Peter’s October 2025 Blog

Welcome in the Red Dust

Port Hedland is not the sort of place that makes an easy first impression.

I’m writing from a low table in a small, sun-bleached house near the port, where the air hums with the scent of salt and metal. The horizon here is endless — a horizon of dust and light, where iron ore trains wait like centipedes to offload their burdens, and the land stretches away into nothingness. Port Hedland sits on the coast of Western Australia’s mining country, and the desert presses close against its edges. There’s a rawness to it all, a kind of honest hostility.

It’s a landscape so vast and unyielding that the thought of anyone “jumping ship” here — the old fear that haunts many ports — borders on the absurd. There is simply nowhere to go. In every direction, only red earth and an indifferent sky.

And yet, it is here, in this place of mines and dust, that I have found myself thinking about welcome.

The Scale of Things

I’ve travelled often in my role with The Mission to Seafarers — from Brazil to Bahrain, Mumbai to Manila — and been continually met with a warmth that humbles me. But arriving in Port Hedland was different somehow. Perhaps it is that my visit here has come midway through two months of continuous travel, with no opportunity to return home. I was tired, jet-lagged, and still carrying the tail end of a cold — one of those small punishments familiar to anyone who spends too much time on aeroplanes.

When I landed, Mee Ping, one of our chaplaincy team, was waiting for me at the airport and snatched me up to the place the MtS team here had prepared for me to stay during my visit. A man who had clearly spent too long on planes and too little time near a washing machine, it was as though they had somehow read my mind — and, in truth, my heart. I felt seen, valued, understood, and…well…welcomed.

What Makes a Welcome

This genuine welcome, I’ve realised, has had perhaps three parts.

First, it brings the vast down to size. The port here is monumental — enormous loaders and conveyors gnash at the earth like red dinosaurs, clawing the shoreline. It would be easy to be overawed, to feel lost in all that scale. But then a person smiles, someone who knows where they are and how it all works, and the world rearranges itself. You remember that for all its immensity, the world is still made of people.

Second, welcome is an act of empathy. The team here couldn’t share my precise experience — the weariness of travel, the homesickness that grows quieter but deeper as the days pass — but they tried to imagine it. They anticipated what might make me feel at ease. Even if they’d got it wrong, even if they’d offered, say, a roast dinner at one in the morning because “British people like roast dinners”, it would still have meant something. Because what matters is the attempt to see and respond to another person’s need.

And third, a true welcome gives you space. Across the global breadth of the Mission, my visits as Secretary General can’t be very frequent and sometimes there’s a lot that people quite naturally want to get out of them. As well as the experiences that will help me appreciate what our team here do and the context of their work, they have ensured a degree of time to catch-up, to reflect, to unwind.

What has the welcome here offered to me? Human scale, empathy, and space — and as I write these words, I realise that they are the very same things our people across the world offer to seafarers every day.

The Human Core

Only a few days before arriving here, I had been speaking to a large conference of shipping professionals in Perth, 1,600 kilometres south. My message there was simple: the future of maritime safety and sustainability depends on remembering that seafarers are not just components in a machine. They are people — complex, capable, emotional, relational. A seafarer is more than a “resource”. They are, in the truest sense, the industry’s lifeblood.

That idea seemed to resonate with the audience as something possibly new and creative. But the truth is, it’s not a new idea at all. It’s the very heart of The Mission to Seafarers — and has been for almost 170 years.

Sitting here in Port Hedland, the desert pressing in and the light fading over the ocean, I feel that truth again. Welcome — real welcome — is not finally about comfort or convenience. It’s about recognition. It’s about saying: I see you. I’ve tried to understand what it’s like to be you. You belong here.

That’s what our chaplains, staff and volunteers do every day. And it’s what I want to thank them for — in Port Hedland and in every port where the human heart still finds a way to be kind, and seafarers find with us the strength to navigate their journey ahead.