Ami Burns – Changes made to accommodate females on board

You’re used to going to sea with who your used to going to sea with. You know they’d watch specific films or they’d put posters up and things like that and they just had to be mindful that women would be walking around the platform. Even just down to the way that they might transit from their accommodation to the showers.

Some of them would happily transit from their accommodation with no clothes on previously but they now have to not do that. And again, you know, it’s all about having those lines of communication between … so for me as an Engineering Officer, I have to still say to the guys, “Look, have you got any problems with what we’re doing and how we’re living it and how can we change it? And I think every time we sent females to sea in the first few iterations it was ‘how can we make this transition easier?’

A great example was that we do something called ‘bird bathing’ which is when showers are out and water is rationed, you might sort of clean yourself in a sink of water, and there was an assumption that women would do this behind closed doors. Absolutely, that’s what we do, but there was nothing put up to hide the guys.

And so about a few weeks into the Patrol, somebody came to see me and said, “Ma’am, I’m not comfortable ‘bird bathing’ if you’re going to come into the showers and see me ‘bird bathing” and I said, “You’re absolutely right, we need to put a shower curtain up or we need to address that” and so the onus was making the females feel comfortable and we probably hadn’t focused as much on making sure that the guys were as comfortable as well, and that just takes time, and sometimes you need to experience these things to go, “Oh yeah, we need to address that.”