SS Talune

SS Talune in Port Chalmers graving dock, c. 1890s
History
Name:	SS Talune
Operator:	Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company / (1891 on) Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand
Builder:	Ramage & Ferguson, of Leith, Scotland
In service:	1890
Out of service:	1921
Fate:	Scuttled November 1925 at Waikokopu, Hawke Bay, New Zealand
General characteristics
Tonnage:	2,087 gross tons
Propulsion:	Single triple-expansion steam engine
Capacity:	175 passengers
Crew:	56 crew

Talune has been the name of three vessels. This article refers to the first SS Talune, built in 1890 and scuttled in 1925.

A second SS Talune was built in 1930 for the Union Steamship company of New Zealand and sold in 1959 to Transporte de Minerales, Panama, which renamed it the Amos. A 30-foot (9.1 m) motor launch named Talune was built in Hobart, Tasmania in 1914 and destroyed by fire at her moorings at Maria Island, Tasmania on 6 July 1929.

The first SS Talune was a passenger and freight steamship employed in the Tasman Sea and South Seas trades in the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. It was a typical ship of its time and type in every way. It would be unknown except that it was the ship that brought the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic from New Zealand to Samoa and other Pacific islands.

SS (steamship) Talune was built by Ramage & Ferguson, of Leith, Scotland, for the Tasmanian Steam Navigation Company of Hobart, Tasmania, entering service with the company in 1890. It was of 2,087 tons, about 230 feet long, coal fired, and powered by a triple-expansion steam engine. It had passenger accommodation for up to 175 people and a crew of around 56. Initially the Talune was employed on the Hobart-Sydney run for its parent company.

In 1891, the ship was taken over by the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand when it absorbed the Tasmanian company and its assets. The Talune worked thereafter between New Zealand and Australia, and later between New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

No complete record of the Talune's many voyages has been found, but the ship appears in a number of records from the time. In November 1891, the Talune took the British poet and writer Rudyard Kipling from Wellington to Bluff, and then on to Melbourne as part of a world tour. His opinion of the ship is not recorded. New Zealand poll tax records show that in May 1896 it brought one Ah Lun, a 34-year-old Cantonese man to Wellington from Sydney. In June 1897, it carried Carl Hertz from Bluff to Hobart. Hertz was an American "Illusionist and Prestigidator" who was the most successful early exhibitor to show motion pictures in New Zealand. In 1901, the Talune was the setting for a lethal poisoning reported in the Otago Witness in April.