or society has to avoid is groupthink, where the default position of any group collective of people is to agree with each other,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong with people agreeing, but there are times when someone has to say, ‘wait a minute, have you thought this through? Or have you thought of something else?’”

When disagreement is informed by a person’s unique experience of the world, that disagreement can help reshape the way things are done, especially in a meeting where everyone “sits around and nods vigorously”, as Mr Parmeter puts it.

“You’ve got to avoid groupthink; you’ve got to have creativity in the industry. And the more you’ve brought people in who have had different backgrounds, different life experiences, the more sparks you’re going to get and the more creativity you’re going to have.”

Cultural overhauls

An individual should be able to challenge more than just the norm, according to Mr Parmeter. They also need to be able to challenge the decisions of those in authority on matters of safety. Mr Parmeter encouraged the maritime industry to look to aviation, which underwent reform following the crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009. He said maritime has a lot to learn from an industry which now encourages those on the flight deck to challenge the captain.

“One of the things aviation had worked on was removing the cult of the god captain,” he said.

“That was particularly relevant for the shipping industry, which historically had a command-and-control culture. ‘I’m the master, you’re the third mate, don’t you challenge what I’m saying.’ That was the mindset.

“[In aviation,] if you think something’s wrong, you are allowed and encouraged and expected to speak up, and the old guy with the grey hair is expected to listen and pay attention. That’s where aviation got to, and that’s where, in the case of shipping, we are moving to – that is to say, on the bridge, everyone’s equal.

“If you have that culture in an operational environment, you will have a very robust safety culture.”

Mr Parmeter pointed to another example of how diversity can change the culture of an industry – this one within the maritime industry itself. The Sydney ferries have managed to transform their culture significantly over the years, he said.

“If you go into Sydney ferry now, you’re likely to be greeted by a young woman who’s standing on the other side of a gangway with a smile on her face, welcoming you on board,” he said.

“There are so many young people working on the ferries now … young women, in particular. Now, it’s changing a culture in the workplace. And I’ve seen the staff being really helpful to people [who] don’t know how the system works.

“It’s a changed mindset, which I would say is driven 99.9% by having people in those jobs who actually give a damn, and all credit to Sydney Ferries for what they’ve done in terms of being able to achieve that change.”

The Cape Don community

Another organisation working towards diversity and inclusion is the Sea Heritage Foundation, which has grown around the conservation of MV Cape Don, a historic lighthouse supply tender and navigational aids maintenance ship.

Sea Heritage Foundation was set up in 2004 to carry out the maintenance and refurbishment of the old vessel, which was found abandoned in Sydney Harbour. The MV Cape Don Society was created for the volunteers engaged in the work.

The Sea Heritage Foundation is working to a 10-year strategic plan to dry dock Cape Don, diversify its income and create training and employment pathways for Indigenous Australians. The plan also involves the development and expansion of a range of arts, culture and community engagement programs on board.

Sea Heritage Foundation chairman and co-director CJ Manjarres-Wahlberg described the society as a melting pot of diversity. Of the society’s 70 members, about 20 volunteers are regularly involved on board.

“The youngest is about 15 or 16 years old, and he comes on board with his dad, and they volunteer together as a father and son,” Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg said.

“Our oldest volunteer has just turned 80. He’s an engineer who has lived and worked in Antarctica as a scientist. He’s worked on ships; he’s worked as a university professor. And then we’ve had volunteers who work in automotive that just want to chip rust out, and we’ve got people who just want to clean.

“We have university students, retired people, people who are middle aged, working in their professions who just want to come on and do something.

“It’s really interesting to see the different backgrounds and the different interests and motivations of people and why they want to just do something different on the ship.”

Career foundations

Within the wider Sea Heritage community there is a dedicated program providing general purpose hand training to enter the maritime industry with a Certificate I in Maritime Operations. The program was designed especially for First Nations people, with a goal to increase the number of Indigenous Australians trained and employed in the maritime industry by 5% in 10 years.

“We looked into Indigenous employment in the maritime industry, and it was really poor,” Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg said.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics had provided Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg with employment data suggesting there was an opportunity to train more Indigenous Australians for maritime careers.

The Sea Heritage Foundation decided it could use this opportunity to make a meaningful contribution. Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg met with other companies around Australia who had run similar programs to find out what worked, and what didn’t.

“There was a bit of a common thread through things that hadn’t worked well, and that was because we were taking a training package that was designed for white fellas. It was death by PowerPoint. It was boring, and people lost interest,” he said.

“There wasn’t a lot of practical elements; you sit in the classroom the whole time.

“Nothing was adapted to Indigenous learning styles. So, I rewrote the package – I got together with the Indigenous engagement team at TAFE NSW, told them what I wanted to do and why we wanted to do it. And then we worked together for 18 months to redesign [the package], so that it was targeted towards Indigenous learning styles.

“So instead of it being this highly theoretical course, we made it a competency-based course. There’s still theory involved, but it’s a learn-do philosophy. Whatever they learn in theory, they’re doing practically. So, we’ve tapped into Indigenous learning styles, and there’s a really heavy practical element to the training now, which is where the ship comes into it.”

Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg drew from his own naval background to create an environment where the job becomes a lifestyle, and students learn and work with their mates.

The first successful course was delivered in 2022 in partnership with TAFE NSW and The Prince’s Trust Australia (now The King’s Trust), a charity with the stated aim of helping young people prepare for the rapidly changing world of work. The second course commenced in July last year with the support of several program partners, including the North Sydney City Council, SERCO Defence Maritime Services, the Australian National Maritime Museum, Cunard Australia, Shipping Australia and Heron Construction NZ.

“The first two days of the course are about breaking down barriers to communication, teamwork and identity, which is really great,” Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg said.

“We take perfect strangers … and we need people to work as a team; we need them to communicate well, we need to get them to start finding similarities and patterns. And how do you do that? We do it through indirect learning. Over the first two days, that’s what the [King’s] Trust does.”

The course formally begins on the third day, by which point the students are already laughing together and getting along and beginning to work as a team. The three months that follow are about building on the foundations laid during the first couple of days together.

“In the morning they do their theory, they have lunch on board the ship together as a crew, then in the afternoon, they’re going through an afternoon watch cycle. They perform the maintenance and they do practical skills based on what they’ve done in theory. That cycle repeats itself over three months,” Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg said.

“We take individuals and turn them into a crew. When they get to their first employment, they know all about safety management systems, they know how to throw lines; they’ve actually done all this stuff on real vessels.”

Sea Heritage Foundation has partnered with the Australian National Maritime Museum to give students a more diverse range of vessels to train on.

“We’re providing this holistic, human-centred approach to education,” Mr Manjarres-Wahlberg said.

“I use the term ‘human-centred approach’ because it’s a holistic approach to the individual within the team. We’re identifying them as the learner, and we’re targeting the training to suit them. They’re small class numbers, but with that comes the quality of education that they’re getting. And you get a more rounded sailor at the end of it.”

A reflection of society

Sea Heritage Foundation’s work to address the Indigenous employment gap in the maritime industry fits into a larger industry effort to address workforce shortages. Diversity usually emerges as part of the solution to this seemingly never-ending issue; work is being done to make professions such as seafaring and stevedoring more inclusive of women, and to make the industry overall more appealing to a younger generation.

Newcomers bring with them the wealth of experience they have built up outside the industry. Different attitudes, approaches to problem-solving, leadership styles and skillsets can utterly transform a workplace. And a safe and inclusive maritime workplace – not to mention the thrill of a career in this industry – can transform a person.

Now, about reaching them.

Sea Heritage Foundation has relied on the TAFE network and the foundation’s own Indigenous Advisory Committee to get the word out about their program. And AMWS relies on charities such as the Salvation Army and Stepping Stone Foundation to establish a connection with someone who may benefit from the society’s maritime scholarship program, which involves training on a tall ship.

“One of the things we do is, in conjunction with other organisations, we facilitate tall ship training where young people get to have an experience sailing on a tall ship, such as the Young Endeavour,” Mr Parmeter said.

“These are young people who have done it tough; they’ve come from disadvantaged backgrounds,” he said.

“What we do is specific to the tall ship training, but it might be the Salvation Army or it might be Stepping Stone House, for example.

“They really give these young people an opportunity to grow and develop.

“The tall ship training has been a fantastic, eye-opening experience for them … you go down to meet them as they’re joining the Young Endeavour, and they’re shy and awkward. And they come back seven to 10 days later, and they’re a foot taller. And they’ll say things like, ‘I now know what I want to do in life.’

“I suppose that’s a small example of where someone who previously would have struggled to fit into the industry profile, or even think about the industry at all and really would have had no idea of a career in the industry, is now working in maritime, and the industry’s better for that, and quite obviously so is the individual.”

Mr Parmeter said AMWS is working to encourage better understanding of the career pathways available to people from all walks of life.

“It goes to this idea of what we can do to get the message out there. There’s a whole maritime industry out there which, for a lot of people, is completely below the radar. We want to have more diversity in that industry, with people with different skill sets.

“I think there’s a lot that could be done to make people more aware of the industry and the opportunities that are there. And this, again, goes to my concern that the industry [has] got a narrow base. It’s got to be for the future; we’ve got to broaden that base.

“As I said, we’ve got to have an industry that that resembles Australian society.”

This article appeared in the June 2024 edition of DCN Magazine