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Seaman Billy "Spider" Webb, played by Jay Ryan
Seaman Billy 'Spider' Webb, the new recruit to HMAS Hammersley, is a tender 18 years of age when we first meet him. Impressionable and enthusiastic, Spider can't wait to travel the world and wear the uniform with pride. It's a long way from the Innisfail North Queensland and the family sugar cane farm where Spider grew up. The farm's been in the family for generations, but can farming is getting harder every year and Spider's father has advised him to find a better future for himself. Spider and his father used to go hunting and hiking on the slopes of Mount Bartie Frer, from which you can see the ocean on one side and the emerald green rain forest on the other. It was almost as if he was being offered a choice - the cane or the sea, and he chose the sea.
Life on the land taught Spider some useful tools for survival - ingenuity, common sense, an ability to improvise. He's a crack shot with a rifle, which will endear him to both the Buffer and Chefo, and a handy fast bowler, which will get him in the Boss's good graces. But none of this ever prepared him for bouts of seasickness. There are times, clinging to his rack in the rolling sea, that Spider cruises himself for thinking that he could ever be a sailor.
Yet he is a lad eager to please and being no dill he applies himself to task at hand. He thrives on problem solving and over time will surely be known as the ship's resident fix-it man. In his spare time he is studying, picking up some missed Higher School Certificate subjects, because down deep Spider wants to succeed in this new world he's entered.
Love or rather how to fain any kind of interest from the opposite sex is a conundrum that Spider just can't seem to work out. His old man would clam up whenever he tries to talk about girls - and his mother - well Spider couldn't bear to ask him other for any advice in that department.
Like a lot of awkward young men, Spider gives himself too hard a time and he beats himself up over trivial mistakes. But he has a tenacious spirit - he always manages to land on his feet and in so doing he will slowly gain acceptance from the crew.
This wide-eyed kid is at the very start of a long love affair with the ocean and a journey that will broken his perspective of the world through the experiences and challenges that he meets.
If he ever looks back at where he came from, it won't be for long enough to start missing it. |
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