Barry Spooner, builder of Bertram and Caribbean boats, dies
One of the driving forces behind the success of Australian-made Bertram and Caribbean boats has died aged 81Barry Spooner, one of the driving forces behind the production of almost 60,000 Australian-built Bertram and Caribbean boats, has died aged 81.
His death late last month marks a remarkable chapter of boatbuilding in Australia, with the Bertram and Caribbean names built by Marine International inexorably linked with high-quality fibreglass runabouts and motor yachts, crowned by the Caribbean 49 Flybridge sports cruiser.
Working for the company founded by his father, Tom Piper canned food entrepreneur Arch Spooner, in 1958, Barry took over the Scoresby factory’s management in 1971, eventually handing the reins over to his son, Richard, in 2001.
In the 1950s, the factory, then named International Plastics, produced copies of British fibreglass boats.
However, in the 1960s it switched to producing bigger deep-vee and constant deadrise offshore motor yachts ranging between 25 and 42 feet that better suited Australia’s choppy waters, under licence from US powerboat enthusiast Dick Bertram.
In 1963, the Spooner family also became the national distributor for Mercury Marine with a 10-year Australia-wide franchise for outboard engines.
Change of name
The boats wore the Bertram name until 1989, when the end of a licencing deal forced a rebranding to Caribbean. However, resistance to wholesale change – Barry thought it better to make continual incremental improvements to the boats than shake up a successful formula – meant only a name change was necessary.
But it wasn’t just building boats; the Spooner family is also responsible for one of St Kilda’s iconic landmarks. Arch was instrumental in the development of the privately owned St Kilda marina, built in the late 1960s in response to a huge spike in demand for recreational boating.
Loosely based on the design of California’s Long Beach wet and dry berth marina in the US, the sawtoothed dry stacks look almost exactly the same as they did when they were built.
Under Barry’s guidance, the family’s property and manufacturing business, and the 120-hectare industrial site developed from International Marine’s landholdings in Scoresby, would turn the Spooner family into one of the richest in Australia, with assets estimated to be worth $240 million in 2002.
Barry Spooner’s legacy lives on beyond him; the Caribbean 35 first built in 1970 as the Bertram 35 is still being made today.
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