Signals, issue 117

SIGNALS quarterly NUMBER 117 DECEMBER • JANUARY • FEBRUARY 2016–17

ANMM.GOV.AU $9.95

THE MUSEUM TURNS 25

Reflecting on a quarter century

WAR AND PEACE IN THE PACIFIC

A five-year commemoration begins

PIONEER SAILOR

Sydney’s first female race skipper

ANMM.GOV.AU

Contents SUMMER 2016–17

Acknowledgment of country The Australian National Maritime Museum acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora nation as the traditional custodians of the bamal (earth) and badu (waters) on which we work.

We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the land and waters throughout Australia and pay our respects to them and their cultures, and to elders past and present.

The words bamal and badu are spoken in the Sydney region’s Eora language.

Supplied courtesy of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.

Cultural warning Warning: People of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent should be aware that Signals may contain names, images, video, voices, objects and works of people who are deceased. Signals may also contain links to sites that may use content of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people now deceased.

Cover: Aerial view of the museum site, November 2016. Image Ken Butti/ Ground Control Pictures

3 BEARINGS From the director 5 CREATING A MUSEUM Our longest-serving employee reflects on the museum’s first quarter century 16 INSIDE THE BOX Containerised shipping – a global revolution 23 ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’ Irene Pritchard, pioneer female open-boat skipper 31 LADY DARLING AND PS HERALD New technologies help to survey and record old wrecks 39 RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILOR’S DELIGHT? Sailors’ weather lore – myth or meteorology?

44 WAR AND PEACE IN THE PACIFIC 1941–1946 We begin a five-year rolling commemoration of the Pacific War 48 MARITIME CONNECTIONS Photographer Harold Cazneaux’s family links to World War II 52 BIENNIAL MARITIME HISTORY AWARDS Inviting entries for prizes worth $5,000 55 PUBLIC ART AND HISTORY A new artwork remembers a Turkish–Australian engagement from World War I 60 FUNDRAISING SUPPORTS MUSEUM PROJECTS The aims of the Australian Maritime Foundation 64 KOORI ART EXPRESSIONS School art program explores Indigenous songlines 67 MESSAGE TO MEMBERS AND MEMBERS SUMMER EVENTS

Your calendar of activities, talks, tours and excursions afloat 78 SUMMER EXHIBITIONS Voyage to the Deep, Koori Art Expressions and Dogs and Cats All at Sea 85 MARITIME HERITAGE AROUND AUSTRALIA HMAS Creswell, training ground of the Royal Australian Navy 94 ‘COOL REAL STUFF’

Tactile learning with the museum’s Education Collection 100 COLLECTIONS New acquisitions of Indigenous fibre art and fashion 105 AUSTRALIAN REGISTER OF HISTORIC VESSELS Classic Tasmanian timber yachts 111 CURRENTS Museum benefactor RADM Andrew Robertson; Cazneaux family members visit the museum 114 TRANSMISSIONS Our latest app lets you tailor your own tour of the museum 116 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We acknowledge the museum’s principal supporters’

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Bearings FROM THE DIRECTOR

IN 1975 THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT published the findings of the Pigott Report, which argued the case for establishing a national maritime museum and collection.

Fast forward 16 years, and the magnificent Philip Cox–designed building in Darling Harbour was opened on 29 November 1991 by the Hon R J L Hawke, Prime Minister. Since then the Australian National Maritime Museum has grown into one of the world’s foremost museums and at its centre is a magnificent collection of more than 150,000 objects.

Our national maritime collection includes priceless treasures such as The Charlotte Medal – arguably the first art object produced by British colonists on Australian soil – through to Alik Tipoti’s magnificent linocut illustrating the age-old tradition of celestial navigation in the Torres Strait, which we acquired last year. Carefully selecting what comes into the national collection from literally thousands of offers each year is one of the most important decisions our curators make – not only because in acquiring these objects the museum assumes the responsibility of caring for them in perpetuity, but because it’s through these objects that we connect people today, with the stories of families and communities of bygone years.

Working in museums, we tend to think of our objects as storytelling tools that are imbued with an intrinsic sense of meaning. And it is the job of our curators and designers to extract this meaning and communicate it through the careful selection of labels, graphics and digital media. However, over my career I have come to appreciate that things are often not that simple, as meaning is never static.

Meaning is constantly evolving, and just as important is what our visitors bring to their encounter with our maritime objects.

It is the memories and life experiences that our visitors bring with them to the museum, the meaning they themselves create within their own eyes, head and heart, that really count.

This hit home for me in October this year when I hosted a visit to the museum by the Wilson family. More than 20 family members from across Queensland and New South Wales had travelled to Darling Harbour to view the World War I service medals of Joseph William Wilson, which they had just donated to the museum.

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01 AE1 submariner Joseph William Wilson,

whose relatives recently donated his World War I medals to the museum. Image courtesy Stuart Wilson

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Joseph Wilson was the chief Engine Room Artificer on board Australia’s first submarine, AE1. Joseph was on secondment to the RAN from the Royal Navy in 1914 and was one of 35 crew lost off the Duke of York Islands on 14 September that year. One hundred and two years later, the Wilson family passed his medals into our long-term care. As I chatted with each family member I noticed how all knew about the events surrounding the loss of AE1, as well as the continuing efforts by RADM Peter Briggs AO CSC to locate the wreck of the submarine.

However, it was the ‘imagined’ impact of Joseph’s sudden loss on his wife Elizabeth and their young son Stanley that was the overwhelming significance shared by every member of the modern-day Wilson family.

For over a quarter of a century, the museum has actively built a collection that in its breadth and diversity speaks to our complex national narratives, but I believe it is in the smaller, often seemingly quiet pieces that are to be found the genuine strength and value of our national maritime collection.

Kevin Sumption

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Creating a museum REFLECTIONS OF A FOUNDING STAFF MEMBER

On November 29, the museum celebrated 25 years since opening.

Senior Curator Daina Fletcher joined the museum in January 1987 as a founding staff member. Nearly 30 years later, she is now its longest-serving employee. We interviewed her about her impressions of the early days and how she helped to make the museum what it is.

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01 The museum building under construction,

1987. The Pyrmont Power Station in the background is now the site of apartment blocks and The Star casino. The warehouse on the far right has been replaced by the museum’s Wharf 7 Maritime Heritage Centre.

ANMM image

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DAINA, YOU’VE BEEN HERE SINCE 1987. What was it like working at the museum in the early days?

Daina Fletcher It was incredibly exciting. We were building a brand new museum – collections, exhibitions, even the building.

In the main we were young greenhorns – curators, designers and collection management staff gathered from far and wide.

Our mission, as we enthusiastically chose to accept it, was to develop new collections and wrestle them into a cohesive thesis about maritime Australia in exhibition form.

We asked ourselves what our visitors might expect to see in a museum dedicated to maritime history

We were working with the designers of the moment – Melbourne firm Denton Corker Marshall – to forge new national stories about maritime identity from selected historical themes, long overshadowed by narratives of the land and prosperity won off the sheep’s back. This presented a massive opportunity to assert histories of sea and river life into Australia’s cultural consciousness. And we watched our brand new building – the soaring white sails of Philip Cox – rising in the industrial wasteland that then was Darling Harbour.

We worked quite furiously, often long into the evenings, making connections, meeting people, hunting for historic objects. There were long and sometimes heated debates in team meetings about what constituted maritime history and how we could articulate that to satisfy and surprise our projected visitor base – tourists and locals alike – in three-dimensional exhibitions.

What were the plans for opening exhibitions?

The exhibition brief was thematic, prescriptive but sketchy – just ideas and words on paper. It was developed by social historian Peter Spearritt and amateur maritime historian Vaughan Evans, after whom the museum’s research library is now named.

02 When Queen Elizabeth II visited the museum

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in 1992, Daina quickly posed for this photo in front of the royal Bentley before dashing back inside to curtsey to Her Majesty. Image Daina Fletcher

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The brief sounds somewhat leaden today, but was reasonably progressive for its time, riding on the back of the rise of social history. Five exhibition themes had been identified: Discovery (an outrageous title, even at the time), Passengers (immigration), Commerce, Navy, and Leisure. By virtue of a government gift from the USA, to this list was added a sixth theme, Linked by the Sea, about Australian–American connections.

These themes embraced the expected and significant cavalcade of foundation stories of Europeans in Australia, of heroic naval men in the main, but also of immigrants, shipowners, seafarers and sailors, and the romance of old – but we also unabashedly absorbed new labour histories of stevedores and working men dockside and on the ships of the merchant marine. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) histories were critical, both as explorations within these parameters and then on their own terms.

It was an intellectually eager time as curators and designers wrestled with how best to convey meaning and interest visitors

Our challenge was to stretch and shape these themes into exhibition form. We were conscious of balancing personal stories, historical events, policy frameworks, Indigenous with non-Indigenous histories, muscular men’s histories and a women’s voice (with a few experiences of families and children) and ethnic and social cultural diversity.

This was an attempt to broaden the notion of maritime history to appeal to the maritime experiences and interests of all our audiences. We asked ourselves what our visitors might expect to see in a museum dedicated to maritime history and how could we interest them, when definitions until then had centred on ‘dead white men’ and ‘blokes and boats’. What might Australians need to see, and enjoy seeing, in a national maritime museum?

03 One of the museum’s first acquisitions – one

of a pair a watercolours by Richard Browne of Aboriginal people fishing. ANMM image

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What of international tourists?

While the ATSI area was initially charted in the Discovery theme, curators developed an exhibition of Indigenous-centred maritime stories based on community life and traditions and removed it from the storytelling about European explorers.

I was able to take the cultural history of the beach, which had been mooted as a future temporary exhibition, and move it into the central leisure narrative of sailing and speedboating.

So ANMM became one of the first maritime museums in the world to include swimwear in its collections and the beach in its exhibition platform. Today we have one of the best collections of swimwear in Australia.

How did the exhibition process work?

It was an intellectually eager time as curators and designers wrestled with how best to convey meaning and attract and interest visitors. What were the roles of artefacts and design in exhibitions? What of the notions of icon objects, everyday objects, objects of social or personal history? How didactic should the narrative be? What of the role of re-creations such as immigrant ship interiors and experiential designs coming out of the UK? What about the circulation path, signage and visitor flow?

We were all excited by a new museology in the early 1990s that favoured design as the driving force. Things often got heated as links, stories or meanings were created or subverted through precise and at times overly considered placement of objects. We seem to having the same arguments today, albeit among a broader and different range of disciplines, with the rise of interpretative and creative directors.

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ANMM became one of the first maritime museums in the world to include swimwear in its collections

Back then, with the rise of interpretative storytelling and the discipline of social history, the era of uninterpreted icon objects in showcases had passed. Also we didn’t have many icon objects. We were on the hunt.

Tell us about early collecting.

It was a mammoth effort, a crazy acquisition program, lots of talking and cups of tea, looking, thinking, forming connections and relationships to identify material for the national maritime collection and its opening displays.

We were artefact hunters – not excavating artefacts from the earth like Indiana Jones (or indeed the water) – but working with community groups, families, descendants and collectors, and visiting galleries and auction houses, organisations, sailing clubs and shipping companies to identify historic material.

We hunted the rare, the everyday, the typical, and personal provenance stories of items relating to individual people.

04 Daina among swimming costumes from the

museum’s collection during a photoshoot for Woman’s Day magazine in 1987. Image Daina Fletcher

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One curator actually talked a tourist into surrendering the shirt off his back as we sought social commentary about the 1987 America’s Cup challenge at Fremantle: ‘What cup?,’ it shouts.

Our collection grew from humble beginnings – material transferred from the Department of Transport, several ancientmariner collections of merchant shipping and whaling, and glass-plate photographic collections of boating and shipping on Sydney Harbour. We had several key icon objects, including two boats – the world’s fastest boat, Spirit of Australia, and the widely celebrated working men’s craft, the 18-footer Britannia – plus the spectre of a third, the triumphant 12-Metre yacht Australia II. We had the Browne watercolours, two stunning early views of Aboriginal people fishing on Sydney Harbour. And then we developed an on-water fleet reflecting collection policies aligned to our key themes and forged by several government gifts. Akarana, the aspirant to centennial colonial regattas in 1888, was a gift from the government and people of New Zealand on the occasion of Australia’s Bicentennial a century later; the restored Kathleen Gillett, round-the-world yacht and Sydney to Hobart contestant, was another Bicentennial gift, this time from the Norwegian government. We also located and acquire a Vietnamese refugee boat, Tu Do (meaning Freedom), an Indonesian lete lete, the ex-navy destroyer HMAS Vampire and submarine HMAS Advance, and World War II commando vessel Krait on transfer from the Australian War Memorial. Wow!

05 Daina and assistant curator Kevin Jones with

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the tank test model of America’s Cup winner Australia II, 1990. Image Jenni Carter/ANMM

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With the exception of the watercolours, it all sounds very blokey and muscular, doesn’t it? It was and it wasn’t. Half our curatorial staff and our senior curator then were women and we worked hard and long to acquire women’s stories. The challenge was to represent the stories of cultural and ethnic diversity rolling off the back of strong government initiatives in this area at the time, but also those of gender diversity.

We were all excited by a new museology in the early 1990s which favoured design as the driving force

How has the museum changed and grown?

The museum’s role has broadened and deepened as it has matured. We have become more multi-disciplinary in all respects. From being predominantly a history museum – the biggest such museum in Sydney – we have become a museum of the art, science and history of maritime Australia, increasingly global on our reach and explorations. Then there are obvious changes to daily working life over the years. ‘What do you mean, they pay me to go to the library?’ When I started I was amazed that I was paid to go the library, and go to the library we must; now the library is at our fingertips. ‘My goodness, they have a typing pool!’ Indeed we had a typing pool, and we had to book time on a computer.

What have been personal highlights for you among the museum’s programs?

Personal highlights, all developed with energetic curatorial and multi-disciplinary teams, are those involving collaborations: seeding and launching the national collaborative program

06 Les Genies de la Mer exhibited

masterpieces of French naval sculpture from the 17th to 19th centuries.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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the Australian Register of Historic Vessels (ARHV); our Nawi conference in 2012 and the ATSI watercraft program that arose from its deliberations; and publishing the first national guide to Australian maritime museums and collections in Australia as President of the Australian Maritime Museums Council in 2000. Recently I have really enjoyed working on art programs, exhibitions and several public art commissions to enliven the museum’s outdoor spaces. For the museum, art is a new way of connecting people to the maritime world.

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We worked quite furiously, often long into the evenings, making connections, meeting people, hunting for historic objects

What were the most exciting collaborations?

Collaborative exhibition favourites were the Annette Kellerman Woollen Mermaids project for the travelling exhibition Exposed! on the history of Australian swimwear with the Queensland University of Technology. It was very contemporary and presented a fresh perspective on Australia’s swimming and swimwear history. We challenged designers of the moment – including Anna & Boy, Hotel Bondi Swim and Seafolly – and influential designers Paula Stafford, Gloria Smythe and Brian Rochford, as well as students, to produce swimsuits in a black wool lycra, which reinterpreted the life, times and swimwear of swimmer and silent film star Annette Kellerman in the early 20th century.

In association with National Museums Liverpool, UK, we developed the travelling exhibition On their Own about British–Australian child migration schemes. It aimed to raise awareness of past policies and their effects on the children and their families in the hope of more formal acknowledgement.

It was compelling, tragic and deeply resonant in the way it bound personal histories with broader national histories in the social and political climate of the time – especially when, during development in 2009, the Australian government issued an apology to child migrants.

07 The former Watermarks Gallery, a project

that Daina managed, focused on recreation, popular culture and ideas of Australian identity. ANMM image 08 The Eora: First People permanent exhibition

showcases Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture and history. Image Andrew Frolows/ ANMM

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What was the most stunning exhibition?

There is a special place in my heart for beauty and aesthetic excellence as an articulation of cultural meaning. My very favourite collaborative exhibition was all this and more – a stunning gilded spectacle of exoticism and empire, propaganda and pageantry at the same time. Championed by former director Mary-Louise Williams and in association with the Musée National de la Marine, Paris, and the Musée des Beaux Arts de Quebec, Canada, Les genies de la mer brought the excess and riches of the maritime decorative arts and politics of the French ancien regime to Australia. It was a huge opportunity to add contextual works for Australian audiences less familiar with this era or with the significant but underappreciated art of naval sculpture.

Half our curatorial staff and our senior curator then were women and we worked hard and long to acquire women’s stories

And your most exciting find?

That would have to be the original figurehead of the 1888 gaff cutter Akarana. I researched and located many former owners of the boat and found the figurehead with its roughly carved face of a Maori woman in the garage of the Goard family in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, where it had been converted to a wall ornament. It was a total surprise to all.

What were the most unexpected projects?

If you had told me when I was aged 15 and riding our horse down a country road that just a few years later I’d be climbing and crawling over the insides of boats, inhaling tar and timber, marking original planks or fittings to be retained, or that I’d know what a knee, a spline or a gunwale was, I would have

09 Of the staff pictured at a celebration for the

museum’s 10th anniversary in 2001, three are still here: Shipwright Lee Graham (fifth from left), Senior Curator Daina Fletcher (second from right) and Sally Fletcher, Manager Registration and Photography (far right; no relation to Daina). Image Jeffrey Mellefont/ANMM

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fallen over backwards. In fact I still cannot believe that I acquired and applied this knowledge born of necessity (and some background in archaeology) when drafting curatorial guidelines for historic vessels. Now we have expert yacht designers and specialised historic vessel curators, so this part of my job seems like a dream.

Have there been any controversies?

Only a few, largely revolving around artefacts – mainly the sensitivities of politicians (to cartooning) or artists (to pastiche or mash-ups, now an accepted critical practice), but I do have a few confessions. One is of taking a cab back to the museum in a slightly merry state with conservator Michael Staples after spending the day with legendary round-the-world sailor and raconteur Jack Earl. Jack wouldn’t talk until you had a whisky.

First there was the obligatory tea, then a whisky chaser – tough at 11 am!

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And at risk of further stretching the code of conduct (it was a long time ago… ), I remember my old dog Rhys padding into the museum offices after hours looking for me. We sat him on the assistant director’s chair wearing a museum tie. He was my ‘security’ dog when I was working late.

What are your hopes for the museum’s future and your involvement with it?

As a ‘gold watch’ employee (though I don’t need it just yet … I’m having too much fun!), I can see clearly how the museum has repositioned itself as both a global leader with an international audience and as an integral part of Australia’s cultural landscape within a renewed Darling Harbour precinct.

I have always enjoyed working at the museum, in particular the challenge of repositioning traditional male histories into new perspectives around the idea of an island nation. Whereas in the past for me it was about gender and cultural diversity in its broadest sense, now it is about global dynamics and issues such as geopolitics, climate change and the environment.

As an Australian of Latvian heritage, I am aware, too, of just how important immigration remains to the nation, and to the museum’s reach and profile. All these complexities are currently being channelled into renewed exhibition programs using art, science, history and mystery as lenses to engage our audiences in innovative ways that have not been implemented anywhere else in the world. Very exciting.

10 Daina’s companion Rhys (‘the Wonderdog’)

guarding the office dressed in a museum tie and scarf. Image Daina Fletcher

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Daina’s top five collection items The Charlotte medal is the museum’s earliest European art object made in the colony – just days after Europeans landed – by convicted forger Thomas Barrett, allegedly from a kidney dish for a surgeon on the First Fleet. Delicately engraved, it shows tremendous resourcefulness.

Two journals – Robert Robertson Smyth’s from 1902 is a story of love and mystery that reads like a gripping novel. In it he accounts for the practicalities of life on board and also his emotional state, his love and longing for Nin, his sweetheart farewelled on the wharf at Sydney. He has a lively pen and it’s full of gorgeous drawings, and overall reveals the disjuncture in the lives of sailors with families left behind. Also we are left wondering if they ever met again. Then there’s Henry William Downes’s 1846–47 log of the whaling barque Terror, one of flamboyant entrepreneur Ben Boyd’s whaling ships. More beautiful drawings, this time of a bloody industry with an array of characters born of an Errol Flynn movie.

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01 Convict Thomas Barrett, engraver of The

Charlotte Medal, holds two Australian firsts – first European creator of an artwork in the new colony, and its first person to be hanged.

ANMM Collection 00045213 02 Henry William Downes’s log of the whaling

barque Terror. ANMM Collection 00038301.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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Handkerchiefs and scarves are deeply personal, powerful little emblems of emotion.

ANMM’s disparate handkerchief collections evoke tears of joy, separation, departure, fear, loss, love and friendship. These resonant little artefacts come from asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants, voyagers, internees, adventurers, spectators and sportspeople.

We hold an enigmatic handkerchief about which I quizzed potential curators at job interviews, asking them, ‘How would you assess this?’

Embroidered with a delicate red cross near one corner, it was sent anonymously to the museum. It meant something to its owner and now it means something to us.

Australian Muriel Binney’s 20-metre-long watercolour panorama of Sydney Harbour was awarded first prize in the first Australian exhibition of women’s work in Melbourne in 1907. She was invited to show the work in London the following year to further acclaim.

I just love everything about this piece – its scale, subject and ambition and the fact that it’s by a woman artist.

Of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections, I love most of it – a great range of artists, materials, practices, forms and explorations from political to traditional. It’s very contemporary and broad in scope.

Our Indigenous Programs staff have been acquiring some magnificent works – my favourites are Nawurapu Wunungmurra’s contemporary Mokuy spirits from north-east Arnhem Land (see Signals 116), which join carved and woven figures of Mimi and Yawkyawk by female Maningrida sculptors, including Lena Yarinkura – absolutely stunning.

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03 Yawkyawk (mermaid) by Lena Yarinkura, 1961.

Yarinkura was the first artist to use fibre to depict mythological figures. ANMM Collection 00031794. ANMM image

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04 The enigmatic handkerchief sent anonymously

to the museum. ANMM Collection.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM 05 Detail of Muriel Binney’s watercolour

of Sydney Harbour, showing the Heads.

ANMM Collection 00008645–7. ANMM image

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Inside the box

60 YEARS OF THE INTERMODAL SHIPPING CONTAINER The sailing of the Ideal-X in April 1956 marked the beginning of a shipping revolution at once profound and largely invisible.

Sixty years on, curator Dr Mary-Elizabeth Andrews lifts the lid on the ‘world the box made.’1

01 01 The nation’s lifeline, acrylic on board, James Thomson,

1991. Reproduced courtesy James Thomson.

ANMM Collection 00033939 Gift from James Thomson

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TAKE A MOMENT to look around you. Are you sitting at home, at work, on a train, in a cafe? What’s in the room, in your bag, on your feet? Chances are, many of the things you encounter have travelled by shipping container. If you’re reading this article in the new digital Signals format, your iPad not only arrived in Australia on a container ship, its various parts traversed the globe during its complex and highly integrated supply and manufacturing process. Its display and camera were made in Japan, its touch-screen sensors in Taiwan, its processor in the United States, its gyroscope in France and Italy.2 And this does not account for the origins of its raw materials or their assembly, packaging and distribution points.

Before the container, loading cargo was a labour-intensive, backbreaking business

A product like this only makes sense in a world fundamentally transformed by the shipping container. The simple steel box may seem an unlikely candidate for a global revolution. It is, after all, just a box. But the impact of the container is far less about what it is than what it has made possible: intermodal transportation networks bridging ocean, road and rail; streamlined port operations that keep ever-larger ships on the move; global supply chains that give manufacturers the flexibility to pick and choose production centres; a sophisticated cold chain delivering fresh and frozen produce all year round; and, ultimately, the economies of scale that ensure shipping is, per unit, the cheapest mode of transport available.

This is why, despite appearances to the contrary, seaborne trade still accounts for 90 per cent of all global trade by volume.

In Australia that figure is closer to 99 per cent.

02 Wharfies positioning wool bales in the cargo

hold of the Magdalene Vinnen, Samuel J Hood Studio, 1933. ANMM Collection 00035586

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The container’s economies of scale are perhaps best illustrated by the ships that carry them. The largest container ships today are 400 metres long – considerably longer than the Eiffel Tower is high – and capable of carrying more than 18,000 TEU, or twenty-foot equivalent units. This is the standard but imprecise measurement for ISO shipping containers, which come in 10-foot (3-metre), 20-foot (6-metre), 40-foot (12-metre) and 45-foot (13.7-metre) varieties and include extra-volume highcubes, insulated ‘reefers’ with built-in temperature controls for refrigerated cargo, open-topped and flat containers for irregular and oversized goods, and tank containers for liquids and gases. Among the biggest ships today are the ‘Triple E’ class ships, named after shipping giant Mærsk’s latest generation of container ships, the first to take the leap to 18,000-TEU capacity in 2013.

The box was born into an industry that had changed little since the second half of the 19th century

Before the box The box was born into an industry that had changed little since the adoption of the steam engine and steel hull during the second half of the 19th century. Despite some mechanisation, many of its practices dated back further still, particularly the loading of ‘break bulk’ cargo – the goods of varying sizes and weights that arrived at the dock in barrels, sacks, baskets, crates and pallets to be loaded onto slings and hauled aboard.

03 The first sailing of the world’s first container

ship, the Ideal-X, on 26 April 1956. Courtesy Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

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From the deck the cargo was sent down to gangs in the ship’s hold, whose job it was to unload and manoeuvre each item into irregular spaces with handcart, hook and brute force.

This was a labour-intensive, backbreaking business. It was also time consuming. A single ship could be held in port for a week or more to unload and load again, all the time making no money for the ship owner.

Seaborne trade still accounts for 90 per cent of all global trade by volume

In the post-World War II United States, the situation was hindered further by a dependence on small and inefficient Liberty ships, the cheaply constructed cargo vessels built as an emergency provision by the United States Maritime Commission between 1941 and 1945 and sold to merchant lines at war’s end.

Tight government regulation sheltered the shipping industry from competition, and there was little incentive to push for change when vast sums would be needed to modernise ships and docks that would still rely on manual labour.

As Marc Levinson, author of The Box, shows, when change did come, it came not from the staid shipping industry, but from an entrepreneurial trucker with a keen talent for squeezing every last drop of profitability from his fleet.3

04 Containers on board Hapag-Lloyd’s Boston

Express, a 4,639-TEU ‘Panamax’ container ship built in 1993, travel through the Panama Canal, c 2014. Image courtesy Hapag-Lloyd

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The X factor In a series of convoluted financial transactions, self-made trucking magnate Malcom McLean purchased the ailing PanPacific Steamship Corporation, followed shortly by its parent company, Waterman Steamship, both in 1955. The idea was to put truck trailers on ships along United States east coast routes to circumvent the interstate trucking industry’s own regulatory restrictions and to open up new territories. McLean soon realised that transporting truck bodies only, without the accompanying trailer chassis, would save considerable space. This was the spark of the container ship idea and in keeping with his propensity for action over analysis, within a year McLean purchased two World War II tankers and converted them to carry his new custom-built 33-foot (10-metre) containers.

On 26 April 1956 the Ideal-X set sail from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas, with 58 containers on board. Though wooden and metal cargo boxes, ‘containers’ of one form or another, had been in use for several decades, this was the first conclusive demonstration of the economic viability of containerisation.

Not only did McLean’s boxes withstand the 4,830-kilometre journey lashed to the deck of the converted tanker, cargo

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05 MV Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, the lead

ship of the Triple E class container vessels, in port at Felixstowe, Suffolk, England, 2015. Image Martin Charles Hatch/ Shutterstock.com

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handling costs were reduced from US$5.83 per ton to just 16 cents.4 Such massive savings had eluded prior containerisation efforts, where unwieldy boxes had been loaded onto traditional cargo ships, vying for space with mixed cargo. There was also the matter of port infrastructure. McLean had invested in heavyduty shore-side cranes with custom-made spreaders, slashing the transfer time from ship to waiting truck.

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The container was both a symptom of and a catalyst for a new era of globalisation

While not the ‘inventor’ of the shipping container, Malcom McLean was certainly its most ardent advocate during the early years of containerisation. Despite the success of his experiment, an industry-wide shift was slowed by the huge capital investment required, both in terms of fleet conversion and on the docks. Many onlookers hedged their bets, waiting, in particular, for a verdict on standardisation. When it came it prompted an accelerated uptake of the new technologies.

The world container ship fleet, estimated at just 16,000 TEU in 1965, jumped to 140,500 by 1970 and increased more than tenfold by 1990 to 1,765,868.5 Ships themselves also grew in capacity over this period.

The 1980s saw the emergence of 3,000–4,000 TEU ‘Panamax’ ships. The name refers to the maximum size that could fit within the locks of the Panama Canal. An expansion of the canal, costing at least US$5.4 billion and completed in June this year, accommodates ships up to 12,500 TEU, the ‘New Panamax’ class, but not the Triple E.

Box world The result of this growth, which didn’t show any signs of slowing until the global financial crisis hit in 2008, was the fundamental transformation of the shipping industry, its associated transport systems, labour practices and work

06 Aileen Rogers, Wilhelmsen Line container

ship berthed in Darling Harbour, 1992.

ANMM Collection 00029645 07 Charles Bush, Everything Light After Rain,

1986. ANMM Collection 00039804 Gift from Mærsk Australia Pty Ltd

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > INSIDE THE BOX

cultures, and the economies it serves. Centuries-old shipping companies failed to adapt, as did many ports, while new and amalgamated liner companies were able to consolidate about three-quarters of the world’s container business among the top 20 players. From the 1990s, a new era of piracy arose, placing ever-smaller crews in very real danger of hostage and ransom.

New challenges stem from terrorism and other forms of illegal trade, which become more and more difficult to police as container volumes increase, while the proliferation of open registries, or ‘flags of convenience’, complicates the shipping industry’s legal, economic and environmental responsibilities.

Sixty years on, it is worth taking stock of the container and its impact. As influential as the maiden voyage of the Ideal-X was, the container did not arrive in a vacuum. It was both a symptom of and catalyst for a new era of globalisation prompted by post-war political and economic changes and accelerated by advances in technology and communications. But as JeanPaul Rodrigue and Brian Slack argue, globalisation could not have taken its present form without containerisation.6 In terms of its contribution to trade growth, the container outstrips all other trade facilitation factors.7 ‘How ironic’, writes British journalist Rose George, ‘that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.’8 With close to 700 million container movements in and out of the world’s ports each year and Australian container traffic set to rise from 7.5 million in 2014 to 19.4 million by 2033,9 perhaps it’s time we made a little more room in our imagination.

08

1 Marc Levinson, The box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2006, p 1 2 Christopher Minasians, ‘Where are the iPhone, iPad and Mac designed, made and assembled?’, MacWorld Online, 18 April 2016: macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/are-appleproducts-truly-designed-in-california-made-in-china-iphonese-3633832/ 3 Levinson, pp 36–53 4 Martin Stopford, Maritime Economics, third edition, Routledge, London and New York, 2009, p 509 5 Stopford, p 508 6 Jean-Paul Rodrigue and Brian Slack, ‘Intermodal Transportation and Containerization’, The Geography of Transport Systems, people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch3en/ conc3en/ch3c6en.html 7 Rodrigue and Slack 8 Rose George, Ninety percent of everything: Inside shipping, the invisible industry that puts clothes on your back, gas in your car, and food on your plate, Picador, New York, 2013, p 2 9 The World Bank, ‘Container port traffic (TEU: 20 foot equivalent units)’, 2014, data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.SHP.GOOD.TU. UNCTAD, ‘Container port throughput, annual, 2008-2014,’ unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/TableViewer/tableView. aspx?ReportId=13321; Australian Government Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, ‘Research Report 138: Containerised and non-containerised trade through Australian Ports to 2032-33’, Bureau of Infrastructure and Regional Economics, Canberra, 2014, p 71

08 Mass-produced Liberty and Victory ships

formed the backbone of the United States post-war merchant fleet. Watercolour, Can Dock Langemak Bay N G, Allaster K McDougall, 1944. ANMM Collection 00044433 Gift from Allaster K McDougall © and reproduced courtesy Allaster K McDougall

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’

‘This venturesome young lady’ IRENE PRITCHARD, SYDNEY’S FIRST FEMALE RACE SKIPPER

In the late 19th century, a young Sydney woman took the dinghy-racing world by storm in an odd little boat as wide as it was long. Åsa Wahlquist profiles the ground-breaking Irene Pritchard.

01 01 Irene and her brothers Fred and Harry sailing

Zephyr. Despite her highly impractical attire, Irene survived two capsizes in one season.

Image William James Hall, ANMM Collection 00002619 Gift from Bruce Stannard

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’

ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1898, Irene Pritchard became the first woman to race a sailing boat on Sydney Harbour.

Skippering the tiny eight-footer (2.4-metre) Zephyr on a rainy day with a strong, cold southerly wind, she took to the front early and won her first race with two minutes to spare.

The Sunday Times reported that the eight-footers’ race formed an exciting part of yesterday’s programme owing to the fact that one of the small racers was in charge of a lady, Miss Irene Pritchard. That victory fell to this venturesome young lady, is perhaps not so much to be wondered at as that she would risk a wetting and the possibility of a capsize on such a day as yesterday proved.

Irene achieved her fame in arguably one of the most absurd boats of the era: her little boat was as wide as it was long

The next month Irene became the first woman to sail a winner in a Sydney regatta – the Anniversary Regatta. She only sailed for one season, but in that time her fame spread as far as Britain.

Irene took to the water at the height of the open-boat era, when hugely over-canvassed boats competed for lucrative prizes, and sailing was as popular with the punters as horse racing. Observers crowded the foreshores and followed the races in ferries. Betting on the boats, though not legal, was widespread, and punters avidly followed their favourite skippers.

The open boats pushed the limits. The length was mandated but the beam, depth and sail size were not. In the 1890s there were boats of just about every length, from 24-footers (7.3 metres), which could carry a crew of up to 20 men, down to the mosquitoes of the fleet, the 6-footers (1.8 metres).

02 Diagram of Zephyr from Australian Wooden

02

Boats, Volume One, reprinted from The Yachtsman, 13 April 1899

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’

03

Irene achieved her fame in arguably one of the most absurd boats of the era: her little boat Zephyr was as wide as it was long. It was reported to carry an 18-foot (5.5 metre) mast, 16-foot (4.9 metre) boom, a 10-foot-6-inch (3.2-metre) gaff and a 10-foot (3-metre) bowsprit.1 Photographs show her dressed in the voluminous blouses and, presumably, the dresses and skirts of the era. How she did not drown when they capsized – and she capsized twice in her first six months – is a mystery.

Into a man’s world Irene was the only girl in a family of eight children. Her father, at least three brothers and her eventual husband were all boatbuilders. Her brother Harry designed and built the small boat in which she sailed, after a discussion with his father as to whether the limit of beam of a sailing boat had been reached.

The Pritchards registered Zephyr with the Johnstone’s Bay Sailing Club (JBSC). This bay lies between Balmain and Pyrmont and today is spanned by the Anzac Bridge. Irene was elected as the first female member of the club in December 1898. The JBSC was both her local club – Balmain Sailing Club had folded, though it would later form again – and arguably the most innovative club in Sydney at the time, and the most likely to accept a woman as a member.

The club was established to promote class racing and to allow professionals to sail with amateurs. By 1889–90 it had the largest fleet of any club in Australia. The crack skippers of the time – Chris Webb, Tom Colebrook, Billy Read, George Holmes, Billy Golding and George Ellis – all raced with JBSC.

03 The course of the eight-footer races,

covering some 11.5 kilometres.

Drawing by David Payne/ANMM

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’

It also provided handsome prize money. In December 1898, for the 18-footer championships – one of the star events of the club – the first prize of £10 was won by Chris Webb, possibly one of the greatest sailors to race on Sydney Harbour, in The Australian. For Irene’s first win, Zephyr and its crew won £1 10 shillings, a handy sum when average weekly earnings were £1 7s.2 Bruce Stannard, in Bluewater Bushmen, said of the open boat sailors:

Irene took to the water at the height of the open-boat era, when hugely over-canvassed boats competed for lucrative prizes

They were workers, wharf labourers, miners, boatbuilders, ironworkers, watermen and factory hands … In designing, building and sailing their own ‘working men’s yachts’ they forged the legend of the great open boats that endures today.3 Perhaps Irene survived in this male environment because she was raised with seven brothers, and only sailed with them – and Harry, six years older, might have protected her from the worst – and also because, at the age of 23, she had the maturity to cope with it.

‘The champion lady “yachts man”’ Sailing clubs in the 1890s differed in a number of ways from those of today.

Most did not have clubhouses: they met in local hotels and sailed from local boatsheds. Nor did they race every weekend.

Over the 1898/99 season, JBSC held only five races for eightfooters, but boats could also race with other clubs when the opportunity arose.

04 Irene Pritchard and one of her brothers

04

in Zephyr, 1899. Photo courtesy Nedlands Library, WA

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’

The clubs Irene sailed with all followed the same course for eight-footers: from Goat Island, which lies between the Harbour Bridge (yet to be built in Irene’s racing days) and Balmain, down the harbour and around Shark Island, off Vaucluse, and back to Goat Island.

Irene’s second race was in the Eight-Foot Championship of the Port Jackson Dingy (sic)4 Club, two weeks later on 7 January 1899. Zephyr capsized.

Her third race was in the Anniversary Day Regatta, now known as the Australia Day Regatta, on 26 January 1899. Irene became the first woman both to sail in the regatta, and to win an Anniversary Day race.

The Sydney Mail reported that the room at the Hotel Australia was crowded for the award night: … when Miss Irene Pritchard, accompanied by her brother, came forward, there were loud applause and hearty cheers … In addition to the prize money the committee awarded a handsome gold medal to the young lady.

The next month, Irene raced with the Sydney Dingey (sic) Club.

The Sydney Mail reported: ‘The now famous Zephyr, with her young lady skipper, Miss Pritchard, again distinguished herself, and sailing through the fleet was ahead of affairs before Shark Island was reached.’ She increased her lead, to win first prize of £1 10s.

The following Saturday, 12 February 1899, Irene again raced again with JBSC. Her handicap, which was five minutes in her first race, had understandably been pulled back to scratch.

Zephyr came second, possibly because of the tactics of the third-placed boat, which was disqualified after Zephyr protested.

Irene capsized in her next race, with the Port Jackson Dingy Club.

The JBSC held its club championships for 18-, 10- and eightfooters on 25 February 1899. Chris Webb in The Australian was again victorious in the 18-footers. He always attracted an enthusiastic following and it is possible Irene received some of his reflected glory.

According to the Evening News: … in the 8-footers’ contest, which was the ‘blue ribbon’ event of the ‘midgets’, Zephyr scored an easy victory. The champion 8-footer, which is 8ft broad as well, was again faultlessly handled

by Miss Irene Pritchard, who may well be congratulated on her prowess.

Irene came in a full six minutes ahead of the second place getter, winning £2 and the club championship.

Irene became the first woman both to sail in the Anniversary Day regatta, and to win an Anniversary Day race

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In the last race of the season with JBSC, Zephyr came fourth, and was so late to the start in the last race with the Sydney Dingey Club in March that it did not place. But the season ended on a high. Irene was presented with the Champion Pennant of the 8-footer class by JBSC, and acknowledged as a big prizewinner by the Sydney Dingey Club.

She also received an invitation to sail in the Newcastle and Stockton Sailing Club’s handicap on 25 March. The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate reported the move, and predicted her appearance would attract considerable attention: Miss Irene Pritchard, the champion lady “yachts man” in her eight-footer, The Zephyr has kindly consented to take part in the carnival. This should alone be a big draw, especially for the ladies, to see one of their own sex at the tiller of her tiny craft.

Irene had a strong lead, but a lack of wind prevented the boats from finishing.

In an article titled ‘Yachting in Sydney’, the March edition of the London-based Yachting Monthly Magazine reported that Irene Pritchard ‘is the “dinghy” topic in boating circles’. The next month the magazine printed a photo of Zephyr winning the Anniversary Regatta and reproduced the plans for the boat, as well as an article on Irene, titled ‘One Beam to Length’: The exceptional speed shown by such a boat 8ft. by 8ft., and the fact of its successful handling by a young lady who had never before sailed in a racing boat, have, needless to say, excited considerable curiosity in that part of the world …5

05

‘any woman wishing to shine in a delightful little world of her own would do well to emulate Miss Pritchard’

In October 1899 Irene featured in an illustration and article in the Australian Town and Country Journal: Miss Pritchard, daughter of Mr. H.C. Pritchard, of Leichhardt, is the skipper of the champion dingey Zephyr, whose splendid record bears testimony to this fair young yachtswoman’s skill and success. It is difficult to understand why yacht racing as a pastime for ladies has not become more popular here … sailing is a pursuit most fascinating, varied, and exciting, in which they can become absolutely proficient, requiring no particular muscular effort or physical strength, only quickness of judgment, and a knowledge, which can be acquired by practice and the opportunity. So any woman wishing to shine in a delightful little world of her own would do well to emulate Miss Pritchard.6 Irene was not the only prize-winning lady skipper. The year before, in England, Irex – a Sydney 22-footer owned by Mark Foy, who revolutionised sailing on Sydney Harbour – was soundly beaten by the Maid of Kent in a series of three races on the Medway. The Maid ’s skipper was Maud Wylie.

The previous season Mrs Wylie had raced the Pensée Fugitive.

05 Irene Pritchard wearing her Anniversary

Day medal. The top of the medal, which is in the shape of a Maltese cross, is a yacht.

Photo courtesy Nedlands Library, WA

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’

The Australasian reported: ‘The Fugitive’s record, as her fair owner laughingly described the other day, was “six starts, four firsts, one second, and one capsize.”’ It’s a record startlingly similar to Irene’s.

Irene next skippered Procella, a 10-footer with a 10-foot beam, also designed and built by her brother Harry. It provoked a lot of interest, much of it unfavourable – the Australian Town and Country Journal called it a ‘monstrosity’. In the first 10-footer race of the 1899/1900 season, held by the JBSC, Procella did not place. Irene Pritchard again made history when, on 7 November 1899, she was the first woman to compete in the Balmain Regatta, in Procella. She did not place.

The fleet of 10-footers gathered for the JBSC’s 10-foot championship on 18 November. The Referee reported: Miss Pritchard’s charge made a fine bid for the race on the run down the harbor, and was the first to haul wind round the buoy.

But this oddity was no match for her big rivals on the thrash back, as one after another they displaced her.

Her position was not recorded.

And that appears to be Irene Pritchard’s last race.

By all accounts Procella was an unusual boat, and one that was difficult to handle, carrying a huge area of sail.

06 The Town and Country Journal of 21 October

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1899 featured an image of Irene captioned “Miss Pritchard, skipper of the champion 8ft dingey [sic] Zephyr’.

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘THIS VENTURESOME YOUNG LADY’

07

Later that year, the Evening News reported that Procella had been debarred, and had to be altered to comply with the rules.

It is likely that the debarring ended Irene’s sailing career.

1 Australian Wooden Boats, Volume One, edited by Trish Murphy, published by the Wooden Boat Association of NSW, 1993, p 59

Not until the mid-1960s would another woman take the tiller and race in an open boat on Sydney Harbour.7 Irene’s sailing career might have ended, but her reputation grew, and she remained closely associated with sailing – and boatbuilding – for the rest of her life.

2 measuringworth.com/datasets/ auswages/result.php# accessed 10/10/2016

A change of tack

5 Yachting Monthly Magazine, 13 April 1899, p 194

In 1904 Irene married boatbuilder Fred Carnaby. According to the book Asteroids on the Swan, when Irene’s brother Arthur (also a boatbuilder) had shown Fred the photo of Irene wearing her gold medal, Fred had said, ‘She’s the girl for me!’8

6 Australian Town and Country Journal, 21 October 1899, p 22.

Irene and Fred moved to Nedlands, Western Australia, pioneering an area that was then on the southern outskirts of Perth, on the Swan River. They first lived in a houseboat while building their boatshed, then lived in the boatshed and built the family home behind it. Irene seemed destined to be surrounded by males: she had six sons – Eric, Ivan, Keith, Cecil, Colin and Trevor.

Carnaby’s Boatshed thrived. Fred constructed motor launches, yachts, luggers, pearling schooners and at least one ferry.

He also built 16 Star class yachts, 22-footers with open cockpits, from the local jarrah. He rented them out, introducing many people to sailing on the Swan River.

Irene Carnaby, née Pritchard, died in Perth in 1953. In 2015 Balmain Sailing Club awarded a trophy named in her honour, given to the top woman skipper in the Balmain Regatta.

Vanessa Dudley was a fitting winner: in 1986, she had been the first woman to win a race at the helm of an 18-footer.

3 Bluewater Bushmen by Bruce Stannard, The Heritage Press, 2004, p 2 4 Dinghy was also spelled dingy and dingey.

7 New Zealander Bev Coles, sailing her own boat in the 1966/67 season, seems to have been the first female skipper in an 18-footer, which were in the tradition of the old open boats. In June 1973 Seacraft reported the first all-female 18-footer crew at the Sydney Flying Squadron, in Moygashel.

8 Asteroids on the Swan, compiled by M R Clarke, Educational Publishers, 1993, p 30 Newspaper articles were access through Trove, trove.nla.gov.au The author wishes to thank Anthea Harris from the Nedlands Library, Western Australia, for her assistance. Åsa Wahlquist is a Walkley-award winning rural journalist and author. Since retiring she has written a book about Snails Bay Sabot Sailing Club, and is researching the history of sailing in Balmain.

07 An Anniversary Day Regatta on Sydney

Harbour in the late 19th century.

Inaugurated in 1836, the regatta drew large crowds. In the centre of the image is the passenger liner Orizaba, acting as flagship.

ANMM Collection 00017599 Gift from the Estate of Peter Britz

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > LADY DARLING AND PS HERALD

Lady Darling and PS Herald

NEW TECHNOLOGIES HELP TO RECORD OLD WRECKS Australian waters are the final home of thousands of shipwrecks, some of them in depths that make survey and recording difficult. Maritime Archaeology Manager Kieran Hosty profiles two 19th-century shipwreck sites and explains how 3D mapping software and compact underwater digital cameras are helping to investigate them.

01 01 Lady Darling’s boiler. Lady Darling is considered

to be the most intact shallow-water (less than 30 metres) shipwreck in New South Wales waters.

Image Lee Graham/ANMM

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > LADY DARLING AND PS HERALD

AUSTRALIA HOSTS SOME 11,000 shipwrecks – or roughly one shipwreck for every 3.3 kilometres of coastline.1 They range from large, fully exposed and intact iron and steel hulls to smaller components and artefacts. The environments in which these sites exist also differ significantly in terms of water temperature, depth and clarity and seabed composition.

In New South Wales many shipwrecks are located at depths of 20 metres (66 feet) or more, and where visibility is moderate to low. These factors create challenging working conditions, particularly in the amount of time available on the sea floor to execute an adequate and accurate archaeological survey.

Due to its historical and archaeological significance, the Lady Darling now lies within a Historic Shipwreck Protected Zone

An emerging field of research in maritime archaeology is the use of 3D mapping software and small compact underwater digital cameras, such as the GoPro, to record and analyse submerged archaeological sites.2 Although digital photogrammetry has rapidly evolved into a relatively inexpensive and efficient way to document submerged shipwreck sites, it is still fraught with issues, and in-water survey methods need significant refinement to produce the best results. To test the efficiency of these methods as a mapping tool, maritime archaeologists from the museum’s Maritime Archaeology Research Centre (MARC) and the Silentworld Foundation are currently testing a variety of photographic survey techniques on selected shipwreck sites in New South Wales waters that have diverse site and environmental profiles.

Two of these sites are the paddle-steamer Herald (1884) and the iron-hulled screw-steamer Lady Darling (1880).

02 Lady Darling’s boiler. Image Kieran Hosty/

ANMM

02

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03

04

PS Herald The 41-ton (gross) Herald was assembled in Darling Harbour, Sydney, in 1855 from iron frames and plates that had been imported from England.3 The paddle steamer was 22.8 metres long, with a beam of 3.9 metres and a depth in the hold of 1.74 metres. It was powered by a twin boiler, single-cylinder steam engine, which drove the two side paddle wheels.

The Herald was originally owned by the North Shore Steam Company and operated as a passenger ferry between Dawes Point and Blues Point on Sydney Harbour. Due to falling patronage and little profit, the company was wound up in 1860 and the Herald was sold to the Evans Brothers of Sydney, who used it as a passenger ferry, excursion steamer, cargo vessel and tug.

It was in its role as a tug that PS Herald made its last voyage on 1 April 1884. It departed Millers Point in the early morning and headed towards Sydney Heads to meet and tow in the schooner Malcolm, which was expected to arrive from Newcastle just before dawn.

The steamer was lying hove-to a short distance south of North Head waiting for the schooner’s arrival when the starboard boiler burst, damaging the ship’s hull.4 Despite the crew’s attempts to save it, the Herald quickly filled and the crew barely had time to abandon ship and get into the ship’s boat before the Herald sank in just over 24 metres of water.

The age of the vessel prohibited any salvage attempts and despite being in Sydney Harbour, the wreck lay undiscovered until 3 January 2013 when two technical divers, Scott Willan and Andreas Thimm, located it after they reinterpreted historical remote sensing data obtained from Sydney Ports. Willan and Thimm were later presented with a Historic Shipwrecks Award by the Heritage Council of New South Wales in recognition of their work.

03 Remains of the port boiler of PS Herald.

Image Lee Graham/ANMM 04 Schooling fish such as these eastern nannygai

created significant problems for the 3D modelling software. Image Lee Graham/ ANMM

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > LADY DARLING AND PS HERALD

SS Lady Darling The SS Lady Darling was a single-screw, iron-hulled, woodendecked, three-masted auxiliary steamer. It was built in 1863 and launched in July 1864. The steamer originally displaced 649 tons (net) and was 58 metres long, had a breadth of 8.83 metres and was powered by a 100-horsepower, twin-cylinder steam engine.

The steamer arrived in Melbourne in January 1865 and commenced operations as a passenger vessel on the route from Melbourne, Victoria, to Newcastle, New South Wales, ‘via Sydney. The vessel was not a success on this highly competitive run and in 1870 it was sent back to England for significant structural modifications, including lengthening it to nearly 73 metres, which increased its net tonnage to 895 tons.

In 1875 the vessel returned to Australia and its old run. On its final voyage, Lady Darling departed Newcastle for Melbourne with 1,220 tons of coal on 8 November 1880 and then proceeded to steam and sail its way down the New South Wales coast battling a rising gale.

In the late evening of 10 November 1880, the steamer was off the south coast of New South Wales, about four nautical miles south of Montague Island, when its captain reported that the ship struck something ‘abreast the engine room and nine feet [2.75 metres] below the water line and forty feet [12.2 metres] forward of the stern’.

05 A ‘shiver’ of Port Jackson sharks resting in

the bow of the Lady Darling. Image Kieran Hosty/ANMM

05

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > LADY DARLING AND PS HERALD

The impact tore open the coal bunkers near the engine room’s aft bulkhead, opening the hull to the sea. The engine room quickly flooded, putting out the fires and making the ship’s pumps inoperable. With the ship unable to manoeuvre, its pumps out of action and the hull rapidly filling, the captain and crew abandoned ship and made their way towards Montague Island. They were later rescued by a construction crew that was building a new lighthouse on the island.

The actual location of the Lady Darling remained a mystery until August 1996 when the net from a Bermagui fishing trawler, operated by Dom Puglise, became entangled on something on the seabed off Cape Dromedary. Puglise asked divers Bert Elswyk and Paul Mood to recover his nets. In doing so, on 16 August 1996, they found that the nets had snagged on the remains of Lady Darling’s iron hull.

Due to its historical and archaeological significance, Lady Darling now lies within a Historic Shipwreck Protected Zone and the site has been given the highest level of protection under the Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976. It is only accessible through a permit system issued by the Federal Minister for the Environment or their state delegate.

The wrecks today In August 2016 the Maritime Archaeology Research Centre (MARC) at the Australian National Maritime Museum obtained such a research permit to enter the protected zone to conduct a 3D mapping exercise on the Lady Darling.

The dive team comprised Lee Graham, Dr James Hunter and Kieran Hosty from MARC, Paul Hundley from the Silentworld Foundation and two volunteer archaeology divers, Eliza Goslett and Matilda Goslett. At Narooma, some 350 kilometres south of Sydney, the team boarded Silentworld’s survey vessel Maggie III for the 14-kilometre trip to the wreck site. This is located two kilometres offshore from Mystery Bay (Cape Dromedary) and eight kilometres south-west of the southern end of Montague Island, which is home to a large permanent colony of Australian and New Zealand fur seals.

After locating the wreck using a combination of GPS co-ordinates and Maggie III’s side scan sonar, the dive teams entered the water and swam down to the wreck, which rests on a fairly flat sandy bottom in 29–30 metres of water.

We quickly found the relatively intact counter stern of the Lady Darling (reinforced by structurally sound iron cant frames), bilge stringers and a transverse bulkhead. The structure rises four to five metres off the sand and supports the remains of the upper deck (minus its timber decking) as well as the steamer’s large steering quadrant.

It was in its role as a tug that PS Herald made its last voyage on 1 April 1884

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Moving forward of the transverse bulkhead, and swimming between the port and starboard hull plating (which projects one to two metres above the sand), we swam over what was the ship’s engine room. We could see the exposed propeller shaft, massive steam engine (2.3 metres high x 4 metres long) as well as an equally impressive ship’s boiler (3.25 metres long x 3.2 metres wide), lying just aft of another transverse iron bulkhead.

Forward from the engine room’s bulkhead, we swam over the remains of the steamer’s cargo holds. In this section of the wreck, the sides of the steamer’s hull (unsupported by the transverse bulkheads) have collapsed outwards. They are almost level with the surrounding sand and the ship’s cargo of coal has become dispersed by the strong currents to which the site is prone.

In the past, this area of the wreck has been deeply buried in the sand for some 30 to 40 metres before protruding again and rising up to the bow section. However, on our recent visit the entire forward section of the ship’s hull – including its iron keelson, lower iron floors and water ballast tanks – was lying exposed on the seabed, with the port and starboard sides of the hull splayed out on either side. Lying on top of the exposed lower deck plating were the remains of the ship’s upper deck.

These consisted of iron deck beams supported by tie plates, diagonals and the mast partner plates, which reinforced the ship’s main and fore masts.

The intact bow is now home to a small group of Port Jackson sharks. The bow is tilted over on its starboard side and all the fittings associated with the bow, including Admiralty and Porters Patent anchors, a capstan, a davit and anchor chain, have tumbled outside the hull and now lie on the seabed to the west of the wreck.

With our initial inspection over, it was down to business.

With the sounds of passing humpback whales singing in our ears and a curious New Zealand fur seal occasionally photobombing us, we commenced recording the wreck.

We used two GoPro cameras equipped with a variety of coloured filters to help compensate for the effect of water depth.

The water density affects the ambient colour spectrum and is a big problem with taking underwater images at such depth.

Red disappears at about five metres, orange at about eight, yellow at about 12 and green at about 22 metres, turning the underwater terrain into murky blues and browns.

Working quickly in two teams, we recorded the major structural features such as the bow, counter stern, engine, boilers and transverse bulkheads, allowing for up to 40 percent overlap between each set of images. Unfortunately, at 30 metres down

Lady Darling’s intact bow is now home to a small group of Port Jackson sharks

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > LADY DARLING AND PS HERALD

06

you don’t get much safe bottom time before you start incurring a serious decompression commitment, so after 20 minutes on the bottom it was time to begin our slow ascent.

In the afternoon we carried out another dive, but with an even shorter bottom time of 15 minutes. However, practice makes perfect and we managed to record a significant area of the wreck before we once again had to ascend.

The wreck site of the PS Herald is a far less daunting dive than that of the Lady Darling. Located only a few kilometres east of the museum, near Sydney’s North Head, it is easily accessible in most weather conditions. Being five metres shallower, it also allows us to substantially increase our time on the sea bottom.

The Herald lies in 25 metres of water on a flat sandy bottom and appears to be largely intact, but heavily buried in sand, up to what would have been its original waterline. Compared to the Lady Darling it is a tiny wreck site, consisting of two small boilers (2.5 metres by 90 centimetres), the remains of its singlecylinder steam engine and the paddle wheel drive shaft lying across the engine. Depending upon the depth of sand coverage, the faint outline of its port and starboard sides and its bow and stern posts can sometimes be seen just poking above the sand.

The dive team had enough bottom time to quickly establish a series of taped lanes running along the full length of the wreck site. These lanes were used as guides by the GoPro operators and ensured that the entire site was covered and had an optimum 40 per cent overlap between the images, allowing the 3D computer program to generate more accurate images than those obtained from the Lady Darling site.

06 Steam ferry, north shore, Sydney, Samuel

Thomas Gill, 1856. Image National Library of Australia nla.obj-135667825

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > LADY DARLING AND PS HERALD

07

During our work on these two sites we obtained more than 140 per cent coverage of the PS Herald and around 30 per cent coverage of the Lady Darling. We are currently assessing the still images and digital footage and running the images through the AgiSoft software to create 3D maps of the wrecks.

It is still early days in our assessment of the program and the different recording methods used on the two sites, but so far we have noticed that the 3D program has difficulty in recording sites where there are significant numbers of schooling fish, which appear to confuse it. On sites where there are fewer fish and better overlap, the program manages quite well, producing repeatable accurate results. The program also has difficulty differentiating between similar-looking sand ripples on sites like the Herald, but appears to have no problems when working on sites like that of Lady Darling, which lies on a bottom of rock, rubble and sand.

We plan to continue our testing of these technologies and to report on the results in future issues of Signals.

1 environment.gov.au/heritage/historic-shipwrecks/australian-national-shipwreckdatabase, accessed 10 August 2016 2 See Dr James Hunter, anmm.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/meanderings-in-the-murkdiving-on-the-wreck-of-the-centennial/, accessed 20/08/2016 3 British Register of Australian Ships, 1855 4 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April 1880 The museum wishes to acknowledge the following people for their assistance in these expeditions: Paul Hundley, Silentworld Foundation; Eliza Goslett and Matilda Goslett, volunteer archaeological divers; Giada Smorto, Liceo Scientifico Statale, Rome, Italy; Ross Constable and Bronwyn Roll, Narooma Coastal Patrol, New South Wales; Dr Brad Duncan and Stirling Smith, Office of Environment and Heritage.

07 SS Lady Darling, Charles Nettleton, 1866.

Image National Library of Australia nla. obj181959203

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILOR’S DELIGHT?

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight?

SAILORS’ WEATHER LORE – MYTH OR METEOROLOGY?

When European sailors began arriving on Australian shores, they brought with them a host of sayings about the weather. What truth was there in these, and were any of them relevant to conditions in the southern hemisphere? Malcolm Riley sorts myth from truth.

01 01 Hereward on Maroubra Beach, 1898, William James

Hall. The 77-metre iron clipper Hereward encountered a large storm off Sydney on 5 May 1898. Winds of up to 76 km/h destroyed its sails and forced it onto the northern end of Maroubra Beach. All 25 crew members were safely brought ashore and the wreck attracted crowds of tourists. ANMM Collection 00002278 Gift from Bruce Stannard

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILOR’S DELIGHT?

EARLY DUTCH AND ENGLISH MARINERS travelling to Australia cut their teeth sailing in the middle and high latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Apart from all its other oddities, Australia would have been a region of unfamiliar weather patterns and currents. In particular, in the northern hemisphere winds blow anticlockwise around lows and cold weather comes from the north, the opposite of conditions in Australia.

European sailors’ weather lore was developed in much higher latitudes than Australia

A 1770 sailor in the north Atlantic experiencing a strengthening south-south-westerly wind in combination with a rapidly falling barometer would, from experience, know the likely weather.

He would expect rain and storms with falling temperatures and a few days of strong north-westerly winds that would slowly moderate as the pressure rose. In other words, this is the passage of a cold front, although the concept of cold fronts and different air masses would not be understood for another 140 years. In southern Australian areas, the only real way you can get a similar set of conditions is to have a stationary lowpressure system forming in situ to the east of you. These were the conditions you would have experienced if you were south of Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, when a catastrophic low was forming during the 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race.

European sailors brought with them the weather lore that worked to some degree around the British Islands and Europe.

However, these weather sayings were developed in much higher latitudes than Australia. For instance, Whitby – the port where an 18-year-old James Cook first put to sea – is at 54° north.

A similar latitude in the southern hemisphere is Macquarie Island (54° south), located 1,500 kilometres south of Tasmania.

So, many of these sayings apply to areas that Australians would call sub-Antarctic.

02 American shipwreck in the rip, Geelong

02

lifeboat Asa Packer barque, 24 May 1861.

Asa Packer left Melbourne for Newcastle, New South Wales, but on arrival at Port Phillip Heads the pilot refused to take it out due to the stormy conditions. The captain decided otherwise. After repeated attempts, a lifeboat, crewed by Customs and Health officers endangering their own lives, finally succeeded in rescuing Asa Packer’s crew. ANMM Collection 00002791 Purchased with USA Bicentennial Gift funds

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILOR’S DELIGHT?

European sailors would have been familiar with the saying ‘red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning’. Cold fronts usually move from west to east.

When a cold front is to the west of your location, the morning sun is reflected in the cloud to the west and shows the cloud to be red, due to the angle of the sun’s rays hitting the cloud.

This means that there is a system to your west that may come your way, bringing bad weather.

A lack of knowledge of what the weather was going to do contributed to countless wrecks through the centuries

Conversely, red sky at night means that the sun’s rays coming from the west are turning the sky to the east red. The cloud (and associated weather system) has passed over your location and you can anticipate moderating weather. While this is sometimes true, it does not apply in the case of successive fronts that follow each other by 10 or 12 hours, with the fronts getting progressively stronger. But noting this saying and seeing a falling barometer would have helped our early sailors realise there could be a blow on the way in southern parts of Australia.

Two other common sayings were ‘Mackerel sky, not 24 hours dry’ and ‘Mares’ tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships to carry low sails’. These relate to clouds associated with a warm front, in which the clouds (altocumulus) tend to thicken and the winds to pick up as the front gets closer. In such conditions, you can expect rain and stronger winds in six to 12 hours.

Australia does get warm fronts, but mainly in southern parts such as Tasmania. They are much more common at much higher latitudes than Australia.

03

03 Sailing, Storm Bay, Tasmania, attributed

to Haughton Forrest, before 1925. A yacht in rough seas and overcast weather off Cape Pillar, Tasman Peninsula. ANMM Collection 00008553

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILOR’S DELIGHT?

A lack of knowledge of what the weather was going to do contributed to countless wrecks through the centuries.

I sail a square-rigged ship myself and know that it is almost impossible to sail off a lee shore in a strong wind.

Unpredictable weather meant that early mariners were forced to sail to a different time schedule than today’s sailors. In 1919 the sailing cargo ship Garthneill left Melbourne for Bunbury, Western Australia, via southern Australia but sustained strong westerly winds that prevented any headway. The skipper then tried to take the vessel anticlockwise around the continent but also encountered headwinds near Torres Strait. The vessel then sailed to Sydney and then to Bunbury, going south of New Zealand, South America and Africa using the westerly winds … taking 76 days. Another vessel, the Edward Sewall, took 67 days in 1914 to pass from the Atlantic into the Pacific Ocean south of Cape Horn – only a few days less than the Garthneill’s time to go most of the way around the globe.

Early mariners had patience and their schedules generally allowed plenty of time to travel; for instance, Captain James Cook arrived in Tahiti on 13 April 1769 to observe the transit of Venus on 3 June. But open-ended schedules are just not possible or practical in today’s world. In 2015 the HMB Endeavour replica set off for Hobart, Tasmania, for the Australian Wooden Boat Festival but encountered (forecast) bad weather ‘on the nose’ and the attempt was abandoned.

Sydney Heritage Fleet’s James Craig also had to turn back to Sydney due to the same weather system.

04

‘Mares’ tails and mackerel scales make lofty ships to carry low sails’

The farthest thing from the generous time schedules of early sailing ships is the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. The vessels are racing, so it is obvious that patience is probably not the highest priority on board. The crews of these yachts have access to forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology, which are issued twice a day, every day, for all of Australia’s coastline. They can also access large amounts of computer model data extending many days into the future, and some would have non-bureau meteorologists on their team. The bureau’s marine forecasts and warnings are issued for the safety and economic benefit of Australian mariners. During the disastrous 1998 Sydney to Hobart race, the first Storm Force Wind Warning (indicating a mean wind speed greater than 63 knots/116 km/h) for the Bass Strait area was issued at 2 pm on 26 December, just an hour after the race start. Some yachts would have barely been outside Sydney Harbour at this time.

04 ‘Mackerel sky’ – altocumulus cloud.

© Kagai 19927/Shutterstock

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > RED SKY AT NIGHT, SAILOR’S DELIGHT?

05

Now, through satellite communication, HF radio, email and computer model data, forecasts for several days ahead are available even in the remotest ocean locations. Much (though not all) of Australia’s coastline has mobile phone coverage, so a mariner with a smart phone can access all the weather data they require. Broadcasts of forecasts and warnings via HF and VHF radio cover the Australian coastline and region.

The early mariners would marvel at a modern vessel with its array of instrumentation, such as radar, radio, depth sounder, GPS and satellite phone, as well as good reliable forecasts that extend many days into the future. The early mariners had a barometer and their own interpretation of what the wind and sky were telling them. Today’s mariners are fortunate indeed to have access to all the forecast information available.

However, whether you are in a tinny or a supertanker, it is still in the skipper’s hands to understand what the forecast is telling you, the likely impact on your vessel and what action to take.

Malcolm Riley worked for the Bureau of Meteorology for 34 years and is one of the skippers of the tall ship Lady Nelson, based in Hobart.

05 Midnight Rambler in the severe storm that

engulfed the 1998 Sydney to Hobart race.

Of 115 starters, 66 yachts retired and five yachts were lost. Six sailors died and 55 others had to be airlifted from their yachts by rescue helicopter. It was Australia’s largest-ever peacetime rescue operation.

Image Richard Bennett Photography

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > WAR AND PEACE IN THE PACIFIC 1941–1946

War and Peace in the Pacific 1941–1946 A NEW USA PROGRAM COMMENCES

Seventy-five years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the USA into World War II, the museum begins a five-year rolling commemoration of turning points in the War in the Pacific. USA Programs Manager Richard Wood provides a preview.

01

ON 7 DECEMBER 1941, Japanese fighter planes launched from aircraft carriers devastated the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, causing the USA to declare war on Japan.

The largest naval conflict in history followed, lasting until 14 August 1945, in which the USA came to the aid of Australia, New Zealand and other allies in their battle against the seaborne invasion of south-west Pacific nations by Japan.

Australia, already fighting the war in Europe and Africa, also declared war on Japan. In repelling the advance of Japan as it invaded Pacific nations to its south, the defence alliance between the USA and Australia born on the battlefields of Europe in World War I was strengthened and re-shaped into the relationship that lasts to this day.

01 The attacks on Sydney, Newcastle and

coastal shipping between 31 May and 8 June 1942 by Japanese Ko-hyoteki class midget submarines brought the Pacific War into the front yard of Sydney. Postcard ‘Raising the Japanese midget submarine’, 1942.

Photographer unknown. ANMM Collection 00015235

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > WAR AND PEACE IN THE PACIFIC 1941–1946

Between 2016 and 2021 the museum’s USA Programs, supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund, will commemorate the 75th anniversary of pivotal moments as they were won and lost by both sides.

The war in the Pacific is now on the cusp of living memory.

Surviving veterans have passed their 90th birthday and even the youngest eye-witnesses of this terrible time are nearing 80.

But, for many descendants of the men and women of the war years, names such as Curtin, Roosevelt and Macarthur, Hirohito and Yamamoto, and places such as Bougainville, Guadalcanal, New Guinea, the Philippines, Okinawa and Hiroshima are redolent with stories and snippets of history handed down to them.

Other names plot the extent and progress of this four-year war at sea: the prefix ‘Battle’ added to Coral Sea, Darwin, Sunda Strait, Savo Island, Midway and Tokyo Bay, and the names of ships such as Australia, Canberra, Sydney, Perth and Centaur; Houston, Yorktown and Lexington; Shōkaku and Zuikaku.

02 A letter written after his conviction by the

‘brownout murderer’, US soldier Eddie Leonski. Leonski attacked a number of women and killed three in Melbourne over 15 days in May 1942. He was hanged at Pentridge Prison on 9 November 1942. ANMM Collection 00017254. Purchased with USA Bicentennial Gift funds

02

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > WAR AND PEACE IN THE PACIFIC 1941–1946

Along with a devoted website portal, the museum is planning a range of travelling exhibitions, small displays, learning programs, commemorations and special events that explore war and peace in the Pacific from Australian, American and Japanese perspectives, and those of other nations and peoples that endured invasion, destruction, privation and slavery until peace arrived.

We’ll be investigating and marking events such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the bombing of Darwin, the invasion of the Philippines and other Pacific nations, the defence of New Guinea, the shelling of Sydney and Newcastle, the bombings of Broome and of Tokyo, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the surrender and occupation of Japan.

We plan to explore in detail the convoluted tactics of naval battles that changed the course of the war, and others in which Australians and Americans sailed and fought side by side.

We’ll be sharing the memories of veterans and witnesses, their children and grandchildren on what they saw and how they felt about the war, and will pause to remember the countdown to the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the war.

Live vision of marine archaeologists exploring World War II shipwrecks is being planned, along with virtual classrooms, talks by experts and authors, displays, travelling exhibitions, movies, demonstrations and commemorative ceremonies.

All of these will be captured on our web portal in stories, blogs, films and links to sites and activities across the Pacific that we’ll maintain as a digital resource for students of the National Curriculum.

We’ll revisit some lesser-known events from the war, such as Mission X, Operation Jaywick and Japanese balloon bombs; from the home front, American entertainer Bob Hope’s forced sea landing in Laurieton, NSW; US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s tour of Australia; the worst air crash in Australian history at Bakers Creek near Mackay; and the story of the Brownout Strangler, Eddie Leonski, an American soldier and serial killer who terrorised Melbourne in 1942.

The program will utilise the museum’s collection and range over topics such as propaganda, movies, fashion, music, and the words and fads brought to Australia by the more than one million Americans who came here during the war. We’ll also examine the rules, restrictions, recipes and handy hints for contributing to the war effort in the USA, Australia and Japan.

An interesting example of wartime austerity measures came

Names of places, battles and ships plot the extent and progress of this four-year war at sea

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > WAR AND PEACE IN THE PACIFIC 1941–1946

on 21 September 1942, when Australian restaurants, cafes and eating houses were forbidden to serve hors d’oeuvres!

Among guest bloggers and writers will be John Berry (US Ambassador to Australia 2013–2016) re-telling the story of his father, a US marine whose visit to Melbourne for rest and recreation leave after the Battle of Guadalcanal led to a lifelong love of Australia that he handed down to his son.

To get the ball rolling, in March 2017 the museum will open the international travelling exhibition Guardians of Sunda Strait – the loss of HMAS Perth and USS Houston at Houston Public Library. The exhibition will then travel to Perth and Sydney.

And in May 2017 a new immersive cinema screening in Action Stations will commemorate the Battle of the Coral Sea, a naval battle fought in the air from aircraft carriers and in which neither side’s ships sighted or fired directly on each other.

Over the next five years we’d be delighted to know about readers’ personal Pacific War experiences between Australians, Americans and Japanese to add to the record.

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > MARITIME CONNECTIONS

Maritime connections THE CAZNEAUX FAMILY AND THE WAR

The museum’s current exhibition Through a different lens – Cazneaux by the water features Harold Cazneaux’s photographs of the sea and Sydney Harbour.

Cazneaux’s personal life reveals more maritime connections, which became especially resonant during wartime, writes Senior Curator Daina Fletcher.

01 Three generations of the Cazneaux family

at Ambleside, 10 August 1941. Back row: Joan Ashburner (son Harold’s fiancée) and Jean; middle row: Beryl, Robert, Winifred, Sally and Harold snr; front: Carmen.

Missing from the photo are daughter Rainbow (Robert and Sally’s mother, who is probably taking the photograph), and Harold jnr, to whom the photo was sent while he was fighting at Tobruk.

01

All Images courtesy the Cazneaux family

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > MARITIME CONNECTIONS

THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS – Cazneaux by the water, the museum’s current exhibition of photographs by Harold Cazneaux, focuses on the photographer’s maritime work, and particularly how the sea, harbour and waterways informed his aesthetic practice – a theme of his work not as widely publicised as his portraiture, city and landscape imagery.

World War II greatly affected the family of Harold Cazneaux and his wife, Winifred. Their youngest child and only son was Harold Ramsay Cazneaux (born 13 March 1920), a radio mechanic and member of the Army Reserves. He enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as a wireless operator in 1940, and on 28 December he sailed out of Sydney on Queen Mary with the Ninth Divisional Signals Company, along with thousands of other young men bound for Fremantle and then North Africa.

Cazneaux’s appointment book records in bald words his son’s movements: ‘said goodbye to Harold 7 December 1940’ as he left for training camp at Bathurst, then on 30 December 1940, ‘Harold sails away’.

Nearly nine months later, on Wednesday 24 September 1941, the book notes: ‘9.45am received telegram of Harold’s death on active service Tobruk’. Harold had died on 14 September from burns sustained in a fire at camp.

02

Cazneaux’s appointment book records in bald words his son’s movements: ‘said goodbye to Harold 7 December 1940’

On the opposite page of the appointment book that devastating day, Cazneaux notes: ‘Hugh on leave HMAS Warrego’.

Hugh Johnson, then a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), was the husband of Harold and Winifred’s eldest daughter, Rainbow. She and their two young children, Robert and Sally, lived across the street from her parents in the Sydney suburb of Roseville.

Hugh enlisted in the RAN in 13 April 1921 as a Boy Second Class on HMAS Tingira, ‘our navy’s nursery’1 in Sydney. In the 1920s he spent periods at sea on the cruisers HMA Ships Sydney and Melbourne and at shore at the naval bases HMAS Penguin in Sydney and HMAS Cerberus in Melbourne.

From June 1930 to April 1933 Hugh Johnson was posted to the seaplane tender HMAS Albatross. During this time, the ship and Hugh bore witness to a special harbour celebration – the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 19 March 1932.

Although only four years old, Albatross was soon obsolete and was paid off on 26 April 1933. In 1938 it passed to the Royal Navy as part payment for its new cruiser HMAS Hobart, a ship whose fate was to become entwined with Hugh’s during World War II. 02 Harold Cazneaux, Corporal Sigs 9th Division

AIF Harold Ramsay Cazneaux, 1940

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > MARITIME CONNECTIONS

It is difficult to fathom the effects that losing a son, brother, husband or father has on individuals and families

03

Hugh left the navy for a property at Naracoorte, South Australia, running sheep and dairy cattle. When war was declared in 1939 Hugh immediately returned to the RAN, posted to HMAS Adelaide as a Lieutenant Commander, on 1 September 1939.

From August 1940 to April 1942 he served on the newly commissioned sloop HMAS Warrego on minesweeping duties.

It was one of 46 Allied ships in Darwin Harbour when Japanese planes attacked on 19 February 1942, and was fortunate to escape damage.

Warrego left Darwin soon after for the Indian Ocean, Fremantle and then Sydney, where it was under refit until the end of May 1942 and where Hugh would have enjoyed shore leave to see his young family. Also in Sydney undergoing repair were the cruisers HMA Ships Hobart and Australia, and in April Hugh Johnson was posted to Hobart with the rank of Paymaster Commander.

HMAS Hobart steamed out of Sydney on 1 May. Only days later the ship suffered heavy air bombardments in what has become known as the Battle of the Coral Sea. Then on 7 August 1942 it was part of the covering force for the American amphibious landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.

Following a refit in Sydney in October 1942, Hobart rejoined Task Force 74 on Coral Sea patrols.

At 6.45 pm on 20 July 1943, HMAS Hobart was returning from patrol to base at Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, zigzagging and following HMAS Australia with three destroyer escorts when it was struck by a Japanese torpedo, aft on the port side.

03 Harold Cazneaux sent this photograph

to his soldier son Harold jnr, inscribing it on the back: ‘A winter evening at ‘Ambleside’ Roseville July 1941 – all talking about the boys “over there”; Jean is writing to Eric – the knitting is being done by Beryl, Joan & Carmen. Mum is reading her journals.

“Pop” is taking the photo – the Esse [heater] is keeping us warm, Cheerio! The Family’.

The photograph was returned with Harold’s belongings after his death later that year.

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > MARITIME CONNECTIONS

Paymaster Commander Hugh Johnson was one of 13 men who lost their lives. His body was never recovered.2 Hugh’s wife, Rainbow, was left with an eight-year-old-son, Robert, and daughter Sally, three-and-a-half.

As it did so many other Australians, World War II cut the Cazneaux family deeply. With daughter Beryl enlisted in the Voluntary Ambulance Detachment and three other sons-inlaw – Herbert Smith (Joan’s husband), Vincent Field (Carmen’s husband) and Eric Blundell (Jean’s fiancé) – on active service, the worries within the family were constant.

It is difficult to fathom the effects that losing a son, brother, husband or father has on individuals and families.

Before the war, Harold Cazneaux’s photographic business had been thriving and lucrative, but following the family tragedies Cazneaux, aged in his 60s, wound it back significantly.

Overall his tremendous body of work as one of the pioneers of Australian pictorialism reveals the personal, aesthetic and business strands of his life – all of which are permeated with maritime stories.

04

1 Bombala Times, 4 November 1921. See Signals 116 for an article on the naval training ship Tingira.

2 Historical details taken from navy.gov.au/hmas_hobart_i Through a different lens – Cazneaux by the water is on at the museum until 5 February 2017.

04 Harold Cazneaux, portrait of his son-in-law

Hugh Malanai Johnson as a Paymaster Lieutenant, 1933.

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > BIENNIAL MARITIME HISTORY AWARDS

Biennial maritime history awards CALLING FOR ENTRIES FOR $5,000 PRIZES

Writers, publishers and readers of maritime history are invited to nominate works for maritime history prizes totalling $5,000, sponsored jointly by the Australian Association for Maritime History and the Australian National Maritime Museum. Nominations for the next round close on 28 April 2017.

TWO BIENNIAL PRIZES – one for a book and another for a publication by a local museum or historical society – are offered. Both reflect the wish of the two sponsoring organisations to promote a broad view of maritime history that demonstrates how the sea and maritime influences have been central to the shaping of Australia, its people and its culture.

Past entries have covered a wide range of topics – maritime archaeology, war, beach culture, evolution, art, local histories and the livestock trade – showing the diversity of this subject area.

The 2017 Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Prize of $4,000 To be awarded for a book treating any aspect of maritime history relating to or affecting Australia, written or co-authored by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2016. The book should be published in Australia, although titles written by Australian authors but published overseas may be considered at the discretion of the judges. The prize is open to Australian authors or co-authors of a book-length monograph or compilation of their own works. Edited collections of essays by multiple contributors are not eligible.

The winner of the 2015 Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book prize was David Stevens for In All Respects Ready: Australia’s Navy in World War One (Oxford University Press, 2014).

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > BIENNIAL MARITIME HISTORY AWARDS

The Australian Community Maritime History Prize of $1,000 To be awarded to a regional or local museum or historical society for a publication (book, booklet, educational resource kit, DVD or other media) relating to an aspect of maritime history of that region or community, and published between 1 January 2015 and 31 December 2016. The winner will also receive a year’s subscription to the Australian Association for Maritime History.

The major prize is named in honour of the late Professor Frank Broeze (1945–2001) of the University of Western Australia, who has been called the pre-eminent maritime historian of his generation. He was the author of many works on Australian maritime history, including the landmark Island Nation (1997), which reached into economic, business, social and urban histories to make maritime history truly multidisciplinary.

How to nominate for the Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize Nominations must include a synopsis of the work (minimum 300 words) plus photocopies or scans of the following: dust-jacket or end covers (including publication details); title page; imprint page; contents pages (including an ISBN); one or two chapters (or a representative portion) of the publication, including examples of illustrative material; any published reviews.

The publication itself may also be submitted.

How to nominate for the Australian Community Maritime History Prize For print publications or DVDs, nominations must include a synopsis of the work (minimum 300 words) plus photocopies or scans of the following:dust-jacket or end covers or DVD cover (including publication details); title page; imprint page; contents pages (including an ISBN in the case of print publications); one or two chapters (or a representative portion) of the publication, including examples of illustrative material; any published reviews.

It is strongly encouraged that the publication itself also be submitted.

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > BIENNIAL MARITIME HISTORY AWARDS

For digital publications such as websites, databases or apps, nominations must include 250–300 words explaining the vision and objectives of the digital media, plus data indicating its success. For websites and databases, also provide the URL or download details; for an app or other digital media, submit it on a USB. Nominations close on 28 April 2017.

Nominations should be posted or emailed to: Janine Flew Publications coordinator Australian National Maritime Museum Wharf 7, 58 Pirrama Road Pyrmont NSW 2009 Email publications@anmm.gov.au

Judging process Following an initial assessment of nominations, shortlisted authors or publishers will be invited to submit three copies of their publication. These will be judged by a committee of three prominent judges from the maritime history community, whose names are yet to be confirmed.

The prize will be announced in early 2018 and awarded at a time and venue to be advised.

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > PUBLIC ART AND HISTORY

Public art and history REVEALING A NEW KINETIC COMMEMORATIVE ARTWORK

In September the museum unveiled Johnnie and Mehmet, the latest work of public art on our waterfront promenade. This, the third piece of outdoor art launched in two years, demonstrates the positive role art can play in exciting visitors about Australia’s maritime identity and experience. By Senior Curator Daina Fletcher.

01 Identified by their respective headwear and

insignia, Johnnie and Mehmet signal to each other via sounds and semaphoric gestures.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

01

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > PUBLIC ART AND HISTORY

ALEXANDER KNOX’S WORK Johnnie and Mehmet is a kinetic and audio art installation, and an almost perfect distillation of the historical event it explores. It’s surprising, engaging, and importantly for a work placed outside, it’s durable, low energy and low maintenance. And it sneaks up on you.

The installation was developed in response to a brief by the museum to explore the naval engagement between the Australian submarine HMAS AE2 and the Ottoman Turkish torpedo boat Sultanhisar during World War I. On the very first day of the Gallipoli campaign, 25 April 1915, Australia’s only remaining submarine, HMAS AE2, made a daring and hazardous incursion through the Dardanelles. It was commanded by Captain Henry Stoker, with 31 Australian and British officers and crew. The following five-day cat-and-mouse pursuit by the Ottoman navy ended with Stoker’s capitulation.

On 30 April AE2 was damaged in an encounter with the much smaller Sultanhisar, commanded by Captain Ali Riza with 17 crew, and Stoker scuttled the submarine. Riza accepted its surrender, took the 32 men on board and clothed and fed them before steaming to Istanbul (then Constantinople), where they were handed to Turkish authorities as prisoners-of-war.

These events made headlines in both countries.

The actions of the crews of both submarine and ship during those five days were then quietly overwhelmed by the carnage of the land battle on the peninsula, and were eventually slowly and quietly absorbed into the foundation stories of both nations.

Upon liberation Commander Henry Stoker published his account of the engagement, Straws in the wind, in 1925. Captain Ali Riza recounted his perspective to a journalist. It was published in Turkey in 1947 and translated into English in 2008 by Vecihi and Hatice Basarin as Beneath the Dardanelles (2008). Although accounts differ, what is clear is the impact that the engagement had on both their lives.

02

02 AE2’s crew. ANMM Collection 00051787 03 Sultanhisar’s crew. Image courtesy Turkish

Naval Museum

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Today this engagement has many layers. The past century has seen close connections between Australia and Turkey, especially in the field of shared histories, national memory and commemoration. Today the ANMM manages an archaeological program with the Turkish government to preserve the wreck of AE2 in the Sea of Marmara (see Signals 108).

Setting clear objectives in the artist’s brief was critical to the success of the project. The work was to be site-responsive, addressing its physical context at the museum, and also responsive to the geopolitical and historical parameters of the story, which it needed to tell from both nations’ perspectives.

The other keynote in the brief was to create an exciting piece of art that would enhance the museum’s exterior spaces, its direct relationship with Action Stations, the submarine Onslow, destroyer Vampire and significantly the adjacent artwork ‘… the ocean bed their tomb’ – a light installation by Sydney artist Warren Langley that commemorates the unresolved loss of AE2’s sister ship HMAS AE1 and its 35 crew.

Importantly, unlike ‘… the ‘ocean bed their tomb’, the AE2 work was not to be especially memorial in tone; the event on which it is based did not directly involve loss of life, although four crew later died in captivity in Turkey.

The new work also needed a delicate and subtle tone to meet the needs of the many communities interested in the engagement: the Royal Australian Navy, submariner associations, the Returned Services League, the Turkish–Australian community, the Turkish diplomatic mission in Australia and specialist archaeological and historical associations.

The rather complex brief resulted in the selection of an exciting artist with a vital, innovative and contemporary aesthetic – Melbourne artist Alexander Knox, who has considerable experience in public art commissions nationally.

Knox employs industrial fabrication techniques and dynamic forms that he fuses with coded and sensorial languages of light, sound and movement. Knox interrogates his brief – an event, place, idea or a theme – and draws the viewer towards nuanced meanings, often presenting diverse and shifting perspectives between past and present, and viewer and artwork.

Knox’s concept for the AE2/Sultanhisar work weaves these interests and reduces the engagement to a poetic dialogue between people, in the form of two stylised elongated figures, each five metres tall. These give the work its name, Johnnie and Mehmet.

The past century has seen close connections between Australia and Turkey, especially in the field of shared histories, national memory and commemoration

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04

The two figures – sailors from AE2 and Sultanhisar respectively, former enemies – meet again today at the museum in the context of the friendship between Australia and Turkey. They are surprisingly human-like. Johnnie is identified by his sailor’s cap and Mehmet by his fez, headwear worn by the Ottoman Turkish navy but outlawed in 1925 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern secular Turkish nation.

Two stylised elongated figures, each five metres tall, give the work its name, Johnnie and Mehmet

Johnnie and Mehmet perform a visual ceremony of remembering that is kinetic and aural, signalling to each other in semaphore-like movements derived from maritime languages, punctuated by sounds from the maritime world, ceremonial and atmospheric at the same time.

The work plays through its balletic maritime sequence with naval precision; a three-minute silence on the hour is followed by a choreographed ritual of warfare and rapprochement.

Johnnie and Mehmet are machines of chains, cogs and pistons, powered by compressed air and driven by intricate software programming. On one level, they evoke a hybrid synthesis of ideas about submarines as machines of war and men as servants of empire. On another, their colourful painted stainless steel shells, symbolic sailors’ headwear and respective naval ensigns enable the two sailor-like machines to reveal their nature. The artist notes: So here they stand, Johnnie and Mehmet, signalling to each other.

Their wartime encounter has become a shared foundation story in our now warm relationship with the Turkish people.

We have been friends now far longer than we were enemies.

The signallers act out their respective roles, not to us, to whom they seem oblivious, but to each other. All aggression is gone between them, the cannon reports are a salute, they recall the original shots fired but now they have a changed meaning.

The semaphoric gestures and signals, the sirens and whistles have become a sort of reciprocal ritual that’s epic and maritime and almost mythic in its reach.

04 Sequence of images of Johnnie and Mehmet

during its kinetic routine. Images Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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05

The two old foes, which these devices symbolically embody, in some ways had more in common with each other than they would have with us, the people from 100 years in the future.

Johnnie and Mehmet, Alexander Knox, 2016, was supported by the Australian Government’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs Saluting their Service program.

The work has a deep resonance on several levels, including in its title, which is taken from a famous speech attributed to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He is said to have delivered the words to mark the first visit of British, Australians and New Zealanders to Gallipoli in 1934:

‘… the ocean bed their tomb’, Warren Langley, 2015, was supported by the Australian Government’s Anzac centenary arts and culture fund.

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives ...

You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.

Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours ...

Windjammer Sailors, Brett Garling, 2015, was presented by Rear Admiral Andrew Robertson ao sdsc ran (rtd) after a concept by Dennis Adams.

By giving names to the two steel figures, Knox also helps to personify the former adversaries. There were three crewmembers named John on AE2’s mission in the Dardanelles: Lieutenant Commander John Pit Cary, Leading Stoker John Kerin and Able Seaman John Wheat. Research is under way into the names of Sultanhisar’s crew.

This new installation joins the lyrical ‘… the ocean bed their tomb’ and the muscular bronze figurative work Windjammer Sailors on the museum wharves. All works are quite different in character but all share a similar ethos – to nudge viewers and tantalise them about the breadth and riches of Australia’s maritime experience. They are the first in a program of works and activations designed to further animate the museum’s waterfront.

05 Johnnie and Mehmet, located between the

main museum building and the Action Stations pavilion on the wharf, surprises visitors and passers-by as they move about the site.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > FUNDRAISING SUPPORTS MUSEUM PROJECTS

Fundraising supports museum projects THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL MARITIME FOUNDATION

Indigenous education, Australia’s migration story and the museum’s collection are the focus of fundraising efforts by the Australian National Maritime Foundation.

Andrew Markwell provides an update on where the Foundation is heading.

01

THE MUSEUM’S THREE PRIORITIES for fundraising in 2017 are Indigenous education, Australia’s migration story and growing and conserving the National Maritime Collection. ‘We have chosen these priorities because of their potential to make a positive contribution above and beyond our ordinary business,’ said Director, Kevin Sumption. ‘Sadly, there are significant differences in school attendance, literacy and numeracy,

01 Close collaboration with Indigenous communities

has led to the creation of several successful programs for Indigenous students at ANMM. One of the most popular, teaching students to build nawi (tied-bark canoes), is in greater demand than the museum can service.

ANMM Image

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and educational attainment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. And attitudes about immigration and cultural diversity vary across the generations and throughout Australia. On the up side, there is evidence that museums can positively contribute to educational outcomes and social cohesion.’

One of our plans is to employ an Indigenous educator to design a new program to share the national maritime story with Indigenous school students throughout Australia to contribute to better educational outcomes.

‘There is evidence that museums can positively contribute to educational outcomes and social cohesion’

‘For this program to be effective, it needs to be developed in close consultation with Indigenous communities,’ explained Mr Sumption. ‘The way we approach it will need to be agreed with them.’

‘An Indigenous educator is a high priority for fundraising,’ said the museum’s Chairman, Peter Dexter. ‘It is the perfect project for the museum at this time because it leverages our extraordinary success in working with Indigenous communities and our national leadership in museum-based education.’

02 On their own: Britain’s Child Migrants

02

concluded its tour of the UK last financial year. With 365,000 visitors, this exhibition was the strongest contributor to our recordbreaking off-site visitation in 2015–16.

Over the past six years more than 850,000 people have seen this exhibition at nine Australian and British venues. Image courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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FOUNDATION SUMMER 2016–17

03

There have been some huge successes this past year.

More than 1.5 million people had access to Indigenous objects in the National Maritime Collection at the museum or on tour.

Living Waters, an exhibition at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco that was co-curated by the ANMM’s Indigenous Programs Manager, was seen by 421,843 people in six months – a record-breaking result.

Living Waters shows that there is a large international audience for excellent contemporary Indigenous art. ‘It was a privilege for the museum to work with these superb artists and communities to bring the world’s attention to marine conservation issues in far north Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands,’ said Mr Sumption.

Migration is also central to Australia’s maritime story and a longstanding focus of the museum – through permanent and temporary exhibitions, multicultural festivals and programs and the award-winning Waves of Migration rooftop projection.

The Welcome Wall, on which the names of almost 30,000 migrants to Australia are inscribed, is one of the museum’s most prominent attractions.

On their own: Britain’s Child Migrants is the most popular exhibition in the museum’s history, attracting more than 850,000 visitors to nine venues over a six-year period.

It tells an important migration story, and the public wants more of them.

03 The fundraising project seeks to expand

the ANMM’s Welcome Wall to enhance the telling of Australia’s maritime story. The wall currently bears some 30,000 names and is near capacity. Various options for expansion, such as the artist’s impression above, will be considered. Image courtesy Cox Richardson

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‘The Scanlon Foundation’s 2015 survey on mapping social cohesion found that almost 70% of Australians believe we should do more to learn about the customs and heritage of different ethnic and cultural groups in Australia. And the museum is very well placed to respond to this community need,’ said Mr Sumption. ‘I would like to see a major overhaul of the presentation of Australia’s migration story. I want every visitor to be educated, inspired and delighted by our approach to this topic.

‘We have almost run out of space on our Welcome Wall and its presentation is in need of renewal. I would like to work with the traditional owners of the land and waters on which the museum is built to create a public place in Australia where everyone feels welcome.

‘We are seeking financial support to refresh our exhibitions, build our collection, enhance engagement with Australia’s ethnic communities and to upgrade the museum’s Welcome Wall.

These are big projects which we will implement over the next few years.’

Fundraising for the National Maritime Collection is the core function of the Australian National Maritime Foundation and this is also a priority for the museum. The collection now comprises more than 146,000 objects.

‘Donations for this priority will help the museum to conserve precious objects and add important new material to the collection,’ said John Mullen, Chairman of the Foundation.

The conservation of material recovered by maritime archaeologists is a specialised skill that does not currently exist within the museum. Funds donated to this priority will help address this gap.

‘And the Foundation has some exciting ideas for acquisitions.

I am particularly keen to ensure Australia’s maritime heritage remains in this country,’ Mr Mullen added. ‘The Foundation is working very hard to secure gifts from individuals and organisations for these and other projects and we would love to hear from everyone who wants to support these projects.’

The Australian National Maritime Foundation is a Tax Concession Charity and holds Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) Category 1 status. This means the Foundation can accept funds from a public or private ancillary fund, as well as from individuals and corporations, and can issue a deductible receipt to the donor for tax purposes.

For information on making a donation, contact Andrew Markwell at the ANMM Foundation on 02 8241 8324.

FOUNDATION SUMMER 2016–17

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > KOORI ART EXPRESSIONS

Koori Art Expressions SONGLINES: THE LIVING NARRATIVE OF OUR NATION

For the third consecutive year, the museum is delighted to host the Koori Art Expressions exhibition. The focus of this arts program is for students and teaching staff to develop an understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander culture and heritage and the unique connection Indigenous people have to country. By Indigenous Programs Manager Donna Carstens.

01

01 Songs of the Sea, 2016, Clovelly Public

School, NSW

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THE ANNUAL KOORI ART EXPRESSIONS program reflects on that year’s NAIDOC Week theme. The 2016 exhibition includes more than 85 artworks created by students from Kindergarten to Year 12 from across the Sydney region. Responding to this year’s theme, Songlines: The living narrative of our nation, students explored and created works to reflect upon the thousands of years that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have navigated their way across the lands and waters of Australia using paths called songlines, or dreaming tracks.

A songline is based around the creator beings and their formation of the lands and waters during the Dreamtime (creation of Earth). It explains the landmarks, rock formations, watering holes, rivers, trees and seas. Through song and dance passed down from generation to generation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are able to demonstrate their infinite knowledge of the lands and waters, in turn creating dreaming tracks for their area. Songlines will often follow on from one another, creating an intricate oral map of place.

Earth and water songlines are mirrored by sky songlines, allowing people to travel vast distances and highlighting the deep connection they have to earth and sea. Songlines are central to the existence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and are imperative to the preservation of the world’s oldest living culture and its practices.

02

02 Earth Treasures, 2016, Chullora Public

School, NSW 03 The Way, 2016, Mount Lewis Infant School,

NSW

03

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Paintings, photography, textiles, sculptures and ceramics are among the diverse works in this year’s exhibition. Among the highlights are works that reflect relationships with the sea – the museum’s core theme. Coral Connections, a collaborative work by year 7 to 11 students from Centennial Park School, celebrates the diversity and beauty of sea life. Rock Oysters of Blackwattle Bay, the work created by Sydney Secondary College, Blackwattle Bay Campus Aboriginal Studies Class, reflects directly on the research the students have done on their local environment. Koori Art Expressions opens on 25 November and will run until 29 January.

A songline is based around the creator beings and their formation of the lands and waters during the Dreamtime

NAIDOC Week celebrates the history, culture and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. NAIDOC originally stood for ‘National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee’. This committee was once responsible for organising national activities during NAIDOC Week and its acronym has since become the name of the week itself.

NAIDOC is celebrated not only in Indigenous communities but by Australians from all walks of life. As well as encouraging a wider understanding of Indigenous culture, it also seeks to highlight how the achievements of the past inform and further our aspirations and plans for the future.

04

04 Piranha, 2016, Jurwan Simpson, 5 Green

Square Public School, NSW

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > SUMMER EVENTS

MEMBERS SUMMER 2016–17

Welcome to summer MESSAGE TO MEMBERS

As we go to press, the museum is marking its 25th anniversary.

The Members team and I have had a wonderful year planning and hosting our events in 2016, and we’ve also enjoyed meeting and getting to know you.

01

01 Monkey Baa Theatre Company presents the

family theatre performance Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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03

02

AS WE GEAR UP FOR a busy summer season, we bring 2016 to a close with our annual Boxing Day cruise and a family New Year’s Eve celebration specially designed to provide a safe, friendly environment for you and your children or grandchildren. We hope you can join us at either or both of these events.

Summer holidays are a great time to make use of your membership, and in particular to bring in your kids or grandkids to experience a range of activities at the museum.

This summer our feature exhibition is Voyage to the Deep – Underwater Adventures. Inspired by Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, it offers children the chance to exercise their imaginations on an interactive voyage aboard the fantastical submarine Nautilus. We’re also bringing back the popular family theatre show Captain Nemo’s Nautilus by Monkey Baa Theatre Company.

Also showing this summer is Koori Art Expressions, in which students from NSW public schools respond to the theme of songlines, or dreaming tracks. The theme is an opportunity for Australians to learn more about songlines and explore those which have created the country in their region.

The exhibition also shows how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are using digital technologies and other modern media to record and celebrate these ancient stories.

Animal lovers will enjoy our light-hearted exhibition Dogs and Cats All at Sea – the first curated by the museum’s seagullchasing border collie, Bailey Haggarty. He puts his unique interpretation on a selection of Samuel Hood’s photographs of shipboard pets from the early 20th century.

In January we’ll be hosting our annual Australia Day cruise.

It’s one of our more popular events on the water, so book early to avoid disappointment.

02 Discover all the museum has to offer on one

of our exclusive tours for new Members; see page 72 for details. Image Ken Butti/ Ground Control Pictures 03 Inside the fantastical Nautilus submarine from

Voyage to the Deep. Image Andrew Frolows/ ANMM

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04

05

We will be continuing with our popular Members Maritime Series in 2017. We hope to see even more people at future talks, and that some of you will join in our unique events on the harbour as well as those in the museum. To keep up to date with all our events, look out for details in our regular Member emails. If you are not receiving these emails please contact Renae or myself directly in the Members office on (02) 9298 3646.

We would like to thank all our valued Members for your support and wish you all the best for the holiday season.

I look forward to seeing you at the museum over the coming months and would love to hear your feedback and any suggestions on your membership or your museum experience.

Oliver Isaacs Manager, Members

04 The museum’s dog, Bailey, gets carried

away choosing images for his first exhibition.

ANMM image 05 Create art from junk at our drop-in ghost net

workshop. ANMM image

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Members events SUMMER 2016–17

DECEMBER

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

On the water

Family fun Sundays

Family fun Sundays

Boxing Day Cruise

Splendiferous Submarine

Row Row Regattas

11 am–3 pm Monday 26 December

11 am–4 pm Sunday 15 January

11 am–4 pm Sunday 5 February

Cheer on the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race starters aboard our exclusive vessel

Lively performances, film screenings, character tours and face painting

Lively performances, film screenings, character tours and face painting

Summer holiday programs

Torchlight tour

Exclusive tour

Kids’ and family activities

Shipwrecked!

Lustre: Pearling preview

28 December–25 January

6.15–7.45 pm Friday 20 January

2–4 pm Thursday 16 February

Hands-on workshops, themed creative activities, film screenings and performances

Character guide Stormy Grey the Stowaway leads a dramatic after-dark tour

Hear the intriguing stories behind Australia’s unique pearling tradition

Monkey Baa Theatre Company presents

On the water

Exclusive tour

Captain Nemo’s Nautilus

Australia Day cruise

Welcome to new Members

10.30 am–3.30 pm Thursday 26 January 2017

10–11 am Tuesday 21 February and Sunday 26 February

Absorb the colour and spectacle of the annual Australia Day Parade on the harbour

An orientation tour to help new Members to get the most out of their museum

Selected dates, 28 December–22 January

A thrilling tale inspired by 20,000 Leagues under the Seas Family event

New Year’s Eve at the museum 6.30–10 pm Saturday 31 December

Enjoy the fireworks – BYO picnic, or enjoy a sit-down catered meal

Meet the neighbours

Fleet discovery day tour 9 am–12 noon Thursday 23 February

Discover what Sydney Heritage Fleet is doing for Australia’s maritime heritage

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Members events SUMMER 2016–17

Available free

Bookings and enquiries

ANMM Speakers

Booking form on reverse of mailing address sheet. Please note that booking is essential unless otherwise stated. Book online at anmm.gov.au/whats-on/calendar or phone (02) 8241 8378 (unless otherwise indicated) or email members@anmm.gov.au before sending form with payment.

Minimum numbers may be required for an event to go ahead.

All details are correct at time of publication but subject to change.

ANMM has a team of professional speakers available to give talks in the greater Sydney area. Over 20 topics are available, covering significant maritime events and people in Australian history: Bass and Flinders, Captain Cook, navy battles such as HMAS Sydney (II) and HSK Kormoran, the attack in Sydney Harbour by Japanese midget submarines, and events that were not covered in their day, like the bombing of Darwin.

The complete list of talks can be found on anmm.gov.au/ Speakers. If you would like to invite a speaker to your club, please contact Noel Phelan or Ron Ray: noelphelan@bigpond.com / 0402 158 590 / (02) 9437 3185 ron.ray@aapt.net.au / 0416 123 034 / (02) 9624 1917

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MEMBERS SUMMER 2016–17

Members events SUMMER 2016–17

On the water

Boxing Day Cruise 11 am–3 pm Monday 26 December Sydney Harbour is an absolute spectacle on Boxing Day. Join the throng of yachts and soak up the festive atmosphere as we cheer on the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. Our exclusive vessel Aussie Magic will ensure you a prime position at the start line. With gourmet buffet lunch and refreshments included, your day will be stress-free and fun. Book early as this popular event sells out fast.

Members: adult $110, child under 12 $70, family (2 adults, 2 children) $250. Guests: adult $130, child under 12 $90, family (2 adults, 2 children) $305. Bookings essential.

Book online anmm.gov.au/whats-on/events/boxing-day-cruise

06

Summer holiday programs

Kids’ and family activities 28 December–25 January Take a voyage into mysterious and marvellous undersea worlds this summer with exhibitions, vessels, hands-on workshops, themed creative activities, performances and more. It’s fun for the whole family!

There are adventures to be had every day, including award-winning kids exhibition Voyage to the Deep; art-making, games and dressups in Kids on Deck; exploring touchable objects and artefacts at the Cabinet of Curiosities; enjoying family theatre performances and film screenings; and more.

07

See anmm.gov.au/schoolholidays for full program.

Kids on deck

Deep sea mystery 10 am–4 pm daily (hourly sessions) 28 December–25 January Peer up periscopes, play, create and discover at Kids on Deck with art-making, interactive games and dress-ups! Be inspired by monstrous creatures, lost cities, submarines and sunken treasure.

Craft your own model submarine or periscope, or make creature prints and a steampunk accessory.

Child $8.50. Members free. Included in Big Ticket

06 Join our Boxing Day cruise for all the

action of the Sydney to Hobart race start.

Image Jeffrey Mellefont 07 Imaginative activities and dress-ups at Kids

on Deck. ANMM image

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MEMBERS SUMMER 2016–17

Members events SUMMER 2016–17

Monkey Baa Theatre Company presents

Captain Nemo’s Nautilus 11.30 am and 2 pm daily 28 December–22 January (except Fridays and 1 and 2 January) When Peta accidentally travels back in time to the extraordinary submarine world of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, there are curious and wonderful adventures ahead – including swirling storms and daring escapes from ravenous creatures. Join the cast of quirky and captivating characters inspired by 20,000 Leagues under the Seas in this thrilling tale written and performed by the acclaimed Monkey Baa Theatre Company. Running time 35 minutes.

08

Members free. Included in Big Ticket. No bookings required

Under fives tours

Aquanaut adventurers!

10–10.30 am or 11–11.30 am Tuesdays and Saturdays 7–24 January Explore the world of submarines, deep-sea creatures and shipwrecks’ sunken treasure in a series of special character tours for under fives and their carers. Enjoy stories, sing songs and move and dance through the galleries in this fun-filled learning program.

Continue to Kids on Deck for craft, dress-ups and messy play activities after the session.

Child $8.50, adult $7 (includes holiday programs). Members free.

Included in Big Ticket. Online bookings essential at anmm.gov.au/ schoolholidays

Torchlight tour

Shipwrecked!

6.15–7.45 pm Friday 20 January Join character guide Stormy Grey the Stowaway for a dramatic after-dark tour through the museum. Seek shipwreck treasure in the museum galleries and enjoy exclusive after-hours access to our summer exhibitions, themed refreshments and souvenir art-making.

Ages 4–12 and adults. Child $22, adult $18. Bookings essential at anmm.gov.au/schoolholidays

08 Stormy Grey the Stowaway guides guests

on our family torchlight tour. ANMM image

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MEMBERS SUMMER 2016–17

Members events SUMMER 2016–17

Cabinet of Curiosities touch trolley

Mysteries and marvels 11 am–12 noon & 2–3 pm Daily in school holidays Explore wonderful and curious artefacts related to shipwrecks and sea creatures in this interactive discovery device in our galleries.

Included in any paid entry. Members free.

Free screenings

Family film program Daily in school holidays 09

Relax and enjoy a film screening in our theatrette.

See anmm.gov.au/schoolholidays for a full list of what’s on

Drop-in craft workshop

Weave the reef Daily in school holidays Drop into our theatrette to craft and display your own gorgeous ghost-net sea creatures to add to our installation. Learn about the work of GhostNets Australia, who advocate for the conservation of marine life and removal of harmful waste from our oceans.

Ages 7–adult. Free with museum entry

10

Youth workshop: Photo pro bootcamp

Two-day photography workshop 10 am–2 pm Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 January Take your photography skills to the next level in this two-day intensive course. Be inspired by the museum’s scenic surrounds on outdoor photo shoots and master the art of shooting dark indoor spaces, moving subjects, macro photography and more. Learn to use manual modes on a digital SLR camera as well as photo-editing skills. Have your finished work displayed in a special exhibition at the museum.

Ages 8–14. $160; Members and earlybird special until 3 January $140. Bookings essential. Book online at anmm.gov.au

09 Kids examine sea creature specimens at the

Cabinet of Curiosities. ANMM image 10 One of our popular holiday photography

workshops for kids. ANMM image

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MEMBERS SUMMER 2016–17

Members events SUMMER 2016–17

Youth workshop: Monster mash

Two-day filmmaking workshop 10 am–2 pm Wednesday 18 and Thursday 19 January Create and star in your own imaginative short films inspired by our Voyage to the Deep exhibition and the great aquatic thrillers of cinema history! Learn clever techniques to create monstrous creature special effects for your thriller. Storyboard, film, direct, edit and score your own terrifying feature and have your work featured on our YouTube channel.

Ages 8–14. $160; Members and earlybird special until 11 January $140. Bookings essential. Book online at anmm.gov.au

11

Family event

New Year’s Eve at the museum 6.30–10 pm Saturday 31 December We’re inviting all families to join us for a very special New Year’s Eve experience on the Darling Harbour foreshore. Learn to hula hoop, have your face painted, play with bubble art and roving performers, dance to a DJ and enjoy exclusive after-hours access to our popular interactive kids exhibition Voyage to the Deep.

Be dazzled by the spectacular 9 pm Cockle Bay fireworks away from the crowds on our exclusive foreshore zone. Choose a premium ‘Yachts’ package, including a sit-down catered dinner, or BYO rug or chair for our ‘Tinnies’ package, which includes a tasty barbecue. Alcohol can be purchased on site only.

Tickets are limited – book now to secure your spot.

Yachts package: Members: adult $165, child (aged 4–12) $95.

Guests: adult $185, child (aged 4–12) $105. Family (2 adults, 2 children) $490. Children under 4 free.

Tinnies package: Members: adult $120, child (aged 4–12) $80.

Guests: adult $130, child (aged 4–12) $80. Family (2 adults, 2 children) $340. Children under 4 free.

Bookings essential. Book online anmm.gov.au/newyearseve or phone 9298 3777

11

Darling Harbour fireworks. Image © Raewoo/ Shutterstock

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MEMBERS SUMMER 2016–17

Members events SUMMER 2016–17

Family activities

Family fun Sundays 11 am–4 pm Sundays 15 January, 5 February Join us for special themed family fun Sundays twice a term with lively performances, film screenings, character tours and face painting. Full program online at anmm.gov.au/familyfun or subscribe to our family e-newsletter to keep up to date on all the details.

15 January – Splendiferous Submarine 5 February – Row Row Regattas 12

On the water

Australia Day cruise 10.30 am–3.30 pm Thursday 26 January 2017 Australia Day on Sydney Harbour doesn’t get any better!

Come aboard Olympic Storm and absorb the colour and spectacle of the annual Australia Day Parade, including the famous Ferrython and Tall Ships race. Places are filling fast, book early.

BYO picnic – Members: adult $60, child under 12 $50, family $200.

Guests: adult $75, child under 12 $65, family (2 adults, 2 children) $260 Gourmet BBQ – For an extra $25 per person ($100 per family), order a gourmet barbecue consisting of sausages, prawns, chicken, lamb kebabs, salads, rolls, then lamingtons and pavlova.

Bookings essential. Book online anmm.gov.au/whats-on/events

13

Exclusive tour

Lustre: Pearling preview 2–4 pm Thursday 16 February Join Interpretation and Design Manager Alex Gaffikin, who will intrigue you with the stories behind Australia’s unique pearling tradition. Members have an exclusive opportunity to preview the new exhibition Lustre: Pearling and Australia, which traces the fascinating heritage of pearling across the north of the country.

Alex will delve into the gritty human story of pearling, weaving together intersecting strands of Aboriginal, Asian and European histories to reveal insights into one of Australia’s oldest industries.

Members $10, guests $15. Includes afternoon tea.

Bookings essential. Book online anmm.gov.au/whats-on/events

12 Celebrating regattas at Family Fun Sunday.

ANMM image 13 Pearls, symbols of prosperity, power and

beauty. Image courtesy Cygnet Bay Pearls

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MEMBERS SUMMER 2016–17

Members events SUMMER 2016–17

Exclusive tour

Welcome to new Members 10–11 am Tuesday 21 February and Sunday 26 February This tour is specially designed to welcome new Members (with a membership of six months or less, or upon request) to the museum. A representative of the Members team will guide you through the museum, pointing out areas of interest, including the galleries, kiosk and Yots cafe. At the end of the tour, enjoy morning tea in the Members Lounge and take the opportunity ask all your burning questions.

Members free. Includes afternoon tea. Bookings essential.

Book online anmm.gov.au/whats-on/events

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Meet the neighbours

Fleet discovery day tour 9 am–12 noon Thursday 23 February Discover what Sydney Heritage Fleet (SHF) is doing for our maritime heritage. Join a guided tour of the fleet’s and ANMM’s joint collection of small vessels and artefacts inside the museum’s Wharf 7 building. Then board heritage motor launch Harman and cruise to SHF’s Heritage Docks and workshops at Rozelle – observe the restoration of 1927 steam ship John Oxley, and see key working vessels, such as steam tugs Waratah and Lady Hopetoun and 1903 gentlemen’s schooner Boomerang.

Members $45, guests $55. Includes morning tea. Limited spaces, no refunds available. Bookings essential. Book online anmm.gov. au/whats-on/events

14 John Oxley under restoration at Rozelle Bay.

Image courtesy Sydney Heritage Fleet

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > EXHIBITIONS > VOYAGE TO THE DEEP

EXHIBITIONS SUMMER 2016–17

Let the voyage begin!

INTRODUCING OUR SUMMER PROGRAM

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MUSIC SWELLS, LIGHTS DIM, a sonar pulse pops and an engine whirrs … ‘Full speed ahead. 50 knots at 100 revolutions per second.’ This summer we’re preparing to dive, dive, dive, once again, into fantastical undersea environments. Curiosities, creative activities and a cast of characters all accompany the return season of our award-winning kids’ exhibition Voyage to the Deep, inspired by Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Seas.

This theme offers infinite aspects to explore, so we’re mining it for new gems and also bringing back the best bits, including the popular Monkey Baa theatre show Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.

This captivating tale of submarine adventures re-imagines Jules Verne’s timeless story especially for our family audiences – with laughs, thrills and especially dancing.

01 Inside the interactive Nautilus submarine from

Voyage to the Deep. Image Andrew Frolows/ ANMM

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In Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, we see the 19th-century world of Captain Nemo through the eyes of Peta, who is accidentally transported back in time to the Nautilus while reading Verne’s novel. What follows is a grand underwater adventure … deep-sea diving for oceanic treasures, fighting off ten-tentacled aquatic beasts and surveying the stomach-churning menu of unsustainable seafood delicacies on board – sea turtle steak, anyone?

If a main course of theatrical magic isn’t enough, we’re also serving up a daily buffet of tempting activities. Explore our hands-on Cabinet of Curiosities filled with shipwreck objects and strange creatures, or enjoy play and art-making, dress-ups, games, character tours, exploration trails and more. And as well as the interactive submarine in Voyage to the Deep, our real submarine HMAS Onslow is ready to be explored.

Also this summer we present artworks by students of Public Schools NSW in Koori Art Expressions, and photographs by renowned 19th-century pictorialist Harold Cazneaux in Through a different lens: Cazneaux by the water. Lustre: Pearling and Australia explores the history and mystique of these sea gems, and Dogs and Cats All at Sea presents photographs from our Samuel Hood collection showing shipboard pets, curated by our own salty sea dog, Bailey Haggarty. We hope to see you at the museum this season.

EXHIBITIONS SUMMER 2016–17

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EXHIBITIONS SUMMER 2016–17

Through a different lens – Cazneaux by the water 2 September 2016–5 February 2017 Photographer Harold Cazneaux (1878–1953) is a giant in the history of Australian photography. In the early 1900s he became a passionate advocate for photography as art rather than a mechanical recording process. This exhibition of more than 50 original works presents a new dimension to Cazneaux’s work, reflecting how the water and Sydney Harbour offered him a space to explore mood, light, atmosphere and life in his signature pictorial photographic style.

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Treasures of the American Collection Currently showing We celebrate the 25th year of the museum’s USA Gallery in an exhibition featuring more than 100 objects acquired with the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund.

The exhibition features masterful ship paintings and seascapes, portraits of dour ships’ captains, intricate ship and engine models and other treasures of a collection that documents the American– Australian maritime relationship in trade, science, migration, defence, exploration, politics, popular culture, love and war.

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Koori Art Expressions 2016 25 November 2016–29 January 2017 Inspirational artworks by students in NSW Public Schools across Sydney (kindergarten to year 12) respond to the 2016 NAIDOC Week theme ‘Songlines: The living narrative of our nation’.

This theme allows Australians to learn more about songlines, or dreaming stories, and to explore those that have created the country in their region. It is a chance to learn how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are today using digital technologies and modern mediums to record and celebrate these ancient songlines.

02 Study in curves (detail), Harold Cazneaux,

1931. ANMM Collection 03 Songs of the Sea, 2016 (detail), Clovelly

Public School, NSW

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EXHIBITIONS SUMMER 2016–17

Voyage to the Deep – Underwater adventures 14 December 2016–19 February 2017 Our popular interactive exhibition Voyage to the Deep returns for the school holidays, after touring to Puke Ariki Museum Library in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Based on Jules Verne’s 1870 classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, the exhibition brings to life the mythical deep-sea world of Captain Nemo and the fantastical submarine Nautilus.

Kids can climb aboard and take control at the helm, peer through the periscopes, crank the propeller, test out the bunks and explore the Cabinet of Curiosities, full of wonderful marine specimens.

For children under 12, it’s a hands-on experience with opportunities to touch, explore and play.

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Dogs and Cats All at Sea Opens 13 December 2016 Animal companions have been cherished on board ships for as long as people have made sea voyages. In a life from which children and families are often missing and very much missed, pets provide a focus for affection.

Sydney photographer Sam Hood went on board thousands of ships between 1900 and the 1950s. He took countless photographs of crew members, and in many cases their animals. This selection of photos shows how much pets meant to many seafarers.

Its guest curator – the museum’s own dog, Bailey – puts his playful interpretation on these images of his seagoing predecessors.

Lustre: Pearling and Australia Opens 18 February 2017 From a 2,000-year-old natural pearl found in a Kimberley rock shelter to modern lustrous pearl jewellery, Lustre: Pearling and Australia traces the fascinating heritage of pearling across the country’s north, from Shark Bay to the Torres Strait Islands.

The exhibition delves into the gritty human story of pearling, weaving together intersecting strands of Aboriginal, Asian and European histories to reveal insights into one of Australia’s oldest industries.

Lustre was curated in a partnership between the Western Australian Museum and Nyamba Buru Yawuru. The exhibition is sponsored by Visions of Australia.

04 British India Line officer with dog on the

ship Chindwara. ANMM Collection Samuel J Hood Studio 00020953

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EXHIBITIONS SUMMER 2016–17

Pompeii Rescue: Navy, Empire, Catastrophe Opens 31 March 2017 In 79 AD Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing huge waves of volcanic ash and debris over the thickly populated Bay of Naples.

The eruption was noticed at the Roman Naval base at Misenum, and in response the fleet’s commander, Pliny the Elder, ordered the Roman fleet to rescue as many people as possible. This is one of the first recorded rescues by sea of civilians by a military force.

The exhibition reveals how the Roman navy came to dominate the Mediterranean, and how this control created a boom in maritime trade not seen again for a thousand years. Finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum – towns destroyed by the volcano – and from shipwrecks bear witness to the extent of this trade in raw materials and luxury goods. As this was the only naval force remaining in the Mediterranean, Pliny the Elder was free to use it to aid the people threatened by Vesuvius.

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Objects displayed in Pompeii Rescue: Navy, Empire, Catastrophe* include jewellery, ceramics, sculptures, frescoes from Pompeii and Herculaneum, and artefacts recovered from ancient shipwrecks. It also features haunting body casts of some of the victims of Vesuvius.

The exhibition introduces the Roman navy through interactive multimedia and 3D animation, and evokes the formidable force of the volcano that destroyed Pompeii 2,000 years ago.

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*Working title

ANMM travelling exhibitions

Waves and Water Bega Valley Regional Gallery, NSW 9 December 2016–4 February 2017 Iconic photographs capture Australian beach culture from the 1930s to today. Sunbathers, swimmers, surfers and surf life savers are depicted in this collection of photographs from the Australian National Maritime Museum.

The exhibition includes Max Dupain’s iconic Sunbaker, Ray Leighton’s surfers posed with their longboards, images from Jeff Carter’s 1960s surfing safari, Ian Lever’s lyrical depictions of Sydney’s ocean pools at dawn and dusk, and Roger Scott’s ‘critical moment’ photographs, taken as an individual catches a wave or dives into the ocean.

05 Fresco depicting a naumachy (mock sea

battle). National Archaeological Museum, Naples 06 The Sunbather #2, Anne Zahalka, 1989.

ANMM Collection Reproduced courtesy Anne Zahalka

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EXHIBITIONS SUMMER 2016–17

East Coast Encounter – re-imagining the 1770 encounter Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, QLD 19 November 2016–21 January 2017 University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery, QLD 16 February–25 March 2017 East Coast Encounter is a multi-arts initiative involving Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, writers and songwriters to re-imagine the encounter by Lieutenant James Cook and his crew with Aboriginal people in 1770.

This project has received administrative and financial support from Sunshine Coast Council, Museum and Gallery Services Queensland, The University of the Sunshine Coast, Arts Queensland and the Australia Council.

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War at Sea Maritime Museum of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS 23 December 2016–18 June 2017 The histories and stories of the Royal Australian Navy and its sailors, less widely known than those of the soldiers at Gallipoli and the Western Front, are told through first-hand accounts from diaries and journals, objects, film and interactives from the National Maritime Collection, the National Film and Sound Archives and the Australian War Memorial.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Horrible Histories® Pirates – the Exhibition National Wool Museum, Geelong 19 November 2016–17 April 2017 Get hands-on with pirate history at this exhibition based on the bestselling Horrible Histories® series. Take command of a pirate ship, design and project your own pirate flag, try out different weapons from cutlasses to cannons, find your fate on the wheel of misfortune, discover the best loot to steal and splat rats in the quayside tavern.

Author Terry Deary and illustrator Martin Brown’s unique approach to storytelling comes to life in this blockbuster family exhibition.

07 Detail from a diorama of Suvla Bay, Gallipoli,

made by Geoff Barnes. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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U N DE R WAT E R A D V E N T U R E S Marvellous undersea worlds are waiting for you to explore these holidays!

See award-winning kids’ exhibition Voyage To The Deep, have fun with games and dress-ups, enjoy a lively theatre show

by Monkey Baa and climb aboard a real-life submarine!

EXHIBITION PRODUCER

MEDIA PARTNER

ACCOMMODATION PARTNER

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > HMAS CRESWELL

MARITIME HERITAGE AROUND AUSTRALIA

JERVIS BAY TERRITORY

HMAS Creswell TRAINING GROUND OF AUSTRALIA’S NAVY

For just over a century, the Royal Australian Naval College has trained and educated its officers, expanding and developing along the way to accommodate the navy’s changing needs. Research Associate Lindsey Shaw traces its history and profiles some of its famous graduates.

01 01 HMAS Creswell is located on the south-western

shores of Jervis Bay, 180 kilometres south of Sydney, and is bordered by the Booderee National Park. In recognition of its historical significance, Creswell was placed on the Australian Heritage Commission’s National Estate register in 1981.

All images courtesy RAN Heritage Collection

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THE ROYAL AUSTRALIAN NAVAL COLLEGE (RANC) – founded in 1913 to provide officers for the newly formed Royal Australian Navy (RAN) – forms part of HMAS Creswell, a 40-hectare site in the Jervis Bay Territory. This territory was granted to the Commonwealth in 1915 so that the landlocked Australian Capital Territory would have access to the sea. Today, as well as the RANC, HMAS Creswell is home to the Royal Australian Navy School of Survivability and Ship’s Safety (RANSSSS) and the Beecroft Weapons Range.

The RANSSSS teaches techniques and procedures for controlling emergency situations in a maritime environment – including firefighting, damage control, and nuclear, biological and chemical defence. The training is designed to be as realistic as possible and to give personnel practical experience.

The range on Beecroft Headland offers targets for naval gunfire support and air bombardment practice.

After investigating various potential sites in New South Wales and Victoria, Parliament decided in 1911 to locate the college at Jervis Bay as part of its plans to develop a federal port there, although the navy itself favoured the RANC being in Sydney.

Construction began in July 1913, and while building was under way the college was located at Osborne House in Geelong, Victoria. The college – 287 cadets and staff plus all equipment – transferred to Jervis Bay in 1915 when construction was completed.

The buildings were designed by John Smith Murdoch, later the Commonwealth Architect. The bungalows were primarily Federation-style with barrack-type buildings externally clad in weatherboard, lined with plasterboard and with a

02 Creswell Class of 1913, the first intake

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of cadets, known as the Pioneer Class.

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galvanised iron roof. Most of the 400 construction workers lived on site in a tent city (where the current golf course is) for the duration of the build. The Quarterdeck (parade ground and sports field) was made by levelling the natural ridge line and the main buildings were grouped around it; staff and cadet accommodation was further back.

About 130 applications for the college were received for the first intake of 1913. After interviews and examinations 28 boys were selected, drawn from every state across Australia. They studied maths, physics, chemistry, engineering, English, French, German, history, geography, navigation, pilotage, nautical astronomy, seamanship, gunnery practice, religious instruction, sport and drill – a full course indeed for young teenagers at a time when the world was heading to war.

The first entry became known as the Pioneer Class. Twenty-three passed out (graduated) in 1916 – four had been withdrawn by their parents and Cadet Midshipman Albert died from meningitis in 1914. They were immediately sent to join ships of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet, then operating in the North Sea against the German High Fleet. Graduates Cunningham and Larkins lost their lives while serving in the submarine service.

From that Pioneer Class, many went on to achieve distinguished naval careers. Vice Admiral Sir John Collins kbe cb ran commanded HMAS Sydney (II) in 1940 in the successful sea battle against the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni and became the first graduate to become Chief of Naval Staff;

03 Royal Australian Navy College entrants from

1914 in bushland, 1916.

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the current Collins class of RAN submarines is named after him. Commander Rupert Long obe became director of naval intelligence. Commanders Eric Feldt obe and Lieutenant Commander Hugh Mackenzie were decorated for their services to the famous World War II coast-watching system. Rear Admiral Harold Farncomb cb dso mvo commanded several ships during World War II and assumed command of the Australian Squadron when Commodore Collins was wounded at Leyte Gulf. Rear Admiral Harry Showers cbe commanded several ships during World War II, including HMA Ships Adelaide, Hobart and Shropshire. Captain Frank Getting was mortally wounded when HMAS Canberra was sunk in the Battle of Savo Island in August 1942 and Captain Hec Waller died when HMAS Perth was sunk by Japanese attack in the Battle of Sunda Strait in March 1942. While a number of graduates had left the navy in the 1920s, all rejoined for World War II service.

During the Great Depression, funding cuts restricted the number of cadet entrants, forcing the government to move the college back to Victoria as a temporary measure, this time to the sailor-training shore establishment of Flinders Naval Depot (HMAS Cerberus) at Crib Point, Victoria, in 1930.

The Jervis Bay site then became a resort, with the college buildings leased out as guest houses, hotels and holiday accommodation. The Commanding Officer’s residence was leased at £4 per week and the college dining room was turned into a cinema. While the college was in Victoria, the navy continued to use the Jervis Bay port for training and rescue activities.

04 Fencing was among a long list of sports,

skills and academic subjects taught to Creswell cadets.

04

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During World War II the site was used extensively to train all three defence services. From 1944 to 1946, the Royal Australian Air Force adapted several buildings for the rehabilitation of airmen and former prisoners of war.

The ‘temporary’ measure lasted 28 years. By 1956 it was obvious that Flinders Naval Depot was overburdened, and in 1958 the college returned to Jervis Bay and was commissioned HMAS Creswell in honour of VADM Sir William Rooke Creswell kcmg kbe. He had been First Naval Member of the Naval Board from 1911 to 1919 and is often referred to as the ‘father’ of the RAN. He had argued strongly for the establishment of an Australian navy after Federation.

For several decades the college accepted boys aged 13 for a four-year course

In another mammoth relocation, all equipment, furniture and stores were transported to Jervis Bay by the RAN armament stores carrier HMAS Woomera; the boats, plus heavy and bulky equipment, arrived via the aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney (III).

For several decades the college accepted boys aged 13 for a four-year course. After matriculation they were then expected to serve 12 years in the RAN from the date they turned 18;

05 Midshipmen being taught the principles

of ship stability.

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penalties were applied if they left without the consent of the Naval Board. Today the college’s main function is in advanced leadership, management and strategic studies, and the men and women who attend the college can range in age from 17 to 45.

In 1968 the college began an association with the University of NSW, and the RANC was accredited to teach university courses – among the first of many changes the college has undergone to provide effective training for the Royal Australian Navy. Trainees had to be less than 20 years of age and to have matriculated with passes in subjects required by the University of NSW. The navy paid them to study for a degree in the arts, engineering, surveying or science; after graduation they became officers and went on to study in specialised fields. During their studies they learnt basic naval skills such as survival at sea, ship handling, helicopter rescues, navigation, sailing, naval history and ceremonial drill.

Some 20 years after this, all tertiary education for the future leaders of the navy, army and air force was transferred to the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra and the naval college revised its role yet again to conduct professional naval studies and training. After three years’ academic and military studies at ADFA they proceed to RANC, RMC Duntroon or the RAAF College at Point Cook for graduation. They are then required to sign on for five years’ service after graduation.

Currently, trainees complete a 22-week New Entry Officers’ Course (NEOC) undergoing intensive training in leadership and command, RAN operational structures, security and safety management, weapons handling and technology, history, physical fitness, combat survival and basic seamanship, preparing them to be officers in the RAN. There are two periods of sea familiarisation: a week on board the college’s vessel Seahorse Horizon, where the basics from the classroom are put into practice, and deployment to a ship or submarine for four weeks.

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The Passing-Out Parade is the highlight of the calendar for officers, staff and families alike

The Undergraduate Entry Officers’ Course is a one-week residential course giving an insight into life in the RAN. It is completed by junior officers undertaking university studies; when they complete their university degrees they return to the RANC to attend the NEOC. The RANC also offers a residential component of the Reserve Entry Officers’ Course (REOC) and Mid-Career Entry Course (MCEC). Short residential courses, including Leadership for Senior Sailors for those transitioning to officer rank, are another modern function of the college. The Junior Officers Staff Course (JOSC) is a four-week professional development course covering aspects of service writing, oral communications, problem solving and defence organisation.

06 The Australian White Ensign is paraded during

the New Entry Officers’ Course 51 Passing Out Parade. Image LSIS Yuri Ramsey © Commonwealth of Australia

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NEOC is undertaken by direct entry officers, graduate entry officers and those who proceed to ADFA to gain their degree.

Those without university qualifications enter at the rank of midshipman, and those with experience or a degree as sub-lieutenant or lieutenant. After completing their training at the RANC they proceed to other establishments for their primary qualification training – as warfare officers, electronic engineers, marine engineers and supply officers.

Today’s graduates may not necessarily spend the majority of their careers at sea. Their particular specialisations may be predominantly shore-based in the areas of project management, computer sciences and integrated logistic support. Off-site expeditions – bushwalking, caving, canoeing, diving, sailing and skiing – are designed to test endurance, initiative and teamwork. Not only RAN personnel study and train at the college. Through military exchange programs, officers from many other defence forces around the world attend the RANC. It’s not all study for those attending the college. The gunroom is where trainees catch up, play pool, listen to music and generally relax. There are also open days, sporting events such as team sports and inter-service carnivals, VIP visits, memorial services, charity and reunion events and graduation ceremonies (the Passing-Out Parade). This parade is the highlight of the calendar for officers, staff and families alike. Prizes are awarded, with the most prestigious – the Queen’s Gold Medal, dating back to 1916 – awarded to the graduate who demonstrates

07 The Royal Australian Navy School of Sea

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Safety and Survivability (RANSSSS) at HMAS Creswell trains personnel to control emergency situations in a maritime environment. Image ABIS Bonny Gassner/ RAN

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the most exemplary conduct, performance of duty and good influence among fellow graduates. Ceremonial Sunset and Beat to Quarters ceremonies during the graduation are perhaps the oldest and most significant of naval ceremonies and are derived from the age of sail.

The Royal Australian Navy is proud of its heritage and has set aside two buildings at the RANC to tell the history of the college, staff and cadets. Displays cover not only the history of the RANC but current deployments of the RAN. Due to current security restrictions the museum is open by appointment only.

One of the most significant pieces of RANC history is a 200-kilogram bronze bell that was installed by John Danks and Sons in the Clock Tower to ring out ‘ship’s time’. It disappeared between 1930 and 1958 when the site was being used as a resort. It turned up at an engineering works in Sydney in the 1960s, and rather than sell it for scrap, the owner of the works decided to display it at home. After some detective work, his family returned the bell to the RAN in 2012. The clues that led them to the RANC were faint markings on the bell, including the initials of four of the 1914 Entry Cadet Midshipmen: Lovell J Towers, Percy F Dash, Otto F McMahon and Arthur H Spurgeon. Graffiti by four 13-year-olds saved the bell! It now resides in the foyer of the college museum.

HMAS Creswell comprises more than 30 buildings – it is, and always has been, a self-contained naval unit. With its age showing, many buildings at the RANC required renovation or replacement and in 1976 a new construction phase costing $600,000 began. Since then further refits of the college have been undertaken, providing better accommodation and training

08 Two of Creswell’s buildings house historical

objects and memorabilia, including ship models. Image Jeremy Austen 09 The Clock Tower’s bronze bell, which went

missing for years before being identified by its graffiti and returned to the college.

Image Jeremy Austen

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facilities and upgraded infrastructure to ensure the navy meets capability requirements. In 2011, works were completed as part of an $83.6 million redevelopment, providing significantly upgraded training and accommodation facilities. The 1913 weatherboard style predominant at Creswell has been kept and the site has been listed on the National Heritage Register.

HMAS Creswell is a significant establishment for the Royal Australian Navy and underpins the navy’s values of honour, honesty, courage, integrity and loyalty. It strives to produce the best in its trainees to meet the challenges of delivering future capability in an ever-changing world.

Lindsey Shaw spent 27 years as a curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum before retiring, and is now an ANMM Honorary Research Associate.

10 Some of the site’s original buildings,

with resident kangaroos on the parade ground. Image Jeremy Austen

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EDUCATION SUMMER 2016–17

SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ‘COOL REAL STUFF’

‘Cool real stuff ’ TACTILE LEARNING WITH THE MUSEUM’S EDUCATION COLLECTION

Our present is tomorrow’s past. Museums collect material culture to help preserve and interpret the past, give context to the present and build bridges to the future.

Senior Education Officer Jeff Fletcher looks at the museum’s Education Collection and how its diverse hands-on objects stimulate learning.

01 Textile and design students examine vintage

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swimsuits from the Education Collection.

Image Zoe McMahon/ANMM

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EDUCATION SUMMER 2016–17

A very little key will open a very heavy door – Charles Dickens

We challenge people to think not only about what the object is but also where it came from and who owned it before

THE VALUE OF AN OBJECT is measured in what it can tell us, how people might react to it and its contribution to our broader knowledge of the human story. Rare or exquisite things through to quite ordinary, everyday things can become sensational, mysterious or endearing. They can trigger feelings of nostalgia, evoke strong emotions, make us laugh or inspire our creativity.

Most of all, they often just become really interesting! Anyone who has ever started their own collection knows that, and most of us have collected something at some stage in our lives.

So, what fuels our desire to accumulate personal treasure troves (even when we run out of room to store them) and enthusiastically hold court to friends and family on their respective virtues? It is because they engage our personal interest, in whatever form that takes. They somehow strike a chord with us. Objects reveal different stories to different people in different contexts and are often the key to empathy and understanding.

There is a growing recognition in education that learning by touch can both complement other learning styles and stand alone as a distinct category. The sense of touch informs cognitive processes and learning tasks. Museums are well equipped to provide such environments and several syllabus documents now include a museum visit on their suggested fieldwork list. I recently asked a group of Year 9 students what they expected to see on a museum visit and the consensus was ‘cool real stuff’. As educators, it is where we go from there that is important. Put a dozen items on a table and give students free rein to choose one to investigate and some will hesitate, some will think about it and others will dive straight in.

02 The museum’s education programs are

complemented by items from the Education Collection. Here students tackle a project about maritime archaeology. Image Zoe McMahon/ANMM

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Their choice and subsequent actions tell us a good deal about the way they engage, think and learn. This is where interpretive learning tools such as technology, investigation tasks and group dynamics effectively come into play.

Writer Ray Bradbury once said ‘Collecting facts is important.

Knowledge is important. But if you don’t have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilisation is nowhere.’ By encouraging (rather than allowing) people to handle Education Collection material, we bring those items into the visitors’ consciousness and ask them to think, imagine, interact, question, hypothesise and extrapolate. We also challenge them to think not only about what the object is but also where it came from and who owned it before, its relevance to the topic at hand and why we actually acquired it. This often resonates with students as they start to form their own connections, which is the cornerstone of serendipitous learning. This also provides an important lesson on how to care for collection items: Why are some things in showcases and others not? Why can I touch things in the Education Collection? Why do I sometimes need to wear gloves?

So, what is the Education Collection? It began as 15 or so interesting pieces that showcased to students some of the museum’s stories, for example a harpoon, a sextant and a mock cat-o’-nine-tails. Over the last decade it has grown to almost 600 objects of all shapes, sizes, materials and origins, connected to a diverse range of curriculum areas such as immigration, Indigenous culture, fashion and leisure, marine biology, war and peace, sea travel, maritime archaeology and exploration.

03 Museum staff and friends model swimsuits

from the Education Collection at the 2016 Classic & Wooden Boat Festival.

Image Janine Flew/ANMM

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To facilitate that, sometimes education officers have to become scavengers of a sort, although ‘opportunist’ might be a slightly more flattering term. We gather pieces from a range of sources such as retail, dealers, auction and donation. We haunt secondhand shops and vintage fairs, trawl for bargains online and rescue things from impending rubbish heaps.

The museum’s curators, registrars and conservators are very generous and always keep us in mind when items become available through acquisition duplicates, rejections and de-acquisitions from the National Maritime Collection.

Before accepting an item we assess it against a set of criteria, mostly relating to its usefulness in a current or future education program and the maritime story that it tells. Each acquired piece is assigned its own number on the museum’s collections database, where we can enter more information and keep track of its location and how it is used.

Most of our pieces are used in school programs incorporating object-based learning strategies in history, archaeology, science, visual arts, geography, mathematics, and textiles and design for both primary and secondary schools. We also try to create multiple learning contexts when we can – for example our wonderful array of vintage swimwear fascinates senior textiles and design students as they study manufacturing techniques, fabrics, design styles and social attitudes from different eras.

We have showcased some of our swimwear in the popular Swimsuits Through Time fashion parades at our Classic & Wooden Boat Festivals and during the museum’s popular exhibition Exposed! The history of swimwear. Other items have been touring the country as education resources for the

04 The Cabinet of Curiosities encourages visitors

to touch items that relate to various maritime themes – here, a diving boot from the 1930s and nails recovered from shipwrecks.

Image Annalice Creighton/ANMM

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EDUCATION SUMMER 2016–17

exhibition Waves & Water: Australian beach photographs and some were lent for use in a documentary on the history of Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club.

Over the last decade the Education Collection has grown to almost 600 objects of all shapes, sizes, materials and origins, from swimsuits and Indigenous items to a stuffed crocodile

Object-based learning has significant benefit in many subject areas. Our stall at the Australian Museum Science Festival this year attracted several thousand students over four days and we relied heavily on the impact created by our marine specimens, old diving suit, Aboriginal bark paintings from north-east Arnhem Land, and stuffed saltwater crocodile and water rat. Through hands-on investigation, students were engaged in concepts relating to physics, environmental science, oceanography, biology and chemistry – even the science of taxidermy. Sitting in the back of a truck nursing a bubblewrapped stuffed saltwater crocodile while negotiating Sydney traffic will be one of my lasting memories of working as an educator at ANMM! An effective blend of physical objects and technology is achieved through our virtual excursion program in which our Indigenous artefacts, models and shipwreck items are used in several programs broadcast to schools around the country and internationally, such as our Indigenous People and Water program that we regularly beam to schools in Korea.

Education Collection objects are a wonderful way to provide stimulus and connective experiences for visually impaired students and are also used extensively in the mobile Cabinet of Curiosities – a feature for public visitors and vacation groups on weekends and school holidays. Visitors can handle and learn about everything from old navigation instruments to cruise ship memorabilia, Aboriginal shell-work from La Perouse in Sydney,

05 Indigenous Programs Manager Donna

Carstens shows a stuffed crocodile to students via video link. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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scrimshaw, shipwreck nails, World War I newspapers and specimen sea creatures – quite the talking point and perfect for inter-generational engagement.

However, there is an important distinction between the Education Collection and general-use props. The former is a formal museum collection, although its objects are sourced, acquired and classified differently from those of the National Maritime Collection so we can use them for a specific purpose.

However, the objects maintain a status that dictates a high level of care and controlled conditions of use. The assistance of our registration, curatorial and conservation departments has been invaluable and the learning team is extremely grateful for their generosity and enthusiasm in establishing and registering our collection. Equally, a small band of museum educators has put a great deal of effort into cataloguing, researching and maintaining our objects.

06

I once saw a T-shirt with the slogan ‘I learned everything I know from Star Trek’ emblazoned across the front. It reminded me of a conversation in the film Star Trek: First Contact between Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Enterprise and Data, an android who longed to be human. The plot had taken them back in time where they encountered the Phoenix, the first space ship to achieve warp speed, several hundred years before their own time. The captain runs his hands over the ship’s hull: Captain Picard: It’s a boyhood fantasy... I must have seen this ship hundreds of times in the Smithsonian but I was never able to touch it.

Lieutenant Commander Data: Sir, does tactile contact alter your perception of the Phoenix?

Captain Picard: Oh, yes! For humans, touch can connect you to an object in a very personal way, make it seem more real.1 Perhaps there’s a lesson there after all …

1 Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Paramount. Extract from the website: imdb.com/title/ tt0117731/quotes

06 A sextant from the early 20th century is used

in programs for students studying Science and the Sea. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > FIBRE ART AND FASHION

COLLECTIONS SUMMER 2016–17

Fibre art and fashion

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO INDIGENOUS ART Contemporary Indigenous art is a dynamic blend of ancient culture and techniques combined with innovation and original design. Indigenous Programs Manager Donna Carstens profiles a creative island community that is making its mark on the worlds of art and fashion.

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01 Designed to complement the necklace is this

top of woven pandanus and kurrajong fibres with natural dyes, which also featured on the catwalk at AIFW 2014. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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GALIWIN’KU IS A COMMUNITY of the Yolŋu Aboriginal people and the only town on Elcho Island, some 550 kilometres north-east of Darwin. The community boasts a thriving arts centre, Elcho Island Arts, which services more than 200 Yolŋu artists who create Yolŋu art and designs that are direct inheritances from ancient times. The artforms and ceremonies passed on to today’s Yolŋu people express direct links to their significant creation sites and ancestors. The arts centre has earned a strong reputation for the quality of weavings, paintings, and carvings informed by these ancestral histories.

Artists pride themselves on originality of design and knowledge of traditional bush materials, including natural earth pigments, which are used in both traditional and contemporary artforms.

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COLLECTIONS SUMMER 2016–17

02 Necklace woven from pandanus and bush

string with natural dyes, made by Mavis Warrngilna Ganambarr for Australian Indigenous Fashion Week (AIFW) 2014.

ANMM Collection 00054381 03 Dilly bag of bush string, luthuluthu (neritina)

shells and natural dyes, made by Mavis Warrngilna Ganambarr. ANMM Collection 00027408

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A number of women are bringing their traditional weaving techniques into a new millennium

The arts centre has been community-operated since 1992, and exists primarily to support Yolŋu artists in sharing their culture and deriving income from their art making. The arts centre assists in the production of artwork as well as the collection, promotion and distribution of high-quality Yolŋu art and design to a range of markets in Australia and overseas.

04

A number of women who work out of the Elcho Island arts centre are starting to make their mark on the contemporary art scene, bringing their traditional weaving techniques into a new millennium. For centuries the Yolŋu women of Elcho Island have used the local pandanus plant and grasses to weave everyday objects such as baskets and fishing nets. They are now transforming these skills with artists such as Mavis Warrngilna Ganambarr.

Mavis Ganambarr is one of Australia’s leading fibre artists.

Born at Matamata outstation on the mainland, on the west coast of Arnhem Bay, she now lives at Galiwin’ku with her husband and children. Mavis is the daughter of clan leader Mowarra (c 1917–2005). He, too, was a renowned artist, whose works are among the museum’s collection of Saltwater Barks.

Mowarra showed Mavis how to use ochre to paint highlights in her work, and later, when he was staying with her during his final illness, he suggested that she begin making ‘soft sculptures’ – three-dimensional creations in fibre, such as hats, pendants, animals and human figurines. Mavis credits her late father for her inspiration, and after his passing she spent several years on her homelands experimenting with innovative techniques, all stemming from traditional practice.

Mavis was still a small child when she was introduced to weaving by her grandmother, Djuluka, and her female relatives at Matamata. By the time she had finished school, she was an accomplished weaver, having gained knowledge of collecting plants and natural dyes, preparing bark fibre strips and weaving dilly bags in the bush, the same way her grandmother and those before her did.

04 Armband of coiled plant fibres decorated

with feathers, made by Mavis Warrngilna Ganambarr. ANMM Collection 00040542

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Mavis prefers to work with a deep yellow natural dye, as the colour refers to that of the earth. Yolŋu society also has strong belief systems, including the balancing of nature, landscape and the human presence within them. Colours have clan associations that can be expressed and seen in the stories made through art. Mavis has also explored texturising colours throughout her work by using feathers that are given to her, along with seeds or shells. She has spent years experimenting and creating new styles of weaving and wearable art, and has worked collaboratively over the past two decades with other artists, curators and designers, including Dr Louise Hamby, jeweller Alice Whish and Sasha Titchkosky of Sydney-based design company Koskela.

Mavis spent several years on her homelands experimenting with innovative techniques, all stemming from traditional practice

05

05 Mavis Ganambarr working with pandanus

leaves.

This image courtesy Koskela

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Mavis has exhibited work across Australia, including in the 16th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial, at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, in the 29th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin, and at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Her solo exhibition Gunga Djama Mirr (Pandanus Work) was held at the Bandigan Art and Crafts Gallery Sydney, 2001. Her works have been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and are included in the Kerry Stokes Collection.

In February 2010 Mavis participated in the Yuta Badayala (New Light) project and exhibition, product of a joint project with Koskela. Its aim was to give Yolŋu women the opportunity to transfer their traditional weaving techniques onto new forms so that long-held cultural practices and art-making skills could be seen in a new light. The project also aims to develop new markets for Indigenous fibre art. The project provided Mavis with the opportunity to translate her traditional techniques onto a new form, and offered a long-term sustainable business opportunity for Yolŋu women through Elcho Island Arts.

Mavis says of her life and work: Bapa Shepie [a missionary] brought me to Galiwin’ku when I was nine years old so I could go to school. I was taught fibre art by my grandmother Djuluka … I have been continually creating weavings and wearable art since then. I am very proud of what my grandmother taught me to do, but now I am making different, new styles of my own ideas. I teach my children and one day they will teach their children. In this way we will keep our culture strong.

The museum wishes to thank Elcho Island Arts and Koskela for their assistance with this article.

06 Mavis harvesting prickly pandanus leaves.

The leaves must then be split before they are dyed and woven.

07 Mavis Ganambarr with roots from which

she extracts her preferred deep yellow dye.

Image courtesy Koskela 08 Pandanus leaves being dyed outdoors.

All images this page courtesy Koskela

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > FOCUS ON TASMANIA

ARHV SUMMER 2016–17

Focus on Tasmania AUSTRALIAN REGISTER OF HISTORIC VESSELS

ANMM.GOV.AU/ARHV This online national heritage project, devised and coordinated by the Australian National Maritime Museum in association with Sydney Heritage Fleet, reaches across Australia to collate data about the nation’s existing historic vessels, their designers and builders, and their stories.

01 01 Sao sails onto the Derwent River on 10 February 1920

to race in the Royal Hobart Regatta. In the background is HMAS Australia, the flagship for the event. Image courtesy Sao’s owner

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ARHV SUMMER 2016–17

Two yachts whose home state is Tasmania are prominent among the latest craft nominated to the ARHV. They feature on the new ARHV website, along with other listed vessels, and serve to highlight the extent of boatbuilding in Tasmania. Curator of Historic Vessels David Payne profiles these, and a visitor to the 2017 Australian Wooden Boat Festival, the elegant steam yacht Ena.

TASMANIA’S OUTSTANDING boatbuilders are particularly known for the range of yachts that came from their yards.

Among these is Sao, a timber racing yacht built by E A ‘Ned’ Jack in Launceston in 1898, to a design by Thomas Archer, a relative of the famous Norwegian naval architect Colin Archer.

Sao raced successfully in the 21-foot waterline class and later moved to Hobart, where it has now been sailing for more than a century. It is an early surviving example of Ned Jack’s skilled workmanship.

Sao was launched from Ned Jack’s yard into the Tamar River in October 1898. Jack was already building small racing craft of this type, while designer and owner Tom Archer was a well-known community member with a large estate called Woolmers in the nearby countryside. He was also commodore of the Tamar Yacht Club and a keen supporter of yachting in the region. The carvel-planked hull had a centreboard and bulb, a large mainsail and small headsail set off the stem for racing, and for cruising it sailed with just a small mainsail.

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02 SY Ena in March 2016, on its first harbour

outing since returning from Melbourne in January. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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The yacht was 27 feet (8.23 metres) long, with a beam of six feet six inches (2 metres). Sao’s successes included a win in the 1903 Tamar Regatta. An article on Archer in The Examiner on 28 August 1902 noted: In October 1898 Sao built by Jack to Mr Archer’s own designs was launched, and in her the success of Bouncer [Archer’s former yacht] has been repeated, while she has eclipsed her sister sailboats in retaining the owner’s affection, for a very reasonable offer that would have made her a southern champion was refused but a few weeks ago.

In 1904 Sao was sold to Percy Bone in Hobart. It had mixed success on the Derwent River, where conditions were often rougher than in the more sheltered Tamar estuary. It raced in the Second Class until around 1907/08, when a new larger class was introduced and the smaller yachts became the Third Class.

Sao also cruised the region, including a voyage around the east coast – a plucky sail for a small yacht. In 1910 it was fitted with a two-and-a-half horsepower petrol motor and a small generator running off the flywheel to power its electric light – the first such light on a Tasmanian yacht.

Percy Bone died in 1925 and the yacht was sold to Richard Whittington and Norman Pearce. Tragically Whittington fell from Sao during a squall that year and drowned. Whittington was very well respected and the accident was reported in the Australian Motor Boat and Yachting Monthly:

03

Sao also cruised Tasmania, including a voyage around the east coast – a plucky sail for a small yacht

They were making their way down river for a weekend cruise when the gale found them. Running hard by the lee it was found necessary to stay the little craft and it was in this manoeuvre that Mr Whittington was swept into the water, most probably by the swinging boom.

His colleague Pearce took the dinghy and found Whittington in the water, but then the dinghy was swamped and both were stranded. Whittington was unconscious and slipped away from Pearce’s hold after 20 minutes.

Sao remained sailing on the Derwent through a succession of owners. In the early 1980s it underwent an extensive refit during which it changed owners, but by the end of the decade it was once again sailing and racing on the river. After another overhaul by the current owner, Sao is once more in excellent condition. Woolmers, the home of Thomas Archer, remains in the Archer family and is a landmark building and site in the Launceston region.

03 SY Ena’s impressive restoration is the

latest chapter in a story that has included wartime service and a sinking off Tasmania.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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ARHV SUMMER 2016–17

Utiekah III is a cruising yacht built in 1925 at the Wilson Brothers yard in Cygnet in southern Tasmania. The Wilsons were a family of well-known boatbuilders in Tasmania over three generations.

It was built for Ireton Elliot Giles, a charismatic Victorian teacher and adventurer who pioneered sail-training for youths and supported the practice for many decades. He also cruised Utiekah III as the first Australian yacht to sail in the South Pacific.

Utiekah III was built for Ireton Elliot Giles, a charismatic Victorian teacher and adventurer who pioneered sailtraining for youths

Utiekah III was built by the Wilson brothers, assisted by two other men and a boy over 10 months. It is planked in Huon pine and copper fastened. Its five tonnes of lead in the keel and seven tonnes of internal ballast ensured a sea-kindly motion in the open sea. It was the first private recreational vessel built

by Wilson Bros, who had only done commercial vessels up to that time.

Utiekah III was preceded by Utiekah II (HV000505), which was designed by Jack Savage Senior in 1911, and built by Lyons and Savage in Williamstown, Victoria. The name Utiekah is thought to have Maori origins, and to refer to the sound of rippling water.

Giles collaborated with Jack Savage to design the third Utiekah for the purpose of taking Melbourne Grammar School students on challenging and character-building exercises where they learnt the arts of seamanship, bluewater sailing and understanding the elements of the ocean – a project he had started with Utiekah II. More than 4,000 young students undertook these adventures, many recalling them as some of their most memorable experiences. Utiekah III crossed Bass Strait more than 50 times during these voyages. Giles retired and moved to Hobart, where he continued to use Utiekah III to teach sailing to the local boys from The Hutchins School. In the late 1930s he formed a crew of his friends and they cruised extensively in the South Pacific, the first Australian-flagged yacht to do so.

Giles sold Utiekah III at age 90, and died two years later.

The yacht was bought by the Fowler family in Tasmania, who fitted it with a deck house and a 1958 Ford Thames diesel motor, which is still installed.

A syndicate purchased Utiekah III in 1972 intending to use the yacht for charter work on the Great Barrier Reef. In 1974 it foundered on a reef off Mackay and was written off and abandoned. A storm from the south washed the yacht into a lagoon, where it was found floating and subsequently recovered

by Gary Underwood. It was taken to New Zealand mainly under power, fitted with a 3.5-tonne reinforced concrete keel to replace the one lost on the reef, then brought back to Australia and sold on twice before being bought by John and Carolyn Mahoney, who set out to rebuild Utiekah III to its original configuration.

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A bronze bust of Ireton Elliot Giles was designed in honour of his dedication to the students at Melbourne Grammar.

At a reunion held at the school in 1996, John Mahoney spoke to 150 ex-students and recalled there was not a dry eye in the auditorium. He had sailed Utiekah III from Tasmania to Melbourne to attend the ceremony. As it continues to sail in Australian waters it stirs memories, and people sometimes ask if this is the Utiekah III that they or their father learnt to sail on.

SY Ena is a remarkable survivor of requisitioning, credit seizures and the auction hammer

It is hoped that both of these Tasmanian-based craft will be attending the Australian Wooden Boat Festival (AWBF) in Hobart in February 2017, where they will be joined by the museum’s representative, SY Ena. The story of this 116-yearold-vessel is in four parts – elegant steam yacht, war service, cargo and fishing vessel, then finally an amazing restoration.

A later issue of Signals will expand on this story, but at present the steam yacht is undergoing a gradual overhaul to return it to first-class standard. Berthed at the museum as a visiting vessel on loan to ANMM, it is open to the public at specified times when it is not being worked on.

Ena is a remarkable survivor of requisitioning, credit seizures and the auction hammer. Launched in 1900, it spent 16 elegant years on the harbour before being sent to war, painted a drab grey all over and renamed HMAS Sleuth. It resumed its private duties in the 1920s before being sold into Tasmanian commercial work, seized by creditors, converted for fishing offshore in the 1940s, and swapping its steam engine for a diesel. Early in the 1980s it sank in the d’Entrecasteaux Channel, was salvaged, shipped to Sydney, restored in a million-dollar project, then seized by creditors again. Sold at auction early in the 1990s, it was then put under wraps except for the occasional day sail, and was lost to the public until recently. After being resold and spending 18 months in Melbourne, it went to auction and finally returned home to Sydney, for all to see.

Its story now includes a desire to share the vessel and open it to the public, and a place for it at Australia’s premier wooden boat festival, the internationally renowned Australian Wooden Boat Festival (AWBF), is long overdue. This venture is not without risk – designed for Sydney Harbour, Ena must make its way on open water, a passage it has done before, and under escort it will steam to Hobart after Christmas. If you are going to the AWBF, there is much to look out for.

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All images courtesy of the boats’ owners; 05 image John Jeremy

For more information on these and other boats, see the new ARHV website, which lists more vessels and features an updated layout: anmm.gov.au/arhv NAME

DATE

BUILDER

TYPE

CODE

01

Sao

1898

EA Jack

Yacht

HV000713

02

Smoky Cape

1973

Cec Quilkey

Yacht

HV000714

03

Nymphaea

1946

C Blunt

Fishing boat

HV000715

04

Silver Arrow

1936

Lars Halvorsen

Motor cruiser

HV000716

05

Tup

1965

Hald & Johansen

Yacht

HV000717

06

Utiekah III

1925

Wilson Bros

Yacht

HV000719

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > THREE DECADES OF SERVICE

CURRENTS SUMMER 2016–17

Three decades of service

RADM ANDREW ROBERTSON NAMED INAUGURAL HONORARY FELLOW

01

THE COUNCIL of the Australian National Maritime Museum was very pleased to award the museum’s inaugural Honorary Fellowship to one our most valued supporters, Rear Admiral Andrew Robertson ao dsc ran (Rtd) in recognition of his 30 years of service and support of the museum.

The Honorary Fellowship is the museum’s highest level of recognition and acknowledges rare individuals of high distinction who have a profound interest in the museum and have made a significant contribution to it. Honorary Fellows receive a variety of benefits, including life membership and their name placed on an honour board in the museum.

01 RADM Andrew Robertson and museum

councillor RADM Stuart Mayer CSC & Bar, Commander Australian Fleet, Royal Australian Navy. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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Rear Admiral Robertson joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1939 and had a long and illustrious career serving in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Coral Sea and the New Hebrides from 1942 to 1944 and in the Mediterranean from 1944 to the end of World War II. He was awarded the King’s Medal in 1942 and the Distinguished Service Cross for service in the Korean War. He was head of the Australian Defence staff in London and Europe before retiring in 1982.

Rear Admiral Robertson’s impact on the founding of the Australian National Maritime Museum is profound and enduring.

He is publicly associated with a report that influenced the government’s decision to establish the museum, and was Deputy Convenor of the museum’s Advisory Committee during its establishment in 1985 and Deputy Chairman of the Interim Council from 1985 to 1988. He proposed the five key themes for the museum’s permanent exhibitions and drafted a proposed charter for the museum.

As a member of the Advisory Committee and the Interim Council, he influenced the museum’s design, legislation, budget and structure, branding, exhibition design and master plan, education policy and early acquisitions (particularly HMAS Vampire and Ken Warby’s Spirit of Australia). His period on the Interim Council included the construction phase of the museum building.

In April this year the museum unveiled a new two-metretall bronze sculpture to honour the contribution made by ‘windjammer sailors’ to the development of Australia.

The sculpture was commissioned from a major donation to the ANMM Foundation by RADM Robertson. Located within the cultural precinct on the Pyrmont wharf foreshore between the museum and its Wharf 7 administrative building, the sculpture is part of a program to re-energise the area.

The museum is delighted to honour Rear Admiral Andrew Robertson by naming him our inaugural Honorary Fellow.

His naval career is to be celebrated and as a founding councillor he is a long-time friend and supporter of the museum. He has played an enormous role in making the museum what it is today and we are extremely grateful for his wonderful contribution to Australian maritime history.

Shirani Aththas

CURRENTS SUMMER 2016–17

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CURRENTS SUMMER 2016–17

SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > CURRENTS

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New names unveiled on Welcome Wall More than 1,500 people attended the unveiling of three new panels, inscribed with 882 names, on the museum’s Welcome Wall on Sunday 25 September. Dr Hari Harinath oam, Chair of Multicultural NSW, was the guest of honour at the morning ceremony and shared his own family’s migration story while discussing the importance of multiculturalism in Australia.

A second ceremony for the Greek community was held later that afternoon, with special guests Greek–Australian actress Mary Coustas (second from left) and the Greek Consul General in Sydney, Dr Stavros Kyrimis (right).

Story Shirani Aththas; image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

02

Family of Harold Cazneaux visit exhibition in his honour A special afternoon tea was held for the grandchildren of Australian photographer Harold Cazneaux (1878–1953) on 25 October to thank them for their generous support of the museum’s acquisition of a collection of Cazneaux’s photographs. The event also acknowledged their assistance in developing the museum’s current exhibition Through a different lens – Cazneaux by the water, with particular thanks to granddaughters Sally Garrett and Anne Christofferson, and agent Gael Newton.

Special thanks were also given to Sydney Heritage Fleet volunteers Jeff Madsen and Bill Allen, who helped identify some obscure maritime sites for the ‘Then and now’ material in the exhibition.

Pictured with ANMM Director Kevin Sumption (left), Senior Curator Daina Fletcher (second from right) and Chairman Peter Dexter (far right) are four of Harold Cazneaux’s grand-children: Dick Smith, Sally Garrett, Robert Johnson and Anne Christoffersen. Story Shirani Aththas; image A Frolows/ANMM

03

Dirk Hartog 400th anniversary On 20 October the museum launched a spectacular new roof projection to mark 400 years since Dutch mariner Dirk Hartog made the first documented European landing on the west coast of Australia, on 25 October 1616. Fusing handdrawn animation and digital technology, the projection was developed with the University of Technology Sydney with funding by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Following speeches by ANMM Director Kevin Sumption and Dutch Consul-General Willem Cosijn, designer Damian Gascoigne’s vibrant brushstrokes – evoking sails, waves and exotic spices carried on trade winds – unfurled dramatically across the museum’s rooftop. The show, with its illuminated colour palette and soundtrack composed by Peter Hollo, brought Hartog vividly to life on the 400th anniversary of his historic landing. Story Kim Tao; image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

Erratum

In Signals 116 we noted that a portrait of polar ship Aurora was presented to the museum by the Fairweather family. It was in fact given by sisters Charlotte and Wendy Fairweather, great-grand-daughters of Captain James Fairweather, Aurora’s master, in memory of their father James S Fairweather (1926–2015). We apologise for this error.

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > YOUR PERSONAL MUSEUM GUIDE

TRANSMISSIONS SUMMER 2016–17

Your personal museum guide

CUSTOMISE YOUR VISIT WITH OUR NEW APP

LET’S START WITH A QUICK QUIZ. Do you know what Lena Gustin and Bob Stephens have in common? What a nawi is?

And what the museum’s Eora Gallery is named after? If not, then our new self-guided Visitor App will help you make the most of your next visit.

The app allows you to explore Australia’s rich maritime history in four different ways: by choosing a tour based on theme or duration; by using the map to make your own tour; or by wandering around the museum. The app uses a technology called ibeacons – small Bluetooth-emitting devices that invisibly talk to your phone or tablet, telling it where you are.

Whether you’re on a pre-programmed tour, or one of your own creation, they can help you navigate around the museum using the inbuilt map. Your phone will identify where you are on the map and the beacons will locate the objects you want to see.

If you’re exploring the museum without a map, the ibeacons aid serendipitous discovery because the app’s ‘nearby’ function allows you to find featured objects that are in your vicinity.

The app tells the stories of more than 100 objects, adding context and providing insights.

You can use the app as a traditional audio guide, by bringing your own headphones and listening to the stories, or you can read the stories and browse the supplementary images and videos in the app. You can track your progress around the museum to make sure you’ve seen everything you want to see. You can also save or share your favourite museum experiences to discuss them with friends or family. The app also highlights the new exhibitions at the museum, making sure you don’t miss out.

We hope the app will help you uncover new treasures within the collection, gain new insights into old favourites and ensure you see all of our temporary exhibitions. The tours have been developed in collaboration with the museum’s expert curators, registrars and photographers, so using the app will be like having your own private tour with the museum’s experts.

Find the app on iTunes or Google Play by searching for ‘ANMM’.

The app runs on your iPhone, iPad or Android device and is available as a free download by visiting anmm.gov.au/visitorApp

Quiz answers Lena Gustin and Bob Stephens both migrated to Australia in the 1950s in the aftermath of World War II. Bob came as a forced child migrant from the UK and Lena, an Italian school teacher, migrated voluntarily with her family.

A nawi is a traditional Aboriginal tied-bark canoe.

The Eora Gallery is named after the Aboriginal people who lived in the area known as the Sydney Basin.

SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > THE STORE

SEE WHAT’S IN STORE ANZAC TEDDY Teddy bear in WWI Digger uniform. Part of the proceeds from sale of this bear will go to charity Soldier On, which helps service people to deal with physical and psychological damage.

$99.95 / $89.95 Members

MONET PRINT SCARF Long, feather-light and beautifully soft chiffon scarf based on Claude Monet’s painting Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge, c 1897–99.

$89.95 / $80.95 Members

CEZANNE PRINT SILK TIE Printed silk tie inspired by sky and water details in the serene painting Lac d’Annecy, by the post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne.

PEARLS This beautifully illustrated book presents these gems in all their natural lustre and discusses their historical and social value.

$79.95 / $71.95 Members

$69.95 / $62.95 Members

CAPTAIN COOK FIGURINE Limited edition bronze collectible figurine of Captain James Cook. Each figurine includes a collector’s certificate.

SUBMARINES AND UNDERWATER EXPLORATION COLOURING BOOK A fascinating introduction to deep-sea diving that chronicles ocean exploration in 44 dramatic ready-to-colour illustrations.

$79.95 / $71.95 Members

$10.00 / $9.00 Members

ANMM COLLECTION 2017 CALENDAR 2017 wall calendar featuring historic photographs by Samuel J Hood and William Hall, from the museum’s collection.

$24.95 / $22.45 Members

Shop online at store.anmm.gov.au 9.30 am–5 pm 7 days a week | 02 9298 3698 store.anmm.gov.au | Members’ discounts

TEA TIN Tea tin printed with an image of Sydney Harbour from the ANMM’s collection. Contains 100g of English breakfast tea.

$25.00 / $22.50 Members

Books DVDs & CDs Brassware Models Gifts Prints Posters Toys Shirts Hats Scarves Souvenirs

116

SIGNALS > NUMBER 117 > ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements The Australian National Maritime Museum acknowledges the support provided to the museum by all our volunteers, members, sponsors, donors and friends.

The museum particularly acknowledges the following people who have made a significant contribution to the museum in an enduring way or who have made or facilitated significant benefaction to it.

Honorary Fellow RADM Andrew Robertson AO DSC RAN (Rtd)

Honorary Life Members Robert Albert AO RFD RD Vivian Balmer Vice Admiral Tim Barrett AO AM CSC

Maria Bentley Mark Bethwaite AM Paul Binsted Marcus Blackmore AM John Blanchfield Alex Books Ian Bowie Ron Brown OAM Paul Bruce Anthony Buckley Richard Bunting Capt Richard Burgess AM Kevin Byrne Cecilia Caffrey Sue Calwell RADM David Campbell AM Marion Carter Victor Chiang Robert Clifford AO Hon Peter Collins AM QC John Coombs Kay Cottee AO Helen Coulson OAM CMDR Russell Crane AO AM CSM RAN

John Cunneen Laurie Dilks Anthony Duignan Leonard Ely Kevin Fewster AM Bernard Flack Daina Fletcher Sally Fletcher CDR Geoff Geraghty AM Tony Gibbs Hon Brian Gibson AM RADM Stephen Gilmore AM

William Hopkins Julia Horne RADM Tony Hunt AO Marilyn Jenner John Jeremy AM Vice Admiral Peter Jones AO AM DSC

Hon Dr Tricia Kavanagh John Keelty Ian Kiernan AM AO Kris Klugman OAM Jean Lane Judy Lee Keith Leleu OAM Andrew Lishmund James Litten Tim Lloyd Ian Mackinder Casimiro Mattea Jack McBurney Bruce McDonald AM Arthur Moss Patrick Moss Rob Mundle OAM Martin Nakata David O’Connor Gary Paquet Prof John Penrose AM Neville Perry Hon Justice Anthe Philippides Peter Pigott AM RADM Neil Ralph Eda Ritchie AM RADM Andrew Robertson AO DSC RAN (Ret)

John Rothwell AO Kay Saunders AM His Excellency the Hon Kevin Scarce AC AO AM CSC RAN David Scott-Smith Sergio Sergi Mervyn Sheehan Ann Sherry AO John Simpson Shane Simpson AM His Excellency the Hon Peter R Sinclair AC AO KStJ (RADM) Peter John Sinclair AM CSC John Singleton AM Brian Skingsley Eva Skira Bruce Stannard AM J J Stephens OAM Michael Stevens Neville Stevens AO Dr Andrew Sutherland AM Hiroshi Tachibana Frank Talbot AM Mitchell Turner Adam Watson Jeanette Wheildon Mary-Louise Williams AM Nerolie Withnall

CSC RAN

Paul Gorrick Lee Graham Macklan Gridley Sir James Hardy KBE OBE RADM Simon Harrington AM Gaye Hart AM Peter Harvie Janita Hercus Philip Hercus AM Anders Hillerstrom Robyn Holt

Founding Members Chad Bull Janette Biber Bruce Webster Margaret Molloy Kaye Weaver David Leigh Yvonne Abadee Maria Tzannes George Fehrenbach Derek Freeman

Alan Stennett Rob Hall Ivor MacDonald Nancy Somerville Ross Wilson Marcia Bass Christopher Harry Malcolm Horsfall Virginia Noel Dennis Rose John Lynch Barry Pemberton John Butler Judy Bayles Allaster McDougall Sybil Jack-Unger Richard Newton James Downie Glenn and Sue Yates Neville Sully John Seymour Peter Magraith Judy Finlason Cliff Emerson David Toyne Kenneth Grundy Geoff Tonkin David Voce David Waghorn and Helen Nickson Vincent Favaloro Colin Randall Denise Taylor Joan and Robert Killingsworth Ian Peters Robert Heussler Dean Claflin Harry Wark John Hamilton Kenneth Swan Mark Latchford James Hawkins Ross and Valda Muller Joyce Groves Lyndyl Beard Walter Pywell John and Marlene Vaughan Peter Wilson Marion Carter and Donald A Finlayson Angela and Teresa Giannandrea Fairlie Clifton Richard and Margaret McMillan Timothy Lewis Maxwell Beever Paul Joyce Petra Blumkaitis and Paul Wahltuch David Robinson Paul Cavanagh Robert and Mary Dick Michael Stacey Peter and Jan Scutts Peter Rowse John Hoey Ronald McJannett John Swanson Herbert White John O’Toole Robert Newell Tim and Kathe Swales Peter Harvey Andrew Kerr

Ronald and Toni White Michael Connor Len Watson Pamela Lowbridge John Carter Paul Richardson Peter O’Hare Stephen Dowsett Simon Barker Bruce Watson Steven White John Bach Bill and Eugenie Forbes Geoffrey Winter Michael and Evelina O’Leary Colin Delaney Mitchell White and Suzanne Peel Adrian Lane Halcyon Evans Bill Fenwick Stephen Smith David Cunningham Peter Inchbold Jean Morgan John Egan Barry Allison Walter Bateman Peter Siebert Michael Turner Stuart Ridland David Nutley Anthony and Katy Palmer Mark Johnson and Lyn Ashby James Littlefield Hilda Farquhar-Smith Robert Holman Bruce Small Garry Kerr William Bixley Derrick Heywood Peter Anderson Neville Rothfield John Brock Graeme Broxam Fred Cory Michael Dowsett Maxwell Surman-Smith Campbell Edmondson Paul Lincoln Tempe Merewether Sydney Jones Stephanie Ross Robert Murphy Derek Moore Anne Liddy Nigel Stoke Alan Ward Philip and Jennifer Andrew Peter Cramer Jeffery Coleman and Lindsey Marwood Allan Bridekirk Bruce and Robyn Tolhurst Chris Clark John and Cecily Ristuccia Andrew Johnston Phillip Good Dawn Springett Greg Swinden Ron and Helen Scobie Edwina Gowans Murray Doyle Adrian and Glenda

Hutchings Peter Gill Ian Robinson Trevor Thomas Jeffrey Mellefont Neville Marshall Bob Walton Peter Bailey Andrew St John-Brown Ann Parry Gary Wilson Kevin Murphy Richard and Christine Diaz Robert and Lynette Schaverien Richard Gardner Rosemary Mahon Daniel and Rosemary Howard Lindsay Rex Valerie Packer Angus Caporn Tom Fawcett Patrick Cooney and Madeleine Degnam Craig Webb William Abbott Neil Brough Susan Tompkins Michael Wise Ann Campbell Ken Woolfe Sarah Marang Chris Mitchell Rob Landis Lloyd Seaforth Poulton and Joan Poulton Margaret White Maxwell Bryan Peter Campbell Peter Cumes Len & Marion Graff Alan Brown Gregory MacMahon Cheryl Manns and Robert Scott Vicky Bourne John Inglis OAM Kenneth Edwards Stephen Robinson Margaret Arthur John Clifton Johan Brinch John Duncan Garry and Janice Sherwood Julie Armour Dawn and Ron Bradner Alexander Bradner Owen Summers Warwick Birrell Jack McBurney Brian and Judith Skingsley Marcus Blackmore AM Anthony Duignan Helen Kenny Honorary Research Associates Lindsey Shaw Jeffrey Mellefont Paul Hundley Rear Admiral Peter Briggs Ian MacLeod

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SIGNALS > NUMBER 117

SIGNALS Signals ISSN 1033-4688 Editor Janine Flew Staff photographer Andrew Frolows Design & production Austen Kaupe Printed in Australia by Ligare Book Printers Material from Signals may be reproduced, but only with the editor’s permission.

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ANMM Council Chairman Mr Peter Dexter am faicd Director and CEO Mr Kevin Sumption Councillors The Hon Ian Campbell The Hon Peter Collins am qc Prof Sarah Derrington Ms Maria Teresia Fors Rear Admiral Stuart Mayer csc and Bar Mr John Mullen The Hon Margaret White ao Foundation partner ANZ Major partners Austal Nine Entertainment Returned and Services League of Australia (Queensland Branch) Partners AccorHotels’ Darling Harbour Hotels AMSA APN Outdoor Foxtel History Channel IAS Fine Art Logistics Laissez-Faire Royal Wolf Holdings Ltd Southern Cross Austereo Sydney by Sail Pty Ltd Founding patrons Alcatel Australia ANL Limited Ansett Airfreight Bovis Lend Lease BP Australia Bruce & Joy Reid Foundation Doyle’s Seafood Restaurant Howard Smith Limited James Hardie Industries National Australia Bank P G, T G & M G Kailis P&O Nedlloyd Ltd Telstra Wallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics Westpac Banking Corporation Zim Shipping Australasia

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War at Sea: The Navy in WWI travelling exhibition

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