There were echoes of a bygone grander era of news publishing when the 14-metre motor yacht Lady Gay sailed into Hobart for the city’s biennial wooden boat festival this month.

Joe Wilson, a member of the family that had founded the New Zealand Herald, was given the kauri-planked launch – built in Auckland’s Ngataringa Bay in 1934 – as a 21^st birthday present.

Owner Graeme Wilson – who tells me, perhaps wistfully, that he’s not a direct descendant – says Wilson built a number of motor yachts as well as a 15-metre sailing yacht, single-handedly keeping the local boatbuilding industry alive.

The Lady Gay was one of hundreds of classic and contemporary wooden craft docked or trailed to Hobart’s Sullivan’s Cove waterfront for the festival attended by an estimated 300,000 and now the world’s largest.

Joe Wilson and his wife owned the Lady Gay for more than 40 years, although she was commandeered during World War 2 for coastal patrols (pictured), but saw no action during 8000 hours’ service.

She was extended with a two-metre aft section in 1968, a 375-horse 12-cylinder truck engine pushing her along at 17 knots (31 kmh). During an extensive restoration in 2001 she was stripped to bare timber and rebuilt, and repowered with a “more appropriate” 210-hp eight-litre Iveco engine to cruise at nine knots.

Graeme Wilson keeps the yacht in Sydney, but as a New Zealand “protected object”, she has to return to Auckland by 2027.

The Herald had been established in 1863 by William Wilson, whose sons merged the paper with that of journalist and tech pioneer Alfred Horton. The company was the country’s first with a rotary press (1883) and linotypes (1898), later launching the idea of classified advertising and helping found the NZ Press Association. Floated as a public company in 1925, it was taken over in 1996 by Dublin-based Independent News & Media, and sold to APN News & Media in 2001 and then NZME (of which News Corp sold out in 2016).

Peter Coleman