Signals 133

Summer 2020–21

Beach Couture Fashion from trash

Chinese immigration Pictures in porcelain

Wartime windjammers The last great ships of sail

Number 133 December to February sea.museum $9.95

Bearings From the Director

AS 2020 DRAWS TO A CLOSE, my thoughts have turned to recovery, and how the museum can respond to the challenges that COVID-19 has presented us. My first priority, as always, is the safety of our staff, volunteers and visitors. We are committed to providing compelling museum experiences that are COVID safe.

We are fortunate to have an abundance of outdoor space available to us, and our staff are hard at work developing activities, events and exhibitions that take advantage of this. In January, we will launch A Mile in My Shoes, an innovative and thought-provoking exhibition from the Empathy Museum. We are also focusing efforts on outdoor festivals and events, such as the ‘Sunday Stir’, to be held on 10 January, which will showcase art, music and stories of and by migrants to Australia (see page 52).

In addition, we have now opened the upgraded Ben Lexcen Terrace. This space will provide a premier indoor/outdoor venue for hire, capturing the western Sydney skyline and offering full weather protection for up to 400 people.

We have received additional funding from the Commonwealth to replace pontoons and make safety upgrades along our wharves. We are grateful for this support, and for the chance to develop new and exciting plans to activate this area and our vessels for our visitors to enjoy.

Speaking of our vessels, I am excited to inform you that the museum has accepted the donation of the Duyfken replica, and it will be arriving from Western Australia in late 2020. In 1606, the original Duyfken, captained by Willem Janszoon, made landfall in the Cape York region of Queensland, and while there, was the first European vessel to make documented contact with First Nations people. I want to acknowledge the generosity of the Duyfken Foundation for this donation and for their custodianship of this extraordinary vessel.

We know that many of our visitors are captivated by the Endeavour replica, and we are delighted by the opportunity to use Duyfken as a complement, highlighting stories of Dutch navigation and exploration, while also presenting another ‘ship and shore’ narrative that gives equal prominence to stories from our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

I am aware that there are many people who may be unable to visit us in person. We are developing new online platforms to enable us to broaden our reach now and into the future. I am particularly proud of our online gaming offers. These curriculum-aligned resources provide students with the opportunity to have fun while learning about important themes. In 2021, we will be launching a third game, Wreck Seekers.

We are also exploring ways to increase access to our collections and resources online, so we can share the National Maritime Collection with you, no matter where you are. 2021 marks the start of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, and the museum is proud to be developing both onsite and online exhibitions, content and activities as our contribution to this decade.

As we move forward into 2021, I am confident that the museum will continue to inspire all Australians to consider the ways in which we are all connected and shaped by our maritime experiences.

I wish you and your loved ones the very best of holiday seasons and I hope we can all look forward to a 2021 that is calmer and less stressful.

Kevin Sumption psm Director and CEO

Contents Summer 2020–21 Number 133 December to February sea.museum $9.95

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

2 A Mile in my Shoes

A pop-up exhibition shares stories of migration

6 Foundation and Members news

Thanking our generous donors; introducing Matt Lee

10 Defying Empire

3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial

16 Botany, art and cultures meet

Reflections on Daniel Solander’s legacy

20 Maritime history prize winners

Announcing the recipients of our biennial maritime history prizes

22 One planet, one ocean

The United Nations Ocean Decade for Sustainable Development

26 Art and activism for the oceans

‘Trashionista’ Marina DeBris transforms ocean waste

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 Islander people now deceased.

30 Wartime windjammers

The museum advises there may be historical language and images that are considered inappropriate today and confronting to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

46 Strengthening our migration history and diversity

The final days of the great ships of sail

38 Australian Sailing Hall of Fame The latest inductees

42 Whale, whale, whale, what do we have here?

DNA analysis reveals the origins of a strange object

A partnership with Settlement Services International

48 A MMAPSS milestone

25 years of supporting Australia’s maritime heritage

52 Museum events

Your calendar of online talks and family activities

54 Exhibitions

Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial and more

Cover A Captive Audience by Marina DeBris is made from trash found on the beach and netting found in the Pacific Gyre.

It features in our new exhibition Beach Couture (see page 26).

Photograph Bruce Ecker, model Daniya Mussina Opposite The Duyfken replica will soon arrive at its new home, the Australian National Maritime Museum. ANMM image

58 Stories in ceramic

Chinese miners on the Victoria goldfields

62 Anchors, chains and an absence of knees

Evidence – and the lack of it – helps to identify a shipwreck

70 Readings

Anton and me: when Merdeka! Came to Sydney by Charlotte Maramis

72 Currents

Vale Mostyn Berryman, last surviving member of Operation Jaywick

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Since the Empathy Museum was founded by Roman Krznaric in 2015, its inaugural project A Mile in my Shoes has travelled to more than 35 locations across the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as New York, Denver, São Paulo, Perth and Melbourne. Now it is Sydney’s turn to host the pop-up storytelling exhibition that allows visitors to step into someone else’s shoes and discover their story, writes curator Kim Tao.

Opening in January as part of the Sydney Festival, A Mile in my Shoes has been developed in collaboration with the Empathy Museum, a series of participatory art projects that encourages people to view the world from a different perspective. The museum considers how empathy can transform our personal relationships and also inspire positive action around global challenges such as prejudice, conflict and inequality. As the first experiential arts space that fosters the skill of empathising, the Empathy Museum doesn’t have a permanent home; instead, its projects are travelling pop-up installations conceived by London-based artist and curator Clare Patey and produced by Artsadmin.

SHOES, MORE THAN ANY OTHER ITEM OF CLOTHING, take on the material imprint of their owners and reflect the places they have been. It is little wonder, then, that to wear someone else’s shoes is a deeply personal tactile experience. This sense of embodied connection lies at the heart of the museum’s upcoming outdoor exhibition A Mile in my Shoes, which invites visitors to walk a mile in the shoes of a stranger while listening to their migration story.

Empathy is often described as having the ability to see the world through another person’s eyes or to walk in their shoes. A Mile in my Shoes interprets this adage literally in the form of a roaming interactive exhibition housed in a giant shoebox, where visitors trade in their own footwear for those of a stranger, slip on some headphones and take a walk as the owner of the shoes shares a story about their life. Over the last five years, the exhibition has welcomed 50,000 visitors who have walked a mile in someone else’s shoes. In each city it visits, the Empathy Museum’s mobile shoe shop collects new stories, resulting in an evolving archive of audio portraits that explore both our differences and our common humanity.

Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

In Sydney, A Mile in my Shoes will give voice to Australia’s diverse immigrant and refugee stories

A Mile in my Shoes at the Totally Thames Festival in Vauxhall, London, 2015.

Image Kate Raworth All images reproduced courtesy Empathy Museum

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Empathy is often described as having the ability to see the world through another person’s eyes or to walk in their shoes

In Sydney, the Australian National Maritime Museum’s migration-themed version of A Mile in my Shoes will activate our Darling Harbour forecourt and give voice to Australia’s diverse immigrant and refugee stories.

The project contributes to the museum’s rich program of migration exhibitions, collections, publications and research activities, which have always used personal stories as the hook to draw out human connections, make history relevant and allow visitors to appreciate the significance of migration in the context of their own lives. A Mile in my Shoes extends this strategy, with its emphasis on personal testimony that implores others to understand ‘what it might be like to be you’.

Understanding and listening are intrinsic to both the exhibition and to Clare Patey’s work, which is focused on creating social spaces in the public realm that bring people together in conversation, participation and celebration. As Patey says: Public spaces for social interaction are diminishing.

Cash-strapped councils are closing social facilities like libraries; our city centres are insidiously privatised; and you can even pay to jump queues where you might have to stand next to someone different to you. Social media encourages us to surround ourselves with groups of likeminded people who don’t unsettle our assumptions about the world ... With the Empathy Museum, what I am trying to do is bring people into contact with those very different to them.1 This notion is especially critical in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, where a sense of social connection is more important than ever. As part of the reawakening of Sydney’s cultural scene in 2021, A Mile in my Shoes generates opportunities for storytelling, dialogue and social inclusion, and positions empathy as a fundamental skill with which to address the complexities of our interconnected global community. The exhibition features 35 engaging audio stories that encompass universal aspects of life – from loss and grief to love and hope – taking visitors on an emotive, empathetic and physical journey.

A Mile in My Shoes at the London International Festival of Theatre, North Greenwich, London, 2016. Image Cat Lee

Among the museum’s storytellers are a Catholic refugee who fled communist Vietnam on a seven-metre-long fishing boat crowded with 99 passengers, who were faced with the horrifying sight of people’s shoes floating in the water from previous failed escapes; a Scottish child migrant who was sent to a blacklisted Victorian children’s home in the 1960s; a Chinese adoptee who was raised by a white family in New Zealand and given a Caucasian name; a young Ghanaian self-taught artist whose work explores African identity; and a firstgeneration Australian whose great-grandfather told his granddaughter as the Germans prepared to invade Poland at the start of World War II: ‘Never judge a man unless you have walked a mile in his shoes’.

For my own walk, I put on a delicate pair of ballet flats in my size, which are trimmed with flowers and ribbons. There is a tangible feeling of connection as the voice of the storyteller speaks directly to me and I am immersed in her story. The experience invokes a process of embodied empathy that is at times unsettling and uncomfortable, but nevertheless powerfully affecting.

Professor Andrea Witcomb, whose research examines concepts of affect and empathy, writes: Affect works through evoking, moving or touching the viewer, producing a visceral response that promotes empathy rather than just simply sympathy.

Feeling empathy is a prerequisite for dialogue, for the recognition of commonalities. While sympathy can reinforce differences by operating in terms of power relations, empathy can build bridges.2 The museum hopes that A Mile in my Shoes will build bridges across Australia’s diverse migrant narratives, challenge assumptions and show that everyone has a story to tell. Whose story will you uncover?

A Mile in my Shoes by the Empathy Museum in collaboration with the Australian National Maritime Museum is on show from 6–31 January 2021. Entry is free; for more information, see sea.museum/a-mile-in-my-shoes.

1 Patey C (2018) ‘Walk a mile in a stranger’s shoes: The Empathy Museum’, CAMOC Museums of Cities Review 2: 7.

2 Witcomb A (2009) ‘Migration, social cohesion and cultural diversity: Can museums move beyond pluralism?’ Humanities Research 25(2): 4.

This exhibition is proceeding with thanks to the support of sponsors, donors and community groups.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Donors make a difference Foundation news

Our donors to the Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation provide vital support to the operations of the museum. During these difficult times, their generosity has been overwhelming, writes Foundation Manager Marisa Chilcott.

MANY DONORS ALLOW THE MUSEUM to direct their donations where they are most needed. This flexibility allows us to respond to unexpected opportunities.

One such opportunity occurred recently, when the museum was approached to become the new home for the Duyfken replica.

A Dutch addition to our fleet

The Duyfken replica was built in Western Australia some 400 years after the original set sail from Banda, Indonesia, in search of ‘south and east lands’ beyond the furthest reaches of the world known to Europeans.

It eventually reached the west coast of what is now the Cape York Peninsula, where its captain, Willem Janszoon, charted 300 kilometres of its shores – becoming the first European to map the Australian coastline.

While the ship itself has been donated to the museum, its voyage from Perth to the other side of the continent has taken time and money. Thanks to the support of our donors, the Foundation was able to fund some of the costs of this journey. Duyfken is due to arrive at the museum by the end of 2020. Once it has settled in, we plan to open it to the public.

Inspiring a love of learning

A core value of the museum is education. This festive season, we invite you to help inspire a love for learning by supporting a disadvantaged child. Every donation over $60 will help a student supported by the Harding Miller Education Foundation (HMEF) to access the museum.

‘Many of our students have never been to a museum before. This opportunity allows our students to broaden their understanding of history, marine sciences and conservation,’ says Cara Varian, CEO of HMEF. 6

Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

The Welcome Wall

You can also honour your family’s journey to start a new life in Australia by including their name on the Welcome Wall. The next panel will be unveiled in late 2021 or early 2022. Gift certificates are available, and we also welcome donations to support the registration of migrants who could not otherwise afford to be included.

All donations support the Migration Heritage Fund, which furthers our work in honouring migration stories.

For more details, please see sea.museum/welcomewall .

Inside this issue of Signals you will find a reply-paid envelope in which to forward your donation, which could help: • inspire a disadvantaged student by supporting their access to the museum • support the Duyfken replica’s relocation and establishment in Sydney • support the museum’s Migration Heritage Fund, to continue showcasing the stories that have made Australia the rich multicultural society it is today.

See the insert in this edition for more information.

How to donate

• Direct deposit BSB 062 000 Account 16169309 Please ensure your name is listed on the transaction.

• Send a cheque made out to ANMM Foundation.

A reply-paid envelope is included in this issue • Or call Marisa Chilcott, Foundation Manager, on 02 9298 3619

Your gift will ensure that a disadvantaged child, who may never have visited a museum before, can be inspired this festive season.

With each donation of $60 to the Inspire a Student campaign, family passes will be distributed to students supported by the Harding Miller Education Foundation.

Students explore naval history and culture in the museum’s Action Stations exhibition. ANMM image

We need your support more than ever

COVID-19 has triggered dramatic changes in the operations of the Australian National Maritime Museum and many longstanding plans have had to be adjusted or shelved.

With the loss of up to $10M in self-generated revenue, roughly a third of our budget, the museum is looking to the Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation – and its donors – for assistance.

A recent study found that most museum-goers are unaware that museums are facing challenges due to COVID-19.1 Yet, when asked how they felt the loss of museums would affect them, either through closures or dramatically reduced services, most said they would be devastated.

The Foundation is requesting your help to:

Our museums help keep our collective memory alive. If we lost even one of these important institutions, it would be like someone had blown out a candle or turned out the lights on a vital piece of our society.

• Assist with the conservation of precious objects

• Allow disadvantaged families to access the museum for free • Support the Migration Heritage Fund • Acquire important objects for the National Maritime Collection

Your tax-deductible donation will help with the museum’s recovery from COVID-19.

For more information go to sea. museum/donate or contact Foundation Manager Marisa Chilcott on 02 9298 3619 or email marisa.chilcott@sea.museum

1 See wilkeningconsulting.com/data-stories

The Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation

Matt Lee, the museum’s new Manager – VIP Relations.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

Introducing Matt Lee Our new Manager, VIP Relations

Many museum Members and regular visitors would be familiar with long-serving staff member Matt Lee. After managing volunteers and front of house, overseeing the museum’s Store for two decades and acting as an assistant director, Matt tells us about his new role as Manager – VIP Relations.

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A most important category of VIPs are our Members and volunteers, who have a strong interest in the museum

Many of you have been Members for a long time.

Many of you are also generous donors and have helped us to secure funds to purchase and conserve items for the collection or enable us to put on an exhibition.

THOSE OF YOU WITH LONG MEMORIES will recall that I started at the museum more than 26 years ago, working in the café. As a new migrant, I got a job making sandwiches and trying to learn how to make coffee.

I apologise to those of you who had to try those first cups of coffee. Mud would have tasted better!

Luckily, I got better over time.

Working in the café, and then later the museum store, was an excellent start to my museum career. I got to hear the stories of our visitors and Members and understand why they loved being a part of the museum.

These days, institutions cannot function without their volunteers and members.

That is why I am so interested in my new role, which includes looking after the museum’s VIPs – among them government and industry partners, previous members of the museum’s Council and high-profile people in areas of maritime industries and pastimes. A most important category of VIPs are our Members and volunteers, who have a strong interest in the museum.

I will work closely with the Australian National Maritime Foundation – an entity set up to raise money for the museum and its activities. Many people don’t realise that the museum, and its Foundation, are charities.

We receive funding from the federal government, which enables us to keep the lights on, the ships in the water and the doors open. It’s our self-generated revenue – through ticket and retail sales, venue hire, sponsorship and membership fees – that allows us to develop and stage world-class exhibitions and to tell Australia’s maritime history and contribute to its future.

I’ll be working closely with Oliver Isaacs, Membership Manager, to get to know you and to hear what interests you about the museum, and to let you know about upcoming projects and possible acquisitions. Until I get to meet you in person, I would like to say a big thank you for giving your time, funds or both to the museum.

Some people donate to a certain appeal or fundraiser; many of you volunteer or give monthly; and some of you have left a legacy to the museum in your wills.

I look forward to meeting you over coffee at the museum soon. I have come full circle – making coffee for our Members again. Hopefully it’s better than 26 years ago.

If you want to contact me to talk about my new role or ways in which you can help to support the museum, then please don’t hesitate to email me at matt.lee@sea.museum or phone on 02 9298 3717.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Defying Empire 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial

An exhibition now showing at the museum reflects on two significant events in the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – the arrival of James Cook in 1770 and the 1967 Referendum that recognised them as citizens in their own country. By Tina Baum.

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The Hand You’re Dealt 2016, Tony Albert. Australian National Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan + Strumpf.

Photo Sam Noonan

We defy: By existing; By determining our identity; By asserting our histories; our culture; our language; By telling our stories, our way; By being one of the oldest continuous living cultures in the world.

LOOKING OUT ACROSS the modern-day shores of Tumbalong/Darling Harbour from the Australian National Maritime Museum, I can’t help but contemplate what untold and hidden histories lie here on the adjacent Gadigal and Wangal Country. Extreme changes and profound upheaval followed the arrival on 29 April 1770 of Lieutenant James Cook and the crew of Endeavour on neighbouring Gweagal Country at Kamay/Botany Bay. The subsequent brutal waves of colonisation across the country had a devastating and long-lasting effect on generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their homelands and waterways. Despite this, the opposition, defiance and resilience of Indigenous Australians have persisted. Their ongoing resistance was captured throughout their own communities via oral stories and by the colonisers in written histories and visual artworks. Artists, black and white, depicted encounters, stories and good and bad experiences, with artists today utilising them to piece together or expose a visual narrative to inform and engage in the history of this country.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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The artists’ works encourage conversations that are essential to dispel myths, stereotypes and outdated ideologies

Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial is one of many events in 2020 designed to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s landing, and the ongoing resistance and defiance by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people against the British Empire since first contact until today. Instead – in a similar way to the first pandemic that Aboriginal people experienced back then – a new introduced disease caused chaos that killed, disrupted and divided communities. It also prevented a national celebration of Britain’s assertion of terra nullius.

When the exhibition first opened in Kamberri/Canberra on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country on 26 May 2017, one day shy of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, it featured works by 30 Indigenous artists from across Australia, both established and emerging practitioners, from urban, regional and remote areas.

Each work commemorated key moments in history through stunning, revealing and sometimes challenging art. The exhibition also repositioned and challenged notions of who we are as Indigenous peoples today by reclaiming and celebrating our identity, the very concept that marked us for categorisation, regulation and restriction under colonial, state and territory laws.

The 1967 Referendum was a decisive turning point in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Upon Federation on 1 January 1901, Indigenous people were, unbelievably, denied the basic right to be recognised as citizens of this country, their own Country. In the referendum, an overwhelming 90.77 per cent of Australians voted ‘yes’ for key changes to the constitution, unifying the nation in a way unprecedented on any other issue. The ‘yes’ vote enabled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be fully counted as citizens in the census for the first time, which also meant, in theory, that they were officially ruled by the same laws as all other Australians.

To Indigenous people, this significant event was to be life changing. For 13 of the artists, born before the referendum, and for the 17 born after, the personal and generational effects still resonate with them today.

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Positioning the exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum in a momentous year that connects it to the first maritime encounter with Cook in Warrang/ Sydney is very fitting. The impact of the British Empire on Indigenous people and the artistic response by the featured artists are appropriate bookends to the ongoing truth-telling of this country. Just as colonial British and subsequent British–Australian-born artists documented and recorded Aboriginal people and their stories, so too do these contemporary Indigenous artists, except from an Indigenous perspective. By combining art and activism, artists have revealed their personal, community or hidden national stories through subtle, overt or confrontational works. Some make political statements important to them and their community; others share their culture or simply engage aesthetically.

All inform, excite, incite and encourage engagement.

The artists in Defying Empire have used their creativity to raise their own voices and speak up for those who have never been heard or need to be heard. Not only do the artists challenge the archaic notion of ‘traditional’ versus ‘contemporary’ art, but they also bring their diverse histories and cultural gauges to their practice.

The exhibition repositions and challenges notions of who we are as Indigenous peoples

01 Bill Onus, President of the Victorian Aborigines’ Advancement League, at an Aboriginal rights march in Melbourne, 29 May 1967.

Image Sydney Morning Herald 02 Protestors at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra, 1974.

National Archives of Australia

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03 Untitled (DOC) 2016, Daniel Boyd. © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

01 Aboriginal Anarchy 2012, Archie Moore. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 02 Double Standards 2015, Sandra Hill. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

By combining art and activism, artists have revealed their personal, community or hidden national stories through subtle, overt or confrontational works 01

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Artists will continue to look to the past, their ancestral or cultural teachings or colonial histories to inform their present thoughts. Whether inspirational, informative or heart-breaking, their works encourage conversations that are essential to dispel myths, stereotypes and outdated ideologies. As we remember the 1967 Referendum, the works in Defying Empire open up conversations through an assemblage of stories, bringing together our inherited chapters of Australia’s history from across the country.

I am eternally grateful to each of the artists, their families and communities for generously sharing their stories that have shaped individuals, communities and us collectively as a nation. It is vital that we hear as many of these experiences as possible, whether we’re comfortable or not, so that we can collectively understand our past and present and how we can work together into the future.

Defying Empire celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art practice, stories and achievements but does not shy away from Australia’s complex histories.

It reinforces and showcases our resilience, pride, diversity and strength and our ongoing connections to Country, family, community, culture and history.

The artists in the exhibition have trawled the colonial cabinet of dated curiosities to demystify, to re-engage, to inspire and to reinforce our resilience and, more importantly, our identity. From those who have fought for our basic right to be counted to our modern-day warriors, and those yet to be seen in the future, keep up the good fight. This is our moment now.

As we reflect on the challenging year that 2020 was, we also need to reflect on and acknowledge the continuity, strength and passion that the arts and artists bring to our lives both in person and more so now online. As we finalise the tour on Gadigal country, at Tumbalong I pay my respects to the Ancestors whose presence, actions, strengths and foresight paved the way for generations of artists, like those 30 featured, to continue truth telling.

Not only does the 2020 NAIDOC theme ‘Always Was, Always Will Be’ contradict terra nullius, it also lays the foundations to all historical and contemporary assertions of ownership and identity. It is only fitting that this exhibition, with its stories of resistance and defiance, should end at ground zero, Warrang/the Sydney region, where it all began 250 years ago.

We will not forget We will not go away We will not be silent We will not die We will fight And we will survive Aboriginal sovereignty Always was always will be Tina Baum is the curator of Defying Empire, which was developed by the National Gallery of Australia. Defying Empire is showing at the Maritime Museum until 7 February.

The Defying Empire catalogue is available from the museum’s Store.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Botany, art and cultures meet Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s legacy

The museum had planned 2020 as a year to explore the impact of James Cook’s first Pacific voyage through a sailing program by the Endeavour replica and a suite of exhibitions. Despite COVID cancellations, one of the museum’s current exhibitions seeks to probe the scientific and cultural legacy of the original voyage of 1768–71, writes Daina Fletcher.

ON BOARD COOK’S ENDEAVOUR 250 years ago was Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander who, with his patron Joseph Banks, became famous as a result of this expedition. Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s legacy features artworks that explore his life and achievements and the effects of European contact on the Indigenous peoples encountered on the voyage.

The core of this intimate exhibition, which sees Solander in New Zealand through the eyes of 10 contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand artists, was developed as a response to the 250th anniversary of Endeavour’s historic circumnavigation of New Zealand. Also on display are works from the museum’s collection of 337 copperplate engravings of Australian specimens collected from April to August 1770, published as Banks’ Florilegium and given to the National Maritime Collection by Dr Eric and Mrs Margaret Schiller.

Daniel Solander (1733–82) was a student of the noted naturalist Carl Linnaeus at Uppsala University in the 1750s. He travelled to London in 1760, became engaged in cataloguing natural history collections in the Linnaean system and worked as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1763. The following year he was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society, where he met the wealthy young amateur naturalist Joseph Banks, with whom he was to form a lifelong friendship and patronage relationship.

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New lands, new species

Solander subsequently joined Banks’ well-equipped scientific party on James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific from 1768 to 1771, along with artists Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan. Their mission was to observe, collect and record plants and animals at sea and on shore, and to observe the customs of local peoples.

On board the ship, Banks and Solander each had a cabin on either side of the commander’s great cabin, which became their shared workspace, as Banks described in 1874: 1 … we sat together until it got dark at the great table with our draughtsman directly across from us and showed him the manner in which the drawings should be done and also hastily made descriptions of all the natural history objects while they were fresh. When a long absence from land had exhausted fresh subjects we finished the former description and added synonyms from the books that we had carried along with us.

After Cook’s circumnavigation of New Zealand from October 1769 to March 1770, Endeavour sought the mysterious southern continent then known to Europeans as New Holland. On 29 April 1770 Cook landed at Kamay, a place that he renamed first Stingray Bay and later Botany Bay due to the huge number of plants collected.

Banks’ scientific party on Endeavour was tasked to observe, collect and record plants and animals at sea and on shore

In the exhibition, the text for each of the Florilegium engravings notes the various names given to each specimen.

Plate 23, shown here, was collected at Bwgcolman, Palm Island, Australia, on 7 June 1770 and carries the Aboriginal name Ya-bu. Solander called it Hibiscus scabrosus, while its modern botanical name, H meraukensis, was attributed

by Hochreutiner in 1908. Its common name today is bush hibiscus. It was, unknown to Solander, a vital bush food for the local people. ANMM Collection 00032545. Reproduced courtesy of Natural History Museum, London and licensed for use by the museum Australian National Maritime Museum

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01 Paradise Lost by Jenna Packer.

02 Black beech, Tawairauriki (Fuscospora solandri) by Jo Ogier.

Contemporary artists in this exhibition explore different aspects of Solander’s voyage

By 3 May Banks wrote: 2 Our collection of Plants was now grown so immensely large that it was necessary that some extrordinary care should be taken of them least they should spoil in the books. I therefore devoted this day to that business and carried all the drying paper, near 200 Quires of which the larger part was full, ashore and spreading them upon a sail in the sun kept them in this manner exposd the whole day, often turning them and sometimes turning the Quires in which were plants inside out. By this means they came on board at night in very good condition.

Overall Banks and Solander collected some 17,000 plant specimens, including 350 new species from New Zealand and 900 from Australia.

A mammoth project

When Endeavour returned to England in 1771 both naturalists were widely celebrated. Solander became private secretary to Banks and resumed his post at the British Museum, becoming keeper of the natural history collections in 1773. Famously, Banks was elected president of the Royal Society in 1778, a post he held until his death.

Solander continued cataloguing and describing the Endeavour voyage specimens in preparation for publication. At great expense, Banks engaged five natural history artists and 18 engravers to work from Parkinson’s botanical sketches and the specimens.

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In 1782 Solander died suddenly, but by that time he had made substantial progress in classifying and describing the Endeavour voyage specimens and the engraved plates were nearly ready. Banks noted: 3 The botanical work, with which I am now occupied, is drawing near to its end. Solander’s name will appear on the title page beside mine, since everything was written through our combined labour. While he was alive, hardly a single sentence was written while we were not together.

Between 1771 and 1784 the artists and engravers produced 743 copperplate engravings, but the project was not completed in Banks’s lifetime. After his death in 1820, the plates were bequeathed to the natural history collections at the British Museum, which also held Solander’s manuscript volumes. Today these collections are held in the Natural History Museum.

Contemporary interpretations

Contemporary artists in this exhibition are Sharnae Beardsley, Dagmar Dyck, Tabatha Forbes, John McLean, Alexis Neal, Jo Ogier, Jenna Packer, John Pusateri, Lynn Taylor and Michel Tuffery MNZM. Each explores different aspects of Solander’s voyage.

Jo Ogier’s etching looks at the legacy of Solander’s collecting and cataloguing in her print Black beech, Tawairauriki (Fuscospora solandri) (2018), one of six New Zealand species named after the botanist.

A poignant title What of the exhibition’s title Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s legacy, which has a certain poignancy today?

The title refers to the proof pages that Solander and Banks used to dry and preserve their botanical specimens.

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Dagmar Dyck’s work celebrates her ancestors.

Pandanus (Pandanaceae) Fā (2018) represents a cross section of the Fā fibre, a specimen first collected in Tahiti and named Pandanus tectorius by Banks and Solander. Dyck explains: There is no escaping the way in which pattern is woven throughout the stories of the great Te Moana-nui-a Kiwa [Pacific Ocean]; they are an essential thread in each of our Moana nations’ societal structures … almost every part of the plant is used and within a Tongan context it is known as Fā. Pandanus trees provide materials for all manner of daily uses and are an integral component in the manufacture of Tongan koloa [fibre and textiles].

Jenna Packer has used the exhibition title as a key to explore knowledge systems in her etching Paradise Lost (2018), pointing out that Daniel Solander was striking in his thirst for knowledge. She develops German artist Lucas Cranach’s 16th-century portrayals of Adam and Eve, placing them beneath a Tree of Knowledge that is: … a hybrid of a European apple tree and Ngutikaka, or kaka beak, which offers the possibility of more than one type of fruit. This tree, however, is also the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, a taxonomic difference which speaks of the cultural values we attach to knowledge.

On the voyage Banks and Solander spent their days botanising, collecting and trying to understand these new plants by comparison with others. And many eluded them.

In 18th-century England, when paper was expensive, bundles of printer’s waste – proof pages – were purchased for the specific purpose of drying such specimens,5 and by chance the proof pages that Solander and Banks used for this purpose were from Notes upon the twelve books of Paradise Lost, published by Joseph Addison decades before Endeavour’s history-making voyage.

As Dr Edward Duyker has carefully noted, Solander struggled with the unfamiliar eucalypts and the now famous banksia.4 On the other hand, the First Peoples watching the ship had a deep, multi-dimensional knowledge of all plants in their environment. As custodians of the lands, seas and skies, they understood a cosmology to sustain their resources. Their knowledge of seasonal cycles marked hunting, fishing, harvesting and flood or fire seasons. Plants carried different names depending on place, people, language, season and use.

Altogether, the artworks in Paradise Lost shift viewing frames between First Peoples and settler cultures, across knowledge systems, historical time periods, and lines of scientific and cultural inquiry.

1 Joseph Banks to Johan Alströmer, 16 November 1784, in Edward Duyker, Nature’s Argonaut – Daniel Solander 1733–1782, The Miegunyah Press, MUP, 1998, p 110.

2 The Endeavour journal of Sir Joseph Banks gutenberg.net.au/ ebooks05/0501141h.html 3 Joseph Banks to Johan Alströmer, 16 November 1784, quoted in Duyker, op cit, p 267.

4 Duyker, op cit, p 181.

5 Mark Carine, ‘Banks abroad: the botany of the voyages of Joseph Banks’ naturalhistorymuseum.blog/2020/06/16/banks-abroadthe-botany-of-the-voyages-of-joseph-banks-botany-collections/ accessed 16 June 2020

Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s Legacy is a touring exhibition from the Embassy of Sweden, Canberra, and the Solander Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand.

It is showing at the museum until 14 February.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Maritime history prize winners The 2019 Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize and Community Maritime History Prize

These two biennial prizes have once again attracted a strong field of nominations across a wide range of topics, including fishing, Pacific exploration, colonial history and biography.

The winners demonstrate some of the many ways in which the sea and maritime influences have been central to shaping Australia, its people and its culture.

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM and the Australian Association for Maritime History (AAMH) jointly sponsor the Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize and the Australian Community Maritime History Prize. We thank our panel of judges – Dr Ross Anderson, Curator, Department of Maritime Archaeology, Western Australian Shipwrecks Museum, and President of the Australian Association for Maritime History; Dr Joanna Sassoon, of Curtin University; and Peter Ridgway, past president of the AAMH, for the considerable time and thought that they gave to judging the latest round of entries.

Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize

This prize is awarded for a non-fiction book on any aspect of maritime history relating to or affecting Australia, published in 2017 or 2018 by an Australian citizen or permanent resident. The unanimous winner of the 2019 book prize of $5,000 is Alan Frost for Mutiny, Mayhem, Mythology: Bounty’s enigmatic voyage (Sydney University Press, 2018). The judges commented: Frost’s book is possibly the last word on this wellpublished subject until any new information comes to light. Frost thoroughly investigates and researches the Bligh/Fletcher/Bounty mutiny myths that have become embedded in broader culture. His forensic analysis of previously published research and source documents together with new material exposes how myths about Bligh, Christian and the mutiny have been perpetuated and embellished.

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The outcome is a solid case for Bligh being not only a bully and brilliant navigator, but a committer of fraud against the Royal Navy and his crew in terms of manipulating supplies for his personal gain, withholding food and ignoring traditional crew rights and privileges.

His treatment of Christian drove the latter to despair and made him choose poorly from the limited options open to him.

Some impressive research has gone into this wellreferenced work, with genuine scholarly treatment exploring all aspects of the subject, where many recent accounts have been lightweight and novelised.

The introduction is so good that one could read just this and no more (but that would be a shame).

The first runner-up is Joy McCann for Wild Sea: A history of the Southern Ocean (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), of which the judges said: Writing a history of a sea is a brave thing to attempt.

McCann does a fine job of bringing together the natural and cultural histories of this little known, vast area.

The Southern Ocean is not universally recognised as an ocean, with its boundaries in dispute. Australia defines it as being up to the southern coast but other countries dispute this, claiming the Indian Ocean extends to Tasmania. The Southern Ocean is likely to become better known now that China is expanding its reach into this ocean (along with Russia and traditional occupiers Australia, New Zealand, France, Chile and the United Kingdom).

Using McCann’s own experiences and journeys to the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic, Wild Sea can be described as a well-researched and well-referenced travelogue.

She succinctly describes the many aspects of the Southern Ocean in terms of its contribution to global ocean currents and weather, unique wildlife and history based on explorers and whalers’ logbooks, and scientific research.

The second runner-up is Charlie Veron for his autobiography A Life Underwater (Penguin Random House, 2017), which focuses on his career as a natural scientist. The judges noted: This book was selected as a finalist in accordance with the judges’ aim to expand the view of Australian maritime history, as even within the realm of natural science, scientific endeavour is a cultural activity.

Although A Life Underwater is by its nature anecdotal, Veron is a significant contributor to both Australian and global marine science, and his account provides a rich source of material for anyone researching the history of marine science in Australia, the development and operation of scientific institutions, and coral science worldwide.

From a museology and taxonomy perspective, A Life Underwater depicts Veron’s pioneering and important work in this area, while also discussing his family and work relationships. The book is engaging, laying bare the tragedies and successes of Vernon’s life and, as he sees it, the problems with environmental science.

The Australian Community Maritime History Prize

The prize of $2,000 has been awarded to the Naval Historical Society of Australia for its website, navyhistory.org.au. The society aims to record, preserve and promote the knowledge and awareness of naval history in Australia. Its website, launched in 2018, features events of interest, a research service, profiles of naval heritage sites, information on guided tours and membership, a members’ page and access to more than 2,000 articles. Uncluttered and easy to navigate, the website provides an excellent resource for anyone interested in many aspects of naval history.

There were no runners-up in this category.

The museum and the AAMH would like to congratulate the winners. Due to COVID-19, it is uncertain whether an award ceremony will go ahead; please check our website for updates.

Janine Flew Australian National Maritime Museum

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Recent surveys of museum audiences have shown an increased interest in climate change and ocean science narratives

One planet, one ocean United Nations Ocean Decade for Sustainable Development 2021–2030

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Over the last few years, the museum has been actively working to build its reputation for delivering high-quality programs in ocean science, technology and sustainability.

It is now embarking on a major initiative in support of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC-UNESCO) and the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, writes Emily Jateff.

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IN RECENT YEARS, the museum’s programs in ocean science, technology and sustainability have included large and small-scale exhibitions, visiting vessels, internal sustainability initiatives, support of citizen science programs, formal and informal learning programs, Ocean Talks, and acquisitions for the National Maritime Collection. Recent highlights include James Cameron: Challenging the Deep and Elysium Arctic, visiting vessels such as Schmidt Ocean Institute’s RV Falkor, and the launch of the first Seabin in Australian waters. We have also acquired objects from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Sea Shepherd Australia and the September 2019 Schools Climate Protest, and established partnerships, especially around key festivals and events.

01 In the wild, clownfish, or anemonefish, form symbiotic relationships with sea anemones.

Image Jean Wimmerlin/Unsplash 02 Stuart Godfrey on HMAS Kimbla’s ‘hero platform’ attaching a Nansen bottle, used for water sampling, to the hydro wire, 1971.

Courtesy George Cresswell.

The museum recently acquired a progression of water-sampling device types from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere.

The museum is now embarking on a major initiative in support of the UNESCO International Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO-IOC) Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. The Ocean Decade is a 10-year global program that aims to deliver against the targets set for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14, which is to ‘conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources’.

The Ocean Decade provides member states with a mechanism for increased marine scientific infrastructure, capacity, visibility and knowledge by 2030. There are seven identified societal outcomes for the Decade: 1. A clean ocean where sources of pollution are identified and reduced or removed.

2. A healthy and resilient ocean where marine ecosystems are understood, protected, restored and managed.

3. A productive ocean supporting sustainable food supply and a sustainable ocean economy.

4. A predicted ocean where society understands and can respond to changing ocean conditions.

5. A safe ocean where life and livelihoods are protected from ocean-related hazards.

6. An accessible ocean with open and equitable access to data, information and technology and innovation.

7. An inspiring and engaging ocean where society understands and values the ocean in relation to human wellbeing and sustainable development.

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UNESCO-IOC has identified ocean literacy as a vital component of ensuring that the Ocean Decade, and its aims and outcomes, are globally adopted by a large and diverse range of stakeholders. Ocean literacy is defined as ‘the understanding of human influence on the ocean and the ocean’s influence on people’.

In answer to this call for increased ocean literacy, the museum is dedicating time and resources to support an Ocean Decade-aligned program. This supports our expansion of scope into contemporary ocean issues.

It has national and international outreach potential and parallels with new and existing exhibitions and programs. Most importantly, the museum is responding to audience-driven demand. Climate change is regarded as a problem by 72 per cent of Australians,1 and 81 per cent are concerned that climate variation will result in more droughts and flooding.2 This is echoed in schools, particularly around curriculum links on climate and sustainability for upper primary and lower secondary students.

Recent surveys of museum audiences have shown an increased interest in climate change and ocean science narratives. Seventy-nine per cent of respondents indicated that they were ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to visit an exhibition on oceans, rivers and climate. More than 90 per cent said that it would be ‘educational’, followed by ‘suitable for families’ (60 per cent). The museum is in a unique position to utilise its position and networks to deliver accurate and informed information nationwide, meeting defined public interest and need.

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01 As part of its commitment to promoting ocean science, the museum hosts events during Science Week each year.

ANMM image 02 Museum Director and CEO Kevin Sumption PSM and Dr Sylvia Earle at Elysium Arctic, 2019.

The museum has developed a ten-year program in support of the Ocean Decade

organisations to present immersive and interactive technologies, compelling personal stories and real-time science interactions. Our oceans, our future will be presented around three main themes: In response to this identified need, the museum has developed a 10-year program in support of the Ocean Decade. This program will feature three major travelling exhibitions, three smaller exhibitions, regional travelling exhibitions and exhibition-linked public programs.

It introduces a new Ambassador Bill Lane Ocean Prize, formal learning programs for schools and international learning programs. It includes featured speakers within our successful Ocean Talks series, visiting vessels, and where possible, support for citizen science programs and exposure for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) developing new ocean technologies and sustainability solutions. As a national collecting institution, the museum is responsible for acquiring and archiving objects of high national significance that illuminate the value Australia places on its marine estate, including contemporary Australian ocean science and technology objects. We have commenced and will continue a proactive, systematic acquisition program for the National Maritime Collection. For example, the museum recently acquired a collection from CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere that illustrates the development of technologies used for monitoring and recording changes in ocean temperature. This collection of objects, among others, will be featured in upcoming exhibitions and available for public access and research on our website.

Our first major exhibition of the Ocean Decade is Our oceans, our future. We are partnering with Schmidt Ocean Institute, the CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and other marine science

• Oceans revealed – investigating and revealing the unknown wonders of and the complex connections between the oceans and life on earth.

• Oceans as evidence – collecting and measuring how we affect the oceans by changing the climate, producing pollution and exploitating unsustainably.

• Oceans of hope – scientific knowledge, technologies and strategies that address, ameliorate or respond to the changing oceans and sustainable exploitation.

Our oceans, our future opens in August 2021, and will include a public program aligned with the concurrent National Science Week. Other events are planned for 2021 and will be announced on our website early next year.

The museum is excited about our engagement with the UN-IOC Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and we look forward to presenting a series of engaging and insightful programs over the next 10 years. This will be a great adventure, and we welcome you to join us in ensuring a sustainable future for our ocean.

1 Australia Talks National Survey, 2019.

2 Australia Institute’s Climate of the Nation Survey, 2019.

Emily Jateff is the museum’s Curator of Ocean Science and Technology.

The Ambassador Bill Lane Ocean Prizes and Our oceans, our future exhibition are USA Programs supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Castaway by Marina DeBris.

Photographer Richard Flynn, model Hannah Kat Jones

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For Marina, each day starts by cycling to her local beach and collecting rubbish – a daily outing from which she is yet to return empty handed

Art and activism for the oceans Beach Couture

It is estimated that every year, 8 million tonnes of plastics enter our ocean. This is in addition to the estimated 150 million tonnes that currently circulate in our marine environments.

A new exhibition at the museum aims to raise awareness of this problem and prompt a change in our wasteful habits, writes Rachel Hart.

SADLY, IT IS PREDICTED THAT BY 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. In Australia, two out of three sea birds are affected by plastic.

These figures are alarming enough, but they were estimated before the current global pandemic, which has only exacerbated the problem.

COVID-19 has meant that many reusable items and modern methods of recycling have been abandoned in favour of single-use, non-recyclable items in a desperate attempt to reduce person-to-person contact.

These include plastic bags, plastic cutlery and single-use coffee cups – many of which will end up in our oceans.

Items of personal protective equipment (PPE), including disposable face masks, latex gloves and hand sanitiser bottles, have already been spotted on our beaches and shores. Following a tragic incident in which 50 shipping containers were lost overboard the APL England in heavy seas, large quantities of various goods, including face masks and take-away containers, were found washed up on Sydney’s south coast.

In France, clean-up charity Opération Mer Propre (Operation Clean Sea) has reported an alarming number of face masks and gloves on the sea floor throughout the Mediterranean. Recently, a survey conducted by OceanAsia found that masses of face masks had washed up on the shores of the Soko Islands off Hong Kong.

Most disturbing is the fact that latex gloves take decades to break down, while synthetic woven masks have an estimated life span of 450 years.

Contrary to popular belief, when plastics do eventually begin to break down, they do not simply disappear.

Instead they become microplastics, which release chemicals that are often ingested by marine life.

These can then enter the human food chain.

The impact that these microplastics have on marine life and on humans is not yet known.

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Rather than presenting the issue of ocean pollution through overwhelming statistics, Marina’s art makes this issue personal to the viewer

01 White Trash by Marina DeBris. Photographer Richard Flynn, model Hannah Kat Jones 02 The Inconvenience Store repackages common single-use items found washed up on beaches to highlight just how much waste ends up in our waterways. Image Jo Kaupe 28

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But just how do we communicate the importance of keeping plastic waste out of our oceans? While much attention has been focused on the impact of COVID-19 on humanity and the economy, little attention has been paid to the impact that the pandemic will have on the environment. Occasionally, overwhelming statistics or heartbreaking images of marine life entangled in plastic waste appear in the media. In a modern world with a declining attention span, however, the impact that such images might have on audiences can be fleeting.

The work of Australian based ‘art-ivist’ (art activist) Marina DeBris provides a unique method and powerful vector for communicating the harm that we are causing our oceans. For Marina, each day starts by cycling to her local beach, Coogee, and collecting rubbish – a daily outing from which she is yet to return empty handed.

Her obsession with collecting rubbish began after moving to Los Angeles. Her daily runs along Venice Beach were consistently interrupted by an instinct to stop and collect rubbish to maintain the beach’s beauty. After realising that her efforts were achieving little in the grander picture of ocean pollution, Marina turned to art to raise awareness and demonstrate just how little of what we use is being reused or recycled.

‘Trashion’ is one such method that Marina uses to convey this message. Though from a distance her wearable pieces might look like high-end fashion, closer inspection reveals a far more sinister truth. Marina’s trashion collection, titled Beach Couture, is made entirely of the rubbish that she has collected on and near the beaches of Sydney and Los Angeles. Utilising a fusion of humour and creativity through works such as Do I make myself clear and The ones that got away, Marina visually communicates to audiences that the waste we create will come back to haunt us. Marina’s trashion is featured in museums, galleries, publications and live trashion shows throughout Australia.

The Inconvenience Store that Marina created also represents a unique method for encouraging audiences to question their use of single-use plastics.

This installation mimics the content and setup of a typical convenience store, yet is filled with repackaged items that have washed up onto beaches.

Here, audiences are confronted with familiar items that they themselves have likely bought and discarded, such as sunglasses, water bottles, thongs and fishing gear, to name a few. The Inconvenience Store has travelled around Australia and was featured at Sculpture by the Sea in 2017, where it won three awards.

Rather than presenting the issue of ocean pollution through overwhelming statistics, Marina’s art makes this issue personal to the viewer. Marina’s trashion and Inconvenience Store force audiences to come face to face with the single-use items that we use daily and often discard without a second thought. It reminds audiences that we are the problem and that we can also fix it by changing our habits. Her work reminds us that many of the single-use plastics that we use are optional and that the harm that they can cause the environment far outweighs the short-term convenience that they can offer us.

Beach Couture, featuring photography, trashion and the Inconvenience Store, is showing at the Australian National Maritime Museum from 19 December 2020 to 18 April 2021.

Rachel Hart is a museum and heritage studies postgraduate student from the University of Sydney who is undertaking an internship at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Wartime windjammers The last days of a great sailing fleet

Few people today would be aware that during the Second World War (1939–45), 27 large sail-driven ships were still carrying much-needed cargoes around the world.

Wartime secrecy prevented detailed records of shipping movements being published after 1939, and much of the information that author and artist Robert Carter OAM has gained comes by word of mouth from the crews of the vessels engaged in this strange anachronism.

Trade Wind, Robert Carter, 1999.

Passat survived World War II and is now preserved in Lubeck, Germany. All images Robert Carter

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The first two years of the war saw a huge tonnage of Allied shipping sunk by German U-boats and raiders

IN THE TWO DECADES BEFORE WORLD WAR II, Australia played a major role in prolonging the viability of sailing ships by providing grain as their cargo – albeit at a low freight rate, but earning enough for a dwindling group of these ships to remain in business, and attracting most of the world’s remaining sailing ships to Australia.

The Grain Fleet

Almost all of these ships were Finnish, and largely owned by one man, Gustaf Erikson of Mariehamn. This is the principal town of the Åland Islands, situated in the Gulf of Bothnia, midway between Sweden and Finland.

They were Finnish territory, but their inhabitants’ language and culture are Swedish.

In 1939 the grain fleet consisted of 14 vessels: four-masted barques Viking, Pamir, Passat, Moshulu, Lawhill, Olivebank, Pommern, Archibald Russell (all Finnish), Abraham Rydberg (Swedish), Kommodore Johnsen and Padua (both German) and Winterhude, Killoran and Penang – three barques owned by Erikson. Deep-laden with wheat or barley, they began departing from Spencer Gulf, South Australia, from February 1939. The last departure was that of Killoran, in July 1939. Apart from Killoran (see below), they all arrived and discharged their grain in UK and Irish ports just prior to the war.

Moshulu was the first to arrive, on 10 June. She was ordered to Glasgow to discharge, then joined Pamir (see below) in Gothenburg, Sweden. In October 1939, she obtained a charter to load maize at Buenos Aires for Aalborg, Denmark. On her return journey, within sight of her destination, she was captured by the German Navy and taken to Farsund in Norway, where she was interned and rigged down and became a store ship.

Abraham Rydberg discharged at Ipswich during June 1939 and returned to Gothenburg. She left again for Australia on 3 September 1939, the day that war broke out, then traded between South American ports and the US throughout most of the war.

Olivebank, after discharging at Barry, Wales, sailed for Mariehamn. On 8 September 1939 she struck a mine off Jutland and sank within minutes, settling on the bottom with her upper masts above water. The master, Captain Carl Granith, and 13 of the crew went down with their ship. Six others survived by clinging to the masts and were picked up by a Danish trawler several days later.

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Almost all of the Grain Fleet ships were Finnish, and largely owned by one man, Gustaf Erikson

01 In Carrick Road, Robert Carter, 1999. Olivebank struck a mine six days after World War II was declared.

02 A Fine Quartering Wind, Robert Carter, 1999. Lawhill sailed through two world wars without encountering the enemy and was affectionately referred to as ‘Lucky Lawhill’ by the grainship seamen.

Archibald Russell discharged at Hull, England, and was laid up there during the war, being used as a store ship. She was rigged down so that her masts would not provide a navigation marker for the Luftwaffe.

After the war she was broken up.

After Winterhude discharged at Barrow, England, Erikson chartered the ship to the Norwegian government as a granary but she was claimed by Germany when they invaded that country, and was used as a floating barracks for part of their occupation troops. After the war she was broken up.

Penang was sent to sea in 1940 and loaded guano in the Seychelles for New Plymouth, New Zealand. She then sailed to Port Victoria, South Australia, and loaded her last grain cargo. She was torpedoed by U-Boat U140 in December 1940 off the coast of Ireland, with the loss of all hands.

Killoran, after discharging her grain cargo in Cork, Ireland, in January 1940, was chartered to take a coal cargo from Cardiff, Wales, to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here she loaded sugar and maize for Las Palmas but was intercepted by the German raider Widder. The crew was taken prisoner and Killoran was sunk by an explosive charge.

Pommern, Viking and Passat returned to their home port of Mariehamn where, apart from short voyages around the Baltic, they stayed until war’s end.

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Pamir arrived at Southampton, England, on 12 June 1939.

After unloading, she proceeded to Gothenburg to lay up. In May 1940 she secured a charter to load grain at Montevideo. On the way the charter was cancelled and after a short lay-up at Bahia Blanca, Argentina, secured a charter to load guano in the Seychelles for New Plymouth, arriving there in December 1940.

She then returned to the Seychelles for another cargo of guano, leaving Assumption on 2 June 1941.

She arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, on 29 July 1941.

It was an unfortunate quirk that Finland found itself at war with Russia in 1940, when Russia and Germany were allies. This made it an enemy of the Third Reich, resulting in the sinking of Killoran and Penang and the capture of Winterhude and Moshulu. Six months later Germany was at war with Russia and paradoxically Finland was considered by the Allies to be an enemy country by virtue of a non-aggression pact it had signed with Germany. Pamir was seized by the New Zealand government as a war prize.

Under the management of the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand, Pamir made four Pacific voyages between Wellington and San Francisco and two to Vancouver during hostilities, sailing more than 96,000 nautical miles. After the war Pamir made another voyage to Vancouver, one voyage to Sydney and one to the UK. 34

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Lawhill arrived at Glasgow on 2 August 1939 and after discharging, sailed on to Troon to lay up. In May 1940 she sailed in ballast to Montevideo for orders. These sent her on to the Seychelles to load guano for Auckland.

From here she sailed to Port Victoria to load grain for East London, South Africa. She arrived at East London on 22 July 1940, where the South African government claimed her as a war prize. From then on she traded between South Africa and Australia throughout the war, taking cargo to and from Australia 10 times. She loaded jarrah sleepers for the South African railways at Bunbury and brought cocoa beans to Hobart for the Cadbury Factory, canned fruit from the IXL factory in Hobart to Sydney and coke from Newcastle to Port Adelaide.

She also rounded Cape Horn four times.

In 1944 Lawhill arrived in Sydney Harbour with a cargo of cocoa beans, and again in 1945 with canned fruit.

Somewhat better equipped than the other wartime windjammers to deal with the enemy, she had two 20-millimetre Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns mounted on the poop and Carley life rafts attached to her main and jigger shrouds, plus she was issued with twelve .303 rifles.

Kommodore Johnsen and Padua arrived back in Germany in July 1939 and were sent to the Baltic, where they were more or less out of harm’s way. They maintained their roles as cargo-carrying training ships, bringing timber cargoes from Estonia.

One of only 13 steel sailing ships ever built in the United States, Kaiulani was built in 1899 for the Hawaii trade

01 The Last Rounding, Robert Carter, 1999. Pamir sailed more than 96,000 nautical miles during hostilities but fell victim to a hurricane in 1957.

02 Off the New South Wales South Coast, 1941, Robert Carter, 1999.

Kaiulani was the last commercial sailing ship under the American flag.

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American sailers

The first two years of the war saw a huge tonnage of Allied shipping sunk by German U-boats and raiders.

There was also a large tonnage of war materials that had to be carried to the UK. Freight rates soared; many laid-up ships were put back into service, including a handful of sailing ships. In San Francisco, there were still some of the laid-up Alaska Packers fleet plus a few that had seen service in the Robert Dollar fleet. Several well-known sailers were among them, including the mighty Daylight, a one-time sailing oil tanker owned by the Anglo American Oil Company. Re-rigged, four of them made voyages during the war years; Daylight was re-rigged as a four-masted barquentine and given an auxiliary engine, and took munitions to Cape Town to be uploaded into convoys headed for North Africa.

The Star of Scotland was re-rigged as a six-masted schooner and took a load of timber from Grays Harbour to Cape Town in January 1942. She then loaded coal for South America but was sunk by the U-boat U159 in November 1942.

The four-masted barque Mary Dollar, ex Hans, was re-rigged as a six-masted schooner and renamed Tango. In April 1942, she took a timber cargo to Durban, where she loaded coal for South America. Her activities are unrecorded after this but she was purchased by a Portuguese shipowner and broken up in Lisbon in 1948.

Most notable of these reincarnations was the barque Kaiulani. One of only 13 steel sailing ships ever built in the United States, she was built in 1899 for the Hawaii trade.

Kaiulani was chartered to take a timber cargo to Durban.

Here she loaded cordite explosive, destined for Sydney.

The Japanese submarine attack in Sydney Harbour prompted her master, Captain Wigsten, to head for Hobart. She was then towed to Sydney but her crew set sails to help the tug along.1 It was in Sydney that Kaiulani’s fate was sealed. She was bought by the US Army for use as a store ship. Rigged down, she was towed to Milne Bay, New Guinea.

Vigilant and Commodore were two other American sailing ships that made wartime voyages. Both four-masted schooners, Vigilant was built in 1920 and Commodore in 1921. In the 1930s both were bought by Hawaiian interests and traded between Honolulu and Puget Sound, USA. In 1939 Vigilant was bought by a Canadian company and renamed City of Alberni. In 1940 she brought 1,650,000 super feet of Douglas fir to Sydney. Over the next three years she made voyages between the USA and Honolulu.

In 1946, renamed Condor, she took a cargo of rice to Greece, when she caught fire and became a total loss.

Commodore continued to voyage between Honolulu and Puget Sound in the 1930s, sometimes in consort with Vigilant. In 1941 Commodore actually sailed within miles of the Japanese fleet on its way to attack Pearl Harbor.

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01 Off the West Coast, Robert Carter, 1988. Padua before the war, carrying nitrate from Chile. This painting hangs in the Bremerhaven Maritime Museum, Bremen, Germany.

02 Entering Independencia Bay, Robert Carter, 2019.

The prophetically named Omega was the last commercial sailing ship, working until 1958.

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Of those Grain Fleet ships that survived the war, only six remain today

The fate of the Grain Fleet

Of those Grain Fleet ships that survived the war, only six remain today: Kommodore Johnsen, Moshulu, Padua, Passat, Pommern and Viking.

Lawhill was kept in trade until 1949, then finally broken up.

Moshulu became, and still languishes as, a floating restaurant in Philadelphia, USA. Pamir and Passat both survived the war and competed in the last grain race, from Port Victoria, South Australia, to the UK, in 1949. Both later became cargo-carrying training ships. Pamir was lost in Hurricane Carrie in 1957 along with all but six of her 80 crew. Passat is now preserved in Lubeck, Germany.

Pommern was given to the town of Mariehamn by the Erikson family, and is on display at Mariehamn Maritime Museum in the Åland Islands.

Viking became a hotel and conference centre at Gothenberg, Sweden.

Kommodore Johnsen and Padua, claimed by the Russians in 1945, were converted to training ships.

Renamed Sedov and Kreuzenstern respectively, they are still active today in this role.

South American sail On the other side of the world from Australia, the world’s sailing ships found two cargoes of fertiliser that kept them trading until the 1930s: nitrates from Chile and guano from Peru.

The four-masted barque Priwall was often part of the Grain Fleet, but in 1941 was sent from Germany to Chile to load nitrates. She was claimed as a war prize, renamed Lautaro and became a cargo-carrying training ship. She made voyages to San Francisco with nitrates.

In 1945, with 3,200 tons of nitrate on board, she caught fire and became a total loss.

Omega ex Drumcliff, a four-masted barque, and the barques Maipo and Tellus under the Peruvian flag and operated by the Cia Administradores del Guano Ltd, were employed transporting guano from offshore islands to the South American mainland. They survived World War II and were the last large sailing ships in trade – Maipo and Tellus until 1955 and Omega until 1958.

Guaytecas, Calbuco and Nelson were three other sailing ships hauling guano and nitrates on the west coast of South America. All three made voyages to Europe during the war.

1 Described in detail in Robert Carter, Windjammers – The Final Story, Rosenberg Publishing, Sydney, 2004, ISBN 1877058041.

Tijuca, a barque registered in Buenos Aires, spent the pre-war years running supplies to the whaling station at South Georgia. During the war, she traded between Buenos Aires and Cape Town with freight and passengers.

Robert Carter is a writer, marine artist and sailing ship historian.

He has interviewed and corresponded with more than 400 surviving crew members of the world’s last large commercial sailing ships to record and illustrate stories from the final 50 years of the sailing ship era. This article is edited from his self-published monograph Wartime Windjammers – Sailing ships during World War II (2019; ISBN 237000063563). To order copies of his books or sailing ship prints, visit robertcarter.com.au

There were numerous, smaller, wooden sailing vessels, such as schooners and ketches, in use around the world during the war, particularly in the Baltic.

Tasmania and South Australia still had a few trading ketches. The auxiliary topsail schooner Huia from New Zealand was regularly seen in Sydney Harbour during and after the war.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Australian Sailing Hall of Fame A new round of inductees

The latest people inducted into the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame are Olympic gold medallists Malcolm Page OAM, Paralympian crew Noel Robins OAM, Jamie Dunross OAM and Graeme Martin OAM, and legendary designer and meteorologist Frank Bethwaite DFC OAM. Daina Fletcher profiles the honourees and their careers.

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Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

2020 Australian Sailing Hall of Fame honourees, Paralympic gold medallists Noel Robins, Jamie Dunross and Graeme Martin, in their Sonar class boat in Sydney 2000. All three were awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2001, while Robins was posthumously inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame in 2013. Photographer unidentified, image Getty Images

Sailing was introduced to the Paralympic Games as a medal sport in the 2000 Sydney Games

THIS YEAR HAS BEEN VERY SPARSE in the world of competitive sailing, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing the postponement of the Tokyo Olympic Games and limiting movement of sailors in and around the country. While all Australian national and many state championships have been cancelled, the announcement this year of three new honourees to the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame is cause for quiet celebration.

The Hall of Fame acknowledges the rich history of Australian sailing by recognising national and international sailing stars, including athletes, coaches, designers, builders and administrators. Many fell in love with sailing on the club circuit – a circuit that is on the rise as sailors rediscover their local clubs and embrace the freedom of the winds and waters for friendly competition.

The honourees this year are Malcolm Page OAM, double Olympic gold medallist in the 470 class; Noel Robins OAM, Jamie Dunross OAM and Graeme Martin OAM, Western Australian Paralympic gold medallists in the Sonar class; and Frank Bethwaite DFC OAM, legendary designer and meteorologist. All cut their teeth in the club circuit and went on to elite achievement internationally.

Noel Robins OAM, Jamie Dunross OAM and Graeme Martin OAM

In 2000, Western Australians Noel Robins (1945–2003), Jamie Dunross (born 1965) and Graeme Martin (born 1949) became Australia’s first gold medallists in the Paralympic Sonar Class at the Sydney Olympic Games.

It was a remarkable achievement at the home-grown Games, when sailing was introduced to the Paralympic Games as a medal sport. It had been a demonstration sport in Atlanta in 1996, then the 2000 Games saw medal racing in two classes: the three-person Sonar and the one-person 2.4mR keelboat classes.

With experienced America’s Cup skipper Robins as skipper and Dunross and Martin as crew, the team finished top four in all their counting races and went on to take gold, ahead of the German and Canadian teams in silver and bronze medal positions respectively.

Robins had sailed as a child, but a car crash at age 21 rendered him partially quadriplegic from a spinal fracture. His long list of sailing achievements included skippering Australia in the 1977 America’s Cup against Ted Turner’s Courageous. He was 55 when he won gold at the Paralympics. In 2003 Noel Robins died after being hit by a car.

Jamie Dunross became a quadriplegic after an explosion at a gold mine in Meekatharra, Western Australia.

After the Paralympics he became the first person with quadriplegia to circumnavigate Australia unassisted, in 2010. Martin, who had his left leg amputated after an accident while fighting fires, went on to win a bronze medal in the Sonar class at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.

While sailing was removed from the Olympic program for the now postponed 2020 Games, lobbying continues to return it to the program for 2024.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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The Hall of Fame acknowledges the rich history of Australian sailing by recognising national and international sailing stars

01 Malcolm Page with the 470 class Practical Magic at the Australian National Maritime Museum, 2013. Image Janine Flew/ANMM 02 Frank Bethwaite at Woollahra Sailing Club c 2007, working on a foiling speedboat which was the precursor to the 49er foiling program. Image courtesy Bethwaite family

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Frank Bethwaite DFC OAM

The third honouree this year is Frank Bethwaite (1920–2012), a global innovator and pioneer in design and meteorology. He and his wife Adelaide (known as Nel) founded a sailing dynasty along with their four children, Christine, Mark, Nicky and Julian.

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Malcolm Page OAM

Malcolm Page (born 1972) has won multiple world and national titles and is currently Australia’s most successful Olympic sailor in the 470 class after winning gold medals at successive Olympic Games, under two different skippers – Nathan Wilmot in Beijing in 2008 and Mat Belcher in London in 2012.

Page overcame childhood seasickness and started sailing in Manly Junior dinghies when he was eight. In 1986 he won his first gold in that class as a teenager at the Australian National Championships. He sailed Flying 11s, 16- and 18-foot skiffs and the International 505 class, then moved to the 470 class for Olympic competition as the new millennium dawned. Under the tutelage of Australian Olympic coach and former 470 class sailor Victor Kovalenko (himself inducted into the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame in 2017), this became Page’s forte, although he also later won events in the larger Farr 40 and Sydney 38 keelboat classes. His first Olympics in the 470 dinghy class was in Athens in 2004. After going in as world champion, he was unplaced. In the following two Olympics, he and his successive skippers won gold.

Excelling over these years meant considerable self-control for the 186-centimetre-tall Page, who adopted a strict diet to control his and his skipper’s optimum weight to race the dinghy in varying conditions.

In acknowledgment of his career, Page was given the honour of carrying the flag for the Australian team in the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympic Games.

He retired to coach soon after.

Bethwaite loved experimenting with rigs and hull designs; he joined the Northbridge Sailing Club in Sydney after moving to Australia from New Zealand in 1959 and was instrumental in forming a group to design a dinghy to make sailing more accessible. The Northbridge Senior, or NS14, was born – a small, light dinghy in which hundreds of children have learnt to sail, with many going on to win world championships.

In 1968 Bethwaite established Starboard Products.

There he created a small wind tunnel to experiment with wind flow over sails, which led to innovative breakthroughs in rig design and performance. In 1975 his Tasar design was picked up by Performance Sailcraft, which produced 3,000 dinghies worldwide, in Canada, the UK, Japan and Australia.

Another high-profile class bearing the Bethwaite name is the 49er skiff, a concept son Julian developed with his father’s support in 1995. The 49er was selected for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, the first Australian design ever to be so honoured. Today it remains an integral part of Olympic sailing.

In 1976 Bethwaite was appointed meteorologist for the Australian sailing team at the Montreal Olympic Games.

The research he did for those Games formed the basis of his 1992 book High Performance Sailing. Seen as an industry standard, it was translated into 12 languages.

He went on to write Higher Performance Sailing in 2008 and Fast Handling Technique, which he completed shortly before his death in 2012.

As grandson Harry said in his speech at Bethwaite’s funeral: Frank was the man that was never going to stop, he always had more energy and excitement for life than any of us … As he once told me during a trial run in the foiling 49er, ‘if it breaks, then we now know how not to do it’. This was said as the pinnacle of the sport was trying to be reached with plywood foils with a couple of bits of carbon on it, which was controlled by a cut fishing rod connected to another rod by a Velcro pad. That first trial run was definitely a good learning curve ...

For more information on these and other honourees, please visit sailinghalloffame.org.au/ Australian Sailing Hall of Fame is developed by Australian Sailing in partnership with the Australian National Maritime Museum Australian National Maritime Museum

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Natural history museum collections are a valuable resource in the study of evolution, and allow us to look into past populations, some of which are now extinct

Whale, whale, whale, what do we have here?

DNA analysis reveals the origins of a curious object

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PhD candidate Caitlin Mudge outlines how a research team used DNA and radiocarbon dating to establish the species and age of a very strange artefact that had mystified museum staff for more than a decade.

Recent advances in ancient DNA techniques have provided a powerful new tool for researchers in their hunt for answers, which often leads to surprising discoveries.

For example, DNA analysis of an 18th-century garment’s corset boning – made from whale baleen – revealed the existence of an extinct, previously undescribed, North Atlantic lineage of right whales (Eubalaena glacialis). A similar case is that of a mysterious artefact whose age and origin baffled Australian National Maritime Museum staff for more than 10 years.

MUSEUMS ACROSS AUSTRALIA house many unique and fascinating artefacts that reflect past societies and cultures. Until the invention of plastic and synthetic materials, many everyday items such as tools, clothing, jewellery and furniture were made using parts from animals and plants. Identifying the source of the organic material used in these items is important in shaping our understanding of past interactions between different cultures and their environment. Often the source of these organic materials is easy to identify: for example, kāhu kiwi (kiwi feather cloak), which was worn by Māori people of New Zealand, consists of kiwi feathers woven into dyed muka (flax fibre). When the material is heavily modified or the source organism is obscure, however, this can be much more challenging.

In 2006, the unusual artefact was anonymously donated to the museum. Researchers quickly concluded that it was an electric lamp, as it was fitted with a light bulb and mounted on a wooden plinth. However, the material used to make the lampshade was mysterious. Staff could tell it was organic, but it must have originated from a very large animal, because it was 1.2 metres tall. In 2017, images of the unusual object were sent to Catherine Kemper at the South Australian Museum, who specialises in marine mammals. Cath was able to determine that the specimen was the male reproductive organ of a large whale, but not which species of whale it came from.

Not surprisingly, reproductive organs in whales have been poorly researched1 – but still, the mystery was one step closer to being solved.

Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

Until the invention of plastic and synthetic materials, many everyday items such as tools, clothing, jewellery and furniture were made using parts from animals and plants

In late 2017, museum conservator Rebecca Dallwitz sent a sample of the whale lamp to Jeremy Austin at the University of Adelaide. Rebecca hoped that DNA testing could narrow down the species and possibly the collection location of the original animal.

Jeremy works at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, where researchers specialise in studying the DNA from human, animal and plant remains that are hundreds and thousands of years old. Working with ancient DNA has its challenges. The DNA is degraded – fragmented into tiny pieces – and often contaminated with DNA from other sources, such as bacteria, fungi and the humans who touch the sample. Though its exact age was unknown, the whale lamp was thought to be old, so its DNA would certainly be degraded and possibly contaminated.

Working in an ultra-clean laboratory, I carefully extracted DNA from a small piece of the whale lamp.

The extracted DNA was then analysed using new methods that can recover and sequence the small fragments of authentic whale DNA. To identify which of the 90 species of whale the lamp was made from, I compared genetic sequences from the lamp to all known species of whale, and hypothesised that it was most likely from one of the species that have been heavily exploited by commercial whaling operations: fin (Balaenoptera physalus), blue (Balaenoptera musculus), sperm (Physeter macrocephalus), sei (Balaenoptera borealis) and minke (Balaenoptera sp) whales. Based on these tests, I was able to determine that the material used to construct the whale lamp originated from a sperm whale.

A sad artefact of 20th-century whaling, this lamp is now known to have been made from a sperm whale harvested between the 1950s and 1970s.

ANMM Collection 00042380.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

Sperm whales are found in all of the world’s oceans, but despite being migratory animals, populations from different oceans – Pacific, Indian and Atlantic – can be distinguished from one another using their DNA. A 2012 study based on hundreds of sperm whale DNA samples showed that each ocean basin contains a unique set of DNA types, but they also share a smaller number of common DNA types. I used this information as comparative material to try to identify which ocean the whale was from. Unfortunately, the whale had the most common DNA type – found in all three oceans – so identifying the collection locality was not possible.

With the source organism confirmed, I then set out resolve the last remaining piece of the puzzle: the age of the lamp. A small piece was sent to the Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory, GNS Science in New Zealand for a carbon dating analysis. Living organisms exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere and therefore contain the same amount of carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon, as the atmosphere in which they live – but the amount of carbon-14 steadily decreases when an organism dies. This means that the amount of carbon-14 remaining in the organism can reveal how much time has passed since it died. The whale sample contained high levels of ‘bomb’ carbon, which reflects changes to atmospheric carbon-14 levels resulting from nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s. The evidence from this ‘bomb’ carbon suggested the sample was collected sometime after the 1950s.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Commercial whale hunting commenced in the fifth century in Japan and the 10th century in Europe, and spread worldwide in the 19th century

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Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

01 Caitlin Mudge in the lab.

Image courtesy the author 02 The whaling ship Cheynes III hauls its catch ashore to the Cheynes Bay Whaling Station, Western Australia, 1977.

ANMM Collection 00054512 reproduced courtesy of Jonny Lewis

Commercial whaling increased after World War II and sperm whales were hunted up until the 1970s.

Consequently, we were able to narrow down the source of the lamp to a sperm whale harvested sometime between the 1950s and 1970s. The mystery was solved; the lamp represents a sad artefact of 20th-century whaling and the sometimes strange and surprising repurposing of animal body parts.

Whales have been exploited by humans for thousands of years for their valuable meat, oil and blubber.

Commercial hunting commenced in the fifth century in Japan and the 10th century in Europe, and spread worldwide in the 19th century. Whale hunting became industrialised in the 1860s with the invention of cannonfired harpoons and steam-powered ships. It is estimated that 2.9 million large whales were caught and killed during the 20th century. Some whale species have never been able to fully recover from this and require intensive conservation to maintain stable population sizes. It is estimated that humpback whales in the North Atlantic Ocean dwindled from 240,000 to 9,000 during the 20th century. Understanding the full impact of whaling has massive implications for the conservation of contemporary whale populations.

Increasing the number of correctly identified whale specimens associated with whaling gives us an in-depth look at population changes over time and insight into populations too fragile to sample in the modern day. The whale lamp held at the Australian National Maritime Museum isn’t the only example of ancient DNA techniques being used to uncover the identity of whaling artefacts. Two separate studies in 2005 and 2012 showed it was possible to extract DNA from whale baleen which could then be used to study population genetics. This was taken a step further in 2016, when a research group developed a method to determine the gender of baleen artefacts. A team at the University of New York in 2012 used ancient DNA techniques to extract DNA from whale bone and baleen to demonstrate that Atlantic and Pacific populations of bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) showed evidence of interbreeding and a drop in genetic diversity, potentially due to excessive hunting.

Natural history museum collections are a valuable resource in the study of evolution, and allow us to look into past populations, some of which are now extinct.

Ensuring the artefacts within these collections are correctly identified is highly important. In cases where this information is missing, we can use DNA testing to understand the history behind many items. This method was used here to solve the mystery of the whale lamp held at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

By combining our expertise and curiosity about unusual museum specimens, Rebecca, Jeremy and I were able to narrow down the source of the lamp to a sperm whale harvested sometime between the 1950s and 1970s.

Identifying this sample, and many others like it, will help us understand changes in whale populations as a direct result of whaling.

1 A rare exception is the Icelandic Museum of Phallology; see phallus.is/en/.

Caitlin Mudge is a PhD student working at the University of Adelaide looking into the loss of biodiversity in Australia over the last 10,000 years.

Her research interests include conservation genetics, ancient DNA and phylogeography.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Strengthening our migration history and diversity In partnership with Settlement Services International

The importance of migration to Australia is hard to dispute. Economically and culturally, this nation has benefitted enormously from more than 200 years of migration to the continent. Museum Director and CEO Kevin Sumption PSM outlines a new partnership that will allow the museum to extend the nation’s understanding of migration history.

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Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

Diversity is crucial, to both our society and every group and organisation

The ability for refugees and migrants to participate fully in economic, social, cultural and civic life is of prime importance to SSI. Violet says: Settlement Services International CEO Violet Roumeliotis and Museum Director and CEO Kevin Sumption PSM at the Welcome Wall, October 2020.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

PART OF THE MUSEUM’S RESPONSIBILITY is to collect and exhibit our rich migration heritage. The National Maritime Collection holds more than 10,000 objects related to migration, and over many years we have developed exhibitions and programs that share migrant stories.

Recently the museum signed a memorandum of understanding with social business and community organisation Settlement Services International (SSI), principally to develop programs that support new migrants.

SSI supports newcomers and other Australians to achieve their full potential. It works with all people who have experienced vulnerability – including refugees, people seeking asylum and culturally and linguistically diverse communities – to build capacity and enable them to overcome inequality.

Diversity is crucial, to our society and to every group and organisation. The museum is no different. If we are to truly reflect and be relevant to modern Australia, the museum must look at diversity both internally and externally.

SSI employs more than 800 people, working nationally and internationally, led by their inspirational CEO, Violet Roumeliotis.

While migration has slowed due to COVID-19 and we seek to rebuild, public discussion about the benefits and challenges of a multicultural Australia should look at the evidence and the experiences of Australians who are migrants and refugees. I am sure this partnership between SSI and the museum will help illuminate Australia’s multicultural success story.

The museum and SSI have already been supporting each other’s projects and are now strengthening their collaboration on areas of common interest. We have already trialled a pilot tour of the museum as part of SSI’s ‘Welcome to Sydney’ program, which introduces new arrivals to Sydney. Together, we are planning a range of activities that aim to provide opportunities to experience Australian art, culture and history, which will support newcomers to learn about Australia, form new connections and acquire knowledge, skills and confidence.

A fully rounded collection of stories of the migrant experience is vital to understanding Australian identity and ensuring diverse peoples are reflected in the national story. We will use SSI’s expertise to strengthen cross-cultural capability via volunteering and employment opportunities.

Formalising our relationship with SSI is a great step forward. Both organisations know the contribution of migrants, both financially and socially, to our nation.

We realise the importance of cultivating an environment that enables new migrants to understand their new country and provides structures that can assist them in the process.

As a collector of stories, through our Welcome Wall program and the National Maritime Collection, the museum is committed to deepening our involvement with such an important element of our national identity.

As SSI states, ‘through the work we do, we empower people to change their lives. Through our advocacy and representation, we influence ideas and policy.’ I think this is true for the museum as well.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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A MMAPSS milestone 25 years of supporting Australia’s maritime heritage

Criss-crossing the country, all along our coastlines, rivers and inland waterways and around our islands, precious stories are being told about Australia, Australians and their relationship with the sea. Sharon Babbage celebrates the telling of these stories, the organisations that tell them, and their relationship to the museum.

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Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

THE STORIES AND OBJECTS that are held and cared for by cultural institutions, historical societies and community groups around the country are known as the National Distributed Collection. This collection helps us as a nation understand the role of the oceans, seas and rivers in shaping our lives, and one mission of the Australian National Maritime Museum is to support, explore, develop, promote and conserve it.

One long-running and concrete way in which this aim has been realised is through the Maritime Museums of Australia Project Support Scheme (MMAPSS), an annual grants and internships program funded by the Australian Government through the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications.

01 The Australian National Maritime Museum holds a watercolour ship portrait of the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company’s steamship Kiama, c 1861, by Frederick Garling.

ANMM Collection 00003698 02 Gary Tonkin, scrimshaw artist.

Image Albany’s Historic Whaling Station

Areas affected by the bushfires over the summer of 2019–20 were given special priority in the grants process this year

For 25 years, through MMAPSS, the museum has supported and encouraged cultural institutions around the country to care for, conserve and display unique local maritime items of historical and national significance for today’s audiences and future generations. Grants of up to $15,000 each and in-kind (non-cash) support are available for projects in the areas of collection management, conservation, presentation, museological training and the development of education or public programs that make Australia’s maritime heritage more accessible to audiences. Internships of up to $3,000 each are also available for staff and volunteers.

Since 1995, MMAPSS has given more than $1.95 million in support of over 480 projects to organisations around the nation. The internship program, which began in 2000, has offered more than 60 internships.

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The 2020–2021 funding awards

Funding worth $125,000 was available for the current round of grants. We received a total of 44 project applications requesting more than $480,000 in funding, and grants and in-kind support were awarded to 26 projects. There were also two internship applications, both of which were successful.

The museum congratulates the successful applicants and organisations and wishes them the best of luck in seeing their projects through. Selected projects are outlined below.

Bushfire-affected organisations

Areas affected by the bushfires over the summer of 2019–20 were given special priority in the grants process this year. As described on our webpage ‘Remembering the fires from the water’s edge’, the museum felt a responsibility to reach out to affected coastal communities and maritime areas.

Any organisation from such an area, regardless of whether its project concerned bushfire-related stories or not, was given extra weighting by the MMAPSS selection committee. Four successful organisations were bushfire affected; one project, by the Clyde River & Batemans Bay Historical Society, aims to benefit eight such organisations along the New South Wales south coast.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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The National Distributed Collection helps us as a nation understand the role of the oceans, seas and rivers in shaping our lives

01 ISNC Shipping Ledgers, ship John Penn, entry from 1871. Image Clyde River and Batemans Bay Historical Society Collection 02 Mary Seymour (1833–1913), the first female child born on Kangaroo Island, was the daughter of Nathaniel Thomas and Betty, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman brought to Kangaroo Island in the early 1800s. She is pictured in about 1905. Image courtesy Kangaroo Island Pioneers Association 50

Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

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Since 1995, MMAPSS has given more than $1.95 million in support of over 480 projects to organisations around the nation

Kangaroo Island Pioneers Association Inc, SA

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The association was awarded $3,200 for replacement of an interpretive sign at the Contemplation Seat Memorial at Penneshaw, Kangaroo Island. The site was developed as a place of reflection and a memorial to the Aboriginal women brought to Kangaroo Island by seamen in the early 19th century. It incorporates a handcrafted wooden seat atop a hill overlooking Hog Bay, Penneshaw, and is approached via concrete steps etched with the names of these women. The interpretive sign details the contribution these women made to the early settlement of Kangaroo Island.

Albany’s Historic Whaling Station, WA

Clyde River & Batemans Bay Historical Society Inc, NSW

The society was awarded $6,525 for its project ‘Delivering the goods,’ to develop a public program to make the maritime heritage of the New South Wales south coast more accessible. The program ensures primary source content is available worldwide through thematic analysis and dissemination via eHive, and establishes an innovative online ‘community’ of South Coast maritime heritage. The society’s pivotal maritime focus commenced with Cook250 and will continue through to 2022, which marks the 200th anniversary of Lieutenant Robert Johnston’s exploration of the Clyde.

This project builds on the conservation and digitisation of shipping ledgers of the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company (ISNC) from the mid 1860s to early 1880s, which show the ISNC’s role in the growth of coastal industries and commerce. The Clyde River & Batemans Bay Historical Society will coordinate with museums and other locally held collections to engage in allied research and build an eHive online gallery of South Coast maritime heritage.

MMAPSS funding is awarded for professional fees for a historian and IT consultancy. Additional research and extensive data entry are provided by the Clyde River & Batemans Bay Historical Society’s skilled volunteers.

The station was awarded $4,500 for its project ‘The art of scrimshaw: A whaler’s pastime’. This follows on from the 2019–20 MMAPSS project ‘Whaler’s tales: Oral histories of Albany’s past whaling community’ and uses content from one of the interviewees, Gary Tonkin.

Tonkin’s career as a meat inspector at the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company (CBWC) near Albany was followed by his transition to a world-renowned scrimshaw artist.

After the end of commercial whaling in Australia, the Cheynes Beach Whaling company was closed.

The site is now a whaling museum known as Albany’s Historic Whaling Station. ‘The art of scrimshaw’ will use artefacts from the museum’s existing scrimshaw collection to showcase the maritime significance of scrimshaw craft, with the support of Tonkin’s in-depth scrimshaw knowledge. Albany’s Historic Whaling Station aims to enrich this scrimshaw exhibition and to enhance engagement by adding interpretive panels and visual presentations. Funding is awarded for design elements of this project.

The full list of 2020–2021 winners can be found at sea.museum/2020-grants

Sharon Babbage is Project Coordinator – Regional Programs and administers the MMAPSS scheme on behalf of the museum.

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Museum events

We regret that due to COVID-19, our regular New Year’s Eve festivities and our cruises on Boxing Day and Australia Day are unable to proceed this holiday season. Many other regular activities are also cancelled or curtailed.

For the most up-to-date information and details of coming talks and activities, please see sea.museum/events.

Art after hours

Morning or afternoon tea

Sips ’n Strokes by the sea

High tea on SY Ena

6–8 pm 14 January

11 am or 1 pm Sunday 17 January

The museum has partnered with Sips ’n Strokes to offer an after-hours art class with a difference. Enjoy our stunning waterfront view while sipping on bubbles (or beer) and painting the night away.

Includes two-hour art class, access to Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, Australian farmhouse cheese and fruit selection (individual box), and Brown Brothers Prosecco 200 ml bottle.

Cash bar also available.

Treat yourself or someone special to a unique, intimate high tea on board the stunning Edwardian steam yacht Ena at its berth in Sydney’s Darling Harbour.

Online bookings essential. Ages 18 plus. $95 per person, $85 for Members or groups of 10 plus

You’ll enjoy a set selection of finger sandwiches, petit fours, sweet and savoury pastries, scones with preserve and clotted cream, tea or coffee and Champagne.

Online bookings essential.

Standard ticket $85, bottomless Champagne ticket $110 ANMM image

Bookings and enquiries

A celebration of migrant stories

Access Program

Please note that booking is essential unless otherwise stated.

Book online at sea.museum/whats-on or phone 02 9298 3646 (unless otherwise indicated) or email members@sea.museum 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. Readers are advised to check our website for updated and new event information.

The Sunday Stir

Sensory-friendly Sundays

2–8 pm Sunday 10 January

Sunday 17 January and Sunday 14 February

Mix it up at the museum with an afternoon of art, storytelling, music and culture.Experience local contemporary artists sharing their stories of migration through drawing, poetry, story and song in a vibrant and interactive program that celebrates Australia’s multicultural society.

The artists will perform throughout the museum, interacting with visitors.

Presented in association with Blacktown Arts, Sydney Festival and Settlement Services International Maryam Zahid will be one of the performers at the Sunday Stir. Image Anna Kucera

Our new exhibitions and activity areas will be open extra-early and modified for a quieter experience to suit people on the autism spectrum and with a range of differing abilities.

Our trained staff and volunteers will be on hand to facilitate creative activities.

Online bookings essential

Museum events

Science discovery space

Family theatre show

One-day workshop for 8–14 years

Ocean lab

Badu by Erth

Whale-song DJ

Daily 29 December to 26 January and weekends in term time

Four sessions daily, 6–24 January

10 am–4 pm Wednesday 13 or Thursday 14 January

Meet the pint-sized planet protectors that save our seas at our ocean container laboratory – a space to explore what lies beneath the surface of the harbour.

Discover more about the secret life of plankton, see films captured by our underwater drones and learn more about the biodiversity of our Sydney harbour environment through experiments and demonstrations.

For ages 4–14 and adults.

ANMM image

The magic of Erth’s visual and physical theatre returns to the museum this summer with their brand new show, Badu – an immersive experience with beautiful puppets and captivating visual effects.

‘Badu’ is an Indigenous word meaning ‘water’, and the show reflects on the wonder of aquatic life in Sydney Harbour. It is performed in the round and was developed in collaboration with First Nation artists.

For families with kids aged 4–12 years.

Duration 25 minutes. For prices, please see website.

Remix, reverb and record your own aquatic-inspired songs and make animated videos in a fun-filled workshop on digital music making. Learn to use underwater technology, including hydro-phones and underwater drones, to explore and record the world beneath the surface. Take your compositions to the next level by creating digital animations for your own music video. Have your finished work showcased on YouTube for family and friends to enjoy.

Image courtesy Infrastructure NSW

$70 Members, $85 general.

Book online at sea.museum/youth

For kids under 5

Open age workshops

Two-day workshop for 8–14 years

Mini Mariners

Underwater drones

Oceans of Stories

10.30 or 11.30 am, selected Tuesdays and one Saturday each month, until 13 March

12–3 pm Wednesdays and Sundays 6–24 January

10 am–4.30 pm Tuesday 19 and Wednesday 20 January

Game on! Have fun testing your gaming skills and explore below the surface of the harbour with our underwater drones.

Create and star in your own imaginative aquatic-themed film inspired by our newest exhibitions and vessels.

Learn clever techniques in green-screen, scripting, directing, acting and special effects as you produce your own creative digital stories. Have your finished work displayed for family and friends in a special-event cinema screening.

For 2–5-year-olds plus carers Explore the galleries and sing and dance in interactive tours with costumed guides.

Enjoy creative free play, craft, games and story time in our themed activity area.

Online bookings essential. To ensure social distancing, our tours are now running at reduced capacity and additional hygiene measures are in place.

Sessions include a private workshop with our ocean-science educators and access to amazing underwater footage highlights to keep and share. For ages 9 to 90.

Suitable for wheelchair users and people of all skill levels. $20 (20 minutes), $30 (30 minutes).

Book online at sea.museum/whats-on/ events/underwater-drone

$140 Members or early bird (before 13 January), $165 general.

Book online at sea.museum/youth Eligible for creative kids vouchers

Exhibitions

Motherland – Exile/Refuge – Migration (repeat) 6–26 January 2021

MIGRATION IN AUSTRALIA encompasses an infinite and sometimes conflicting understanding depending on our personal and social experiences, our visa status, the means of transport we used to get here, and the language we speak.

Motherland – Exile/Refuge – Migration (repeat) asks us to pause and reflect: how does the way you arrived in this country define the way people see you, the way you see yourself? Why did we have to leave our motherland?

How can we have a conversation about migration without acknowledging displacement? And how can we talk about displacement without First Nations people?

The exhibition brings together artists who have experience as refugees or asylum seekers, and artists exploring these themes: Hedar Abadi, Damon Amb, Rohingya Women’s Collective, Sayd Abdali, Jane Theau, Carlos Agamez, Shivanjani Lal, Maher Al Khoury and others.

Curated and produced by Settlement Services International (SSI), Motherland – Exile/Refuge – Migration (repeat) is presented in partnership with the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Trapped Home, by Damon Amb, is one of the works exploring migration in Motherland – Exile/Refuge – Migration (repeat).

Exhibitions

A Mile in My Shoes

Beach Couture

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

6–31 January

From 19 December

Until 28 January

A Mile in My Shoes by the Empathy Museum is a shoe shop where visitors are invited to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes – literally. This roaming international exhibition holds a diverse collection of shoes and audio stories that explore our shared humanity.

Beach Couture is a collection of wearable artworks made from rubbish by artist and environmentalist Marina DeBris.

Collected from beaches and oceans in Sydney and Los Angeles, it makes visible, in grotesquely amusing fashion, what is often overlooked – but shouldn’t be.

The Maritime Museum’s version gives voice to Australia’s diverse refugee and immigrant stories. Visitors are invited to take an empathetic and physical journey by walking a mile in a stranger’s shoes while listening to their story.

The exhibition also features the wildly subversive Inconvenience Store, which repackages single-use ‘convenience’ items found washed up on beaches.

This world-renowned exhibition features 100 awe-inspiring images, from fascinating animal behaviour to breathtaking landscapes.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year is the most prestigious photographic event of its kind, providing a global platform that has showcased the natural world’s most astonishing and challenging sights for more than 50 years.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London.

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sea.museum/a-mile A Mile in my Shoes. Image by Tracy Kidd, reproduced courtesy Empathy Museum

Mariw Minaral (Spiritual Patterns) Now showing For the first time, we bring together works

by Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait Islands) artist Alick Tipoti, respected for his work in regenerating cultural knowledge and language. Tipoti’s storytelling encompasses traditional cosmology, marine environments and ocean conservation – focusing on what it means to be a sea person.

Mariw Minaral showcases Tipoti’s linocuts, award-winning sculptural works, contemporary masks and film. sea.museum/mariw-minaral Mariw Minaral exhibition view.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s legacy

Ship and Shore – The history and legacy of Cook’s first voyage

Until 14 February

Now showing

This exhibition commemorates the legacy of the Endeavour botanist Daniel Solander and the first encounter between Sweden and the Pacific Region. It features fine art prints by leading New Zealand artists which bring a unique vision to this historical event and Solander’s legacy.

It also features Australian Indigenous scientific knowledge as a framework to explore engravings of botanical specimens collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander from the National Maritime Collection.

James Cook mapped the east coast of Australia aboard the Endeavour in 1770, and 2020 marks 250 years since that historic voyage. This free outdoor exhibition in the Wharf 7 forecourt examines this event and its legacy, incorporating perspectives of both those aboard the Endeavour and the Indigenous inhabitants watching it from the shore.

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Exhibitions

Sydney Harbour Gallery

Travelling Exhibitions

Permanent exhibition now open

Voyage to the Deep: Underwater adventures

For the first time, the museum has opened its windows out to the water via the new Sydney Harbour Gallery.

Explore historical and contemporary stories of Sydney Harbour – both above and below the water – and understand your role in keeping the inhabitants of our harbour safe.

See ship models that highlight past and present commerce and trade, and learn about the importance of keeping our working port alive. Find out what scientists and designers are doing to restore vital habitats and protect biodiversity. Understand the threats our harbour has overcome, and what we need to do to protect it in future.

Nauticus, Virginia, USA Until 3 January 2021 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 of the helm, peer through the periscopes, crank the propeller, test out the bunks and explore the Cabinet of Curiosities, full of wonderful marine specimens. sea.museum/voyage-to-the-deep

Submerged: Stories of Australia’s Shipwrecks Touring community museums and libraries throughout Australia The Australian Maritime Museums Council (AMMC) and the Australian National Maritime Museum partnered to develop the graphic panel display Submerged: Stories of Australia’s Shipwrecks.

Content was developed by AMMC members at maritime heritage organisations across the country and merged into a nationally touring display by the museum.

This display is supported by Visions of Australia sea.museum/submerged

Outside, rest, relax and enjoy the view of our fleet from the newly refurbished Ben Lexcen Terrace. sea.museum/sydney-harbour-gallery

Duyfken replica Coming soon The museum is pleased to announce that following negotiations with the Duyfken Foundation in Western Australia, the museum will take over the ownership and management of Duyfken, the replica of the ship in which Captain Willem Janszoon arrived at Cape York in 1606.

Once it joins our fleet, we anticipate that it will be open to the public in the new year.

Please see our website for updates.

Sea Monsters – Prehistoric ocean predators

Cats and Dogs: All at Sea – Photographs by Samuel Hood

Queensland Museum, Brisbane Until 3 May 2021

Bass Strait Maritime Centre, Devonport, TAS From 1 October

An exhibition combining real fossils, gigantic replicas, multimedia and hands-on experiences to reveal ancient monsters of the deep. Find out how three main types of ancient reptiles – ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs – left the land to rule the seas. In the oceans, they developed into awesome, enormous predators that make today’s great white sharks seem almost friendly! sea.museum/sea-monsters-travelling

Dogs, cats, monkeys and birds have been cherished on board ships for as long as people have made sea voyages.

In a life from which children and families were usually missing, pets provided an important source of comfort and affection. Photographer Samuel Hood boarded hundreds of ships between the 1900s and 1950s that were moored in Sydney Harbour. He took thousands of photographs of crew members – and their pets – as a souvenir of their visit and to send home to families and loved ones. sea.museum/cats-and-dogs

Dates listed for onsite exhibitions are subject to COVID-19 restrictions and guidelines, and may change at short notice.

Please check our website www.sea.museum for updates.

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As Signals goes to press, the Duyfken replica is making its way to its new home in Sydney. Image ANMM

Exhibitions

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Collections

01 Arrival in the Land of Cakes, Bern Emmerichs, 2019. The ship that brought 350 prospective Chinese miners to Australia in 1857 was Scottish and took its odd name Land of Cakes from a popular nickname for Scotland, a country known for its oatcakes.

ANMM Collection 00055464

02 The Celestials Trek, Bern Emmerichs, 2019.

In the 19th century, the term ‘Celestial’ was commonly used in newspapers to refer to Chinese migrants to Australia and North America. The Celestial Empire is an old name for China.

ANMM Collection 00055465

03 New Gold Mountain Xin Jin Shan, Bern Emmerichs, 2020.

This tableau features portraits of Hannie Kay based on those in the State Library of Victoria, and the artist’s imagined view of his wife Fanny, of whom no portraits are known. It also depicts historic Creswick buildings, including the courthouse where Hannie worked as official interpreter, and names from the petition of 30 April 1867 from Chinese residents to Creswick Council.

ANMM Collection 00055466

The Celestial Trek Chinese miners on the Victorian goldfields

Three newly acquired artworks by Bern Emmerichs focus on a controversial period in Australian history, when authorities were trying to control Chinese migration to the goldfields. As a series these works help bring to life this complex and fascinating era in our history – a time of shameful racism, the lure of wealth, strangers meeting in strange lands, and resilience against the odds. By Daina Fletcher.

IN JULY 1851 THE NEW COLONY OF VICTORIA was inaugurated. Fuelled by the discovery of gold, its population jumped from 70,000 in 1850 to 500,000 in 1860 as people massed in Victoria from around the globe. After news reached China, then suffering widespread poverty and famine, thousands left their homelands and made their way to what they called Xin Jin Shan – New Gold Mountain.

The Chinese miners attracted particular hostility.

In 1855 the Victorian government passed the first legislation to restrict Chinese immigration to the colonies, applying prohibitive passenger limits per ship, a poll tax of £10 per Chinese passenger and a heavy import duty on opium.

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This did nothing to prevent the rush, however.

Shipowners instead sailed to free ports in South Australia, which had no landing tax and only a 5 per cent tax on opium. They disembarked their Chinese passengers at Port Adelaide or Guichen Bay, near Robe, from where the prospective miners trekked up to 700 kilometres overland to the Victorian diggings.

Bern Emmerichs’ series of three ceramic paintings are Arrival of the Land of Cakes, The Celestials Trek and New Gold Mountain Xin Jin Shan. They explore this historical event in the artist’s distinctive flowing and detailed figurative style, which pays homage to Chinese imagery, iconography and the export porcelain that was made for the European market from the 16th century onwards.

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Collections Ambrotype portrait of Henry (Hannie) Kay, c 1855–60.

State Library of Victoria

The discrimination faced by the miners on the goldfields was widely documented

The ship Land of Cakes arrived in Guichen Bay, Robe, on 16 January 1857 directly from Hong Kong, landing 350 passengers. It is widely celebrated as the first ship to enter the port to avoid the £10 Victorian poll tax. Research into shipping arrivals and departures indicates there were many earlier arrivals to Guichen Bay from 1855 via Port Adelaide, carrying hundreds of unnamed Chinese steerage passengers.

In 1857 and 1861 respectively, South Australia and New South Wales also passed legislation limiting arrival options, and in 1859 Victoria amended its Act with a punitive £40 entrance fee for Chinese who arrived other than by sea. In the seven years to 1863, some 16,500 Chinese people made the trek overland, as represented in Emmerichs’ The Celestials Trek.

The discrimination faced by the miners on the goldfields was widely documented. Almost all Chinese arrivals were men, without wives or families, which further fuelled hostilities amid accusations of heathen hordes promoting paganism and immorality, with accompanying threats to white women, and by inference to the fabric of colonial society. Many Chinese did, however, settle in the gold towns in other roles as active community members, and more than a few enjoyed prosperous inter-racial marriages.

The story of one Chinese immigrant miner and his English-born wife inspired the third of Bern Emmerich’s works, New gold mountain Xin Jin Shan (2020).

This tableau features the gold town of Creswick and vignettes from the life of Henry ‘Hannie’ or ‘Hanny’ and Frances ‘Fanny’ Kay in Creswick in the 1860s.

Henry A H Kay was born in Penang in either 1828 or 1837. By 1860 he was mining in Creswick and applied to be Chinese court interpreter there, as ‘a half caste who speaks Malay as well as several Chinese dialects’. He was eventually successful, and he is noted in contemporary court reporting in the newspapers in the 1860s.

On 7 May 1864, Hannie married Frances ‘Fanny’ Cooper (born 1841 in Surrey, England) at Ballarat. They had a large family and together ran a number of businesses around the gold mining township north of Ballarat.

Hannie, Fanny and other business owners became community advocates, petitioning to improve living conditions. The names of one or both of them appear on all four petitions presented by local Chinese residents to the Creswick Borough Council for water supply, drainage, footpath or access services between 1867 and 1873.1 The petitions show that Chinese residents were willing and able to take part in the processes of local government. Emmerichs’ tableau New Gold Mountain Xin Jin Shan features the Chinese characters, transliterated names and several European names from the first petition of 30 April 1867.

Immigration restriction and hostility towards the Chinese led to both Chinese resistance and a cavalcade of restrictive immigration policies, culminating in the new Commonwealth government’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. In May 2017, the Chinese community marked the origin of this anti-Chinese legislation, and the 160th anniversary of its circumvention in the arrival of the Land of Cakes and the Celestial Trek. They re-enacted the walk from Robe to Ballarat and then to the Victorian Parliament, where Premier Daniel Andrews issued an apology to descendants of those migrants and Chinese Victorians, describing the policy as ‘a shameful injustice’.

Bern Emmerichs’ tableau series was sparked by a meeting with a descendant of Hannie and Fanny Kay. The artist, long excited by colonial and pre-contact histories, could not resist this compelling story of an inter-racial couple and community advocacy amid the tumultuous gold rush.

Each of these works on porcelain is painted deftly in small sections because the ceramic paint dries quickly.

It is slowly fired to 850 degrees, then just as slowly cooled. The process is repeated a number of times as layers are applied. Emmerichs mixes the colours with a medium such as gum Arabic or water to yield various consistencies that heighten or deepen colour or add viscosity.

These imaginary views based on historical sources provide a very accessible entry point to consider the import of these events and to reflect on their place in the history of Chinese immigration and government policy in Australia.

1 Denny E, ‘Mud, sludge and town water: Civic action in Creswick’s Chinatown’ (2012) Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria 11.

Daina Fletcher is the museum’s Head of Acquisitions Development.

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Research

Anchors, chains and an absence of knees Identifying the Boot Reef shipwreck

In December 2018, a team of divers from the museum and Silentworld Foundation found an unidentified shipwreck on Boot Reef, a remote reef system some 950 kilometres north of Cairns and 100 kilometres east of Mer (Murray Island) at the eastern entrance to Torres Strait. Research and analysis of artefacts have now enabled tentative identification of the wreck. By Kieran Hosty and Dr James Hunter.

THE 2018 EXPEDITION TEAM discovered an iron stud-link anchor chain running west-east across Boot Reef, a large iron anchor lying on the reef top, and a second, smaller anchor off the reef’s western edge precariously perched on a rock ledge in 39 metres of water (see ‘Black reefs and the “Jardine Treasure”’, Signals 126). As work progressed, more artefacts were uncovered, including copper-alloy hull fastenings and sheathing, iron chain plates, glass deck-light fragments, and copper-alloy fittings from rigging blocks.

As team members swam eastward across the reef top and followed the line of wreckage into curling breakers on the eastern side of the reef, they found a cluster of additional artefacts. These included unidentified iron concretions, iron rigging components and mast fittings, iron gudgeons and/or pintles (large hinges mounted on both the ship’s stern and rudder upon which the rudder pivots), lead patches, additional copper sheathing fragments, several copperalloy nails, spikes and bolts, and a number of large iron keel bolts.

Small finds within the scatter included lead musket shot and sounding weights, as well as glass and coal fragments. But what did this all mean?

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Research

At least 15 recorded shipwrecks are known to have occurred within the vicinity of Boot Reef

Silentworld Foundation Director John Mullen examines the stud-link anchor chain on Boot Reef. The anchor chain was the first indication that an unidentified early-19th-century shipwreck was present at Boot Reef.

All images Julia Sumerling/Silentworld Foundation except where otherwise stated

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Research

Evidence – and its absence

Deliberately misquoting Carl Sagan, ‘Is the absence of [archaeological] evidence [on Boot Reef] evidence of something’s absence?’ – or, is what is not present at the site equally important as what is present? In the case of the Boot Reef shipwreck, clues in the form of surviving material culture proved critical to narrowing the field of potential vessel candidates. However, it was not just what was present that helped solve the mystery of the site’s identity. Surprising though it may sound, this evidence-based approach was complemented by the notable absence of specific artefacts and architectural components.

By the late 18th century, advances in naval architecture and ship design allowed shipbuilders, owners, insurers and underwriters to devise a series of rules and regulations governing the construction of wooden ships. When the dive team arrived back in Sydney, they consulted these rules and regulations and other contemporary references about ship construction and design and compared them with the archaeological material found at Boot Reef. Doing so enabled the team to systematically whittle down the list of potential shipwreck candidates and establish – with a fair degree of confidence – the identity of the site investigated in 2018.

The anchors

Each anchor discovered at Boot Reef exhibits a thin shank that would have been fitted with a wooden stock.

This, coupled with a large iron ring and sharp crown formed by the arms, is consistent with what is known as an ‘old pattern long-shanked’ variant of the Admiraltypattern anchor. Developed in Great Britain, this style of anchor was in common use aboard European vessels throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Both anchors at Boot Reef are later variations of this type, and each is fitted with an anchor ring rather than one or more iron shackles, which were first patented

by Royal Navy Lieutenant Samuel Brown in 1808.

These traits indicate that the wrecked vessel was most likely constructed and outfitted after 1808, but before 1830, when anchor shackles were in common use.

Furthermore, each anchor’s size indicates the tonnage of the vessel that would have used it. A comparison of the reef-top anchor’s total length (3.81 metres) with information contained in early-19th-century treatises reveals an exact match with the largest anchors used aboard merchant ships of 330–360 tons.

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Anchor chain

While two anchors were discovered in association with the site, only one iron anchor chain (or cable) was located. It is paid out over the reef top and, based on the broken link at its western terminus, is almost certainly associated with the anchor located on the reef wall directly beneath it. The lack of a second anchor chain suggests that the reef-top anchor’s cable was constructed from natural fibre such as hemp or manila.

Stud-link chain was first patented by Samuel Brown in 1808. While ship owners were cautious about adopting new technologies, stud-link anchor cables were carried as a matter of course on most European vessels by the mid- to late 1830s.

Copper sheathing

For 2,000 years, shipbuilders have tried to protect the wooden hulls of their vessels from the ravages of timbereating organisms such as as ‘shipworm’ (Teredo navalis) and ‘gribble’ (Limnoria sp). Several solutions were proposed and tried, including patent compounds and paints, horsehair and sacrificial pine sheathing.

By the mid- to late 18th century, copper and copper alloy sheathing emerged as the most effective means of protecting wooden hulls.

Royal Navy warships were first clad in copper sheathing in the 1760s, and by 1777 the first British merchant vessels followed suit. The next major development in hull sheathing occurred in 1832, when an alloy of copper and zinc known as ‘Muntz metal’ or ‘patent yellow metal’ was developed. This proved ideal for covering ships’ hulls, and by the mid-1840s was the most commonly used metal sheathing affixed to British and continental European vessels.

The Boot Reef shipwreck’s hull sheathing appears to have been manufactured predominantly from copper rather than one of its alloys, and while by no means conclusive, its presence strongly suggests an early-19th-century date range.

Research

The evidence indicates that the vessel was sailing on an easterly or northeasterly track when it struck the western edge of Boot Reef

01 Copper-alloy fastenings such as these nails indicate that the vessel was probably built after 1810.

02 Irini Malliaros and Andrew White examine the edge of Boot Reef where the stud-link anchor chain terminates. Analysis of the chain and the anchor on the reef wall below it indicates the vessel struck the western edge of the reef.

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Royal Navy warships were first clad in copper sheathing in the 1760s, and by 1777 the first British merchant vessels followed suit

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Iron rudder fittings

Copper-alloy and iron ship fastenings

Among the artefact cluster on the reef’s eastern edge were three examples of mounting hardware for the vessel’s rudder. All were heavily concreted or damaged; consequently, it was difficult to positively discern whether they were gudgeons or pintles. The largest and best-preserved example has a maximum length of 1.27 metres, a width of 7.6 centimetres and a thickness of 2.5 centimetres. Based on information contained within Lloyd’s Rules and Regulations (1864), the dimensions of the best-preserved example compare favourably with that of a sailing vessel between 400 and 500 tons.

Ship fasteners ranged in size from small rose-headed copper-alloy sheathing tacks to large, heavily concreted iron keel bolts. These and other fastener types, including nails, spikes and dumps, were found scattered across the reef top. Beginning in the 1750s, European navies began experimenting with copper and its alloys as suitable materials for ship fastenings. Although more expensive and difficult to manufacture than those forged from iron, copper and copper-alloy fastenings resisted corrosion much better than iron.

The use of iron in the manufacture of the rudder hardware is highly unusual for a vessel built in Great Britain during the mid- to late 19th century.

Copper alloys were more commonly used to manufacture gudgeons and pintles during this period, while iron rudder hardware is generally more indicative of a vessel constructed during the late 18th or early 19th centuries. Iron pintles and gudgeons were also a common feature of 19th-century vessels built in the colonial shipyards of Canada.

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By the mid-1770s, myriad patents for copper and copperalloy ship fastenings existed. While the British and French navies could afford to use copper fastenings and sheathing on their ships, merchant fleets could not, and the use of copper sheathing and copper-alloy fasteners remained limited for the remainder of the 18th century.

Although by no means conclusive, the presence of a mix of both copper-alloy and iron hull fastenings suggests that the wrecked vessel was constructed during a transitional phase when iron fasteners and fittings were gradually superseded by those manufactured from copper and its alloys. This phase commenced around 1800 and continued until the 1820s, when copper and its alloys became the predominant metals used in wooden ship construction.

Research

01 Maritime archaeologist Irini Malliaros and Silentworld Foundation diver Jacqui Mullen carry out a metal detector survey on Boot Reef. The metal detectors proved invaluable in locating metal artefacts covered by sand and coral debris.

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But where are the iron braces?

Given relatively rapid advances in naval architecture in the 19th century, iron structural components became a common feature of vessels built in Great Britain and continental Europe. Not surprisingly, iron elements of ship architecture are frequently found in association with 19th-century shipwrecks on the Great Barrier Reef and in the Australian Coral Sea Territory. It is extremely unusual, then, that no iron knees or other forms of ferrous ship architecture are present at Boot Reef.

In North America, where shipbuilders had access to vast supplies of local timber, the use of iron braces such as knees, crutches and breasthooks was kept to a minimum and few American ships were fitted with iron knees during the early to mid-19th century. Surveyors from Lloyd’s of London enforced the insurer’s classification standards and rules, and greatly influenced how ships were built in British colonies – particularly if shipowners wanted to sell to European buyers. Lloyd’s actively discouraged the use of softwoods such as pine and spruce in the construction of ships, and downgraded the insurance rating for vessels built from these timbers.

02 Documenting and analysing the two anchors found on Boot Reef allowed the team to calculate an estimated age and tonnage for the mystery shipwreck. On the right is the original sketch of the reef-top anchor, and on the left the scaled drawing. Image James Hunter/ANMM

To get around this problem, Canadian shipbuilders began installing iron knees in vessels constructed at shipyards in New Brunswick and Quebec from 1811 onwards. By the mid-1820s, Lloyd’s had amended its Rules and Regulations for colonial vessels to stipulate that they must ‘be secured in their bilges by the application of iron riders’ to receive an ‘A’ rating.

Further, additional bolts were to be used, and all ships were to be ‘secured by iron-hanging knees to the hold beams’.1 As a result, iron knees became standard on New Brunswick-built vessels, most of which were retrofitted in England prior to sale.

The presence of iron knees on shipwreck sites in Australia normally indicates a build date from the late 1820s onwards. The absence of iron knees or other ferrous architectural elements on the Boot Reef shipwreck strongly suggests it predates 1830.

Further, it can be argued that it may represent a North American-built vessel that was registered either to an American owner, or to a British owner that had not yet retrofitted it according to Lloyd’s regulations.

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Research

The wreck of the Henry, a former female transport, is both Australia’s earliest known shipwreck of a Canadian-built vessel, and the oldest wreck site of a convict ship identified to date

01 3D model of the smaller anchor located in deep water off the western edge of Boot Reef.

Image James Hunter/ANMM 02 Museum maritime archaeologist Dr James Hunter examines an iron gudgeon or pintle found on the eastern edge of Boot Reef.

The presence of iron rudder hardware strongly suggests the wreck is that of an early-19thcentury vessel built in North America.

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Research

A candidate emerges

Archaeological investigation of the Boot Reef shipwreck revealed it to be the remains of a wooden-hulled merchant sailing vessel between 200 and 400 tons burthen. Aspects of its construction, including copper sheathing and a mix of iron and copper-alloy fasteners, indicate a likely build date between 1800 and 1830.

The vessel’s proposed date range and size are reinforced by the two anchors and the presence of only one iron anchor chain. The presence of iron rudder fittings and absence of iron knees and other ferrous internal bracing also suggest the vessel was most likely built in North America during the first two decades of the 19th century.

Spatial analysis of the artefact scatter, as well as distribution of the two anchors and run of chain, indicates the vessel was sailing on an easterly or northeasterly track when it struck the western edge of Boot Reef. The crew appears to have deployed the smaller anchor first, and fitted it with the iron cable.

In all likelihood, the stern extended over the edge of the reef at the time the anchor was let go, and this would account for the anchor’s precarious position on the reef wall. The vessel then appears to have surged across the reef flat, causing the attached chain to pay out.

Ultimately, the chain broke and the second anchor – fitted with hemp or manila cable – was deployed.

The vessel continued to surge eastwards, about threequarters of the distance across the reef, then came to rest and began to break up in the surf. Ship fasteners, deck lights, copper sheathing, chain plates and mast hardware were all deposited on the reef top as the timber hull started to work apart. The dispersal of material culture from west to east, rather than from south-east to north-west, also suggests the wrecking event occurred during the northern Australian wet season, which runs from January to April. During this period, winds in the Torres Strait blow predominantly from the west. By contrast, Boot Reef is under the influence of strong southeasterly trade winds between the months of May and December.

According to the Australasian Underwater Cultural Heritage Database, at least 15 recorded shipwrecks are known to have occurred within the vicinity of Boot Reef. Based on a review of existing archaeological and historical data, including construction attributes, vessel size, site formation features and historic weather patterns, most of these candidates have been removed from consideration. Of the entire list of potential candidates, the English-built brig The Sun (1826) and

Canadian-built ship Henry (1825) exhibit size and construction attributes that most closely match the shipwreck at Boot Reef. The Sun, at only 185 tons, is too small, however, to have carried both anchors associated with the site. Additionally, it wasn’t large enough to have been outfitted with the wreck’s rudder hardware.

Based on available archaeological and historical data, the likeliest candidate for the Boot Reef shipwreck is Henry. The Quebec-built vessel entered service in 1819 and was fitted with spruce knees instead of iron internal bracing. At 386 tons, its size most closely approximates that for a vessel outfitted with the anchors, chain and rudder fittings observed on the wreck site. Henry was lost in 1825 on an unnamed reef in the vicinity of Torres Strait while sailing northbound from Sydney to Batavia.

It had dropped female convicts at Hobart and was returning to England. No casualties were reported.

The loss occurred in April, when Boot Reef is primarily subject to westerly winds, and this correlates well with the shipwreck’s proposed site formation scenario.

While the team may not have discovered a ‘treasure wreck’, its detective work has revealed a site of arguably greater historical and archaeological value: a former female transport that is both Australia’s earliest known shipwreck of a Canadian-built vessel, and the oldest wreck site of a convict ship identified to date.

1 Report from the Select Committee on Shipwrecks of Timber Ships: With the minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, Ordered to be printed 2 August 1839, Great Britain. Parliament, House of Commons. ...

Appendix 3, First Class Ships, British North American Built Ships, pp 104–105.

References Australian Lloyds, 1864, Rules and Regulations, with Registration Tables Applicable to the Varieties of Colonial Timbers Used in Shipbuilding, Scale of Fees, &c. Mason & Firth, Melbourne.

Curryer, B, 1999, Anchors: An Illustrated History. Chatham Publishing, London.

Fincham, J, 1825, An Introductory Outline of the Practice of Shipbuilding, &c (second edition). William Woodward, Portsea.

Hosty, K, J Hunter, I Malliaros and P Hundley, 2019, ‘Black reefs and the ‘Jardine Treasure’: The Boot Reef Project 2018’, Signals 126: 8–25.

McCarthy, M, 2005, Ships’ Fastenings: From Sewn Boat to Steamship.

Texas A&M University Press, College Station.

Staniforth, M, 1985, ‘The Introduction and Use of Copper Sheathings: A History’, Bulletin of the Australian Institute of Maritime Archaeology 9(1): 21–32.

Steel, D, 1794, The Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship, Volume One. David Steel, London.

Traill, T W, 1885, Chain Cables and Chains. Crosby Lockwood and Co, Ludgate Hill (London).

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Readings

Anton and Me: When Merdeka! came to Sydney

Lottie and Anton A story of love and politics

A CROSS-CULTURAL LOVE STORY adds a touching human dimension to the political movement that, 75 years ago, saw Australian maritime unions and politicians support the Indonesian people in their struggle for independence, after more than three centuries of Dutch domination in the East Indies. This political story was told in the museum’s travelling exhibition Black Armada, which has appeared extensively throughout Indonesia, and is currently online as Two Nations: Australia–Indonesia 1945–1949 (sea.museum/two-nations).

The love between Lottie and Anton bloomed as postwar politics unfolded, and her book’s early chapters sketch these events. Indonesian nationalists had declared independence (the Merdeka of the book’s title) as soon as Japan surrendered, while the Dutch were determined to resume their overlordship of the East Indies. Australian maritime workers showed solidarity with their fellow Indonesian seafarers by black-banning ships carrying Dutch arms and troops back to reoccupy the Indonesian islands.

Charlotte Reid was a respectable middle-class Sydney teenager, daughter of a strict merchant mariner and a country-born mother. Lottie, as she was known, was working as a clerk in the city at the end of World War II when she fell in love with a handsome Indonesian exile.

Anton Maramis, an educated Christian from a Minahasan family in North Sulawesi, was stranded in Australia, along with thousands of Indonesian seafarers, after the Japanese had driven their Dutch employers from the East Indies. He had arrived as a purser with the Dutch line KPM.

Anton Maramis undertook important work in Australia for the Indonesian nationalist leaders, while they battled the Dutch for their freedom. The couple’s marriage in 1947 was disrupted when he was deported from Australia and later imprisoned by the pro-Dutch British in Singapore. Shortly after the UN recognised Indonesia’s independence in 1949 (championed by the Australian government, which took a surprisingly anticolonial position), Lottie joined Anton to make their lives together in the brand-new Republic of Indonesia.

Lottie’s kind-hearted mother was part of a small group offering support and hospitality to KPM’s native petty officers, marooned far from their homes and families in the midst of a white nation that had excluded coloured people since Federation, and neither knew nor cared much about the inhabitants of their near neighbour the East Indies.

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By Charlotte Maramis, published

by Australia Indonesia Association, Sydney, 2020. Softcover, 192 pages, BW illustrations.

ISBN 978-0-646-81726-2.

Available in the Store or online, special price $20

Signals 133 Summer 2020–21

Most of Lottie’s book relates her life there learning about her new home with its monsoon climate, its ancient monuments of earlier kingdoms, its very different customs, religions and spicy cuisines, all of them utterly unknown to her and just about all Australians.

These early years of Indonesia’s independence were marked by economic hardship, shortages and poverty, and considerable political and social upheaval.

Readings

‘People would glare and look us up and down as we walked around the streets of Sydney arm in arm’

To some extent she was shielded from these by Anton, who was part of an educated elite, and whom she portrays as an understanding, loyal and supportive husband.

Their domestic lives in the better parts of Jakarta (the former Dutch capital Batavia) and travels in Java, Sulawesi and Bali make fascinating reading, as she learns the national language, forges friendships and teaches English to the wives of prominent Indonesians. Lottie is recruited to write for Indonesia’s first English-language newspaper, and as a journalist she attends President Soekarno’s Bandung Conference, where he founds the world’s Non-Aligned Nations movement in 1955.

One poignant personal story has her going to a traditional shaman healer seeking a cure for infertility due to a childhood illness, since Western treatments have failed. Secretively she visits a giant bronze Portuguese cannon where Javanese women come to make offerings, believing in its mystical power to make them pregnant.

(The famous cannon, called Si Jagur, stands in the same public square today where it is still visited by women for the same reason.) Sadly these steps fail, though the exemplary Anton assures Lottie he’s happy just with her.

After living through the dramatic, turbulent era of independent Indonesia’s first leader, President Soekarno, Lottie and Anton returned to Sydney, where they were involved with the growing Indonesian community and its Consulate until the end of their respective long lives.

The most exceptional aspect of this story is one to which Lottie gives very little space in her account.

It’s how utterly fearless she was in following her heart in mid-1940s Australia, when the overwhelming response to marrying a dark-skinned Asian was racist disapproval. She wrote: ‘People would glare and look us up and down as we walked around the streets of Sydney arm in arm.’ Her marriage was reported in the Sunday Sun with the condescending speculation that she would live the life of a poor Javanese peasant. Although her immediate family accepted Anton, many of the Dutch who remained in Indonesia snubbed her. It’s likely some of Anton’s compatriots would have questioned his choice of bride, too.

Lottie Maramis née Reid was surely a pioneer of Australian–Indonesian friendship, from a historical period that got our national relations with the Republic of Indonesia off to a flying start.

Jeffrey Mellefont, ANMM Honorary Research Associate

Anton and Lottie at their wedding, Wesley Chapel, Sydney, 18 January 1947.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Farewell to the last member of Operation Jaywick Vale Mostyn Berryman 9 November 1923–6 August 2020

MOSTYN (MOSS) BERRYMAN, who died on 6 August 2020, was the last surviving member of the epic Second World War commando raid Operation Jaywick.

Moss was an Able Seaman in the Royal Australian Navy when recruited for the raid, and trained and served in secrecy with its 14-man team of Z-Special Force operatives through much of 1943.

This extraordinary venture took those operatives far into the Japanese-held waters of Indonesia. Posing as Malay fishermen aboard the Japanese fishing vessel Krait, the team mounted a covert raid on shipping in Singapore Harbour. Six commandos embarked aboard three folding canoes and approached Singapore under cover of darkness. On the night of 26 September 1943, they entered the harbour and used limpet mines to sink or damage six Japanese merchant ships. Krait successfully recovered all six members of the strike team and returned to Western Australia in early October 1943 without being detected.

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Moss remained aboard Krait during the raid and manned its Bren guns and other small arms, but was also a reserve commando for the canoe team. Blessed with excellent eyesight, he spent much of his time at the top of Krait’s mast looking out for other vessels, which were given a wide berth. Operation Jaywick had an enormous impact on Japan’s confidence, as it caught the occupying force in Singapore completely by surprise, and mystified its military leadership. Indeed, most Japanese officials refused to believe the raid had been carried out by Allied forces and instead thought local Singaporean insurgents were responsible.

At the conclusion of Operation Jaywick, Moss and others went on to serve in other theatres, but key members of the raid later undertook a second covert operation, codenamed Rimau. Tragically, this mission was a failure, and all of the commandos involved lost their lives.

Moss’s final wartime deployment was aboard the destroyer HMAS Vendetta, and he was demobilised in February 1946.

Currents

Posing as Malay fishermen aboard the Japanese fishing vessel Krait, the team mounted a covert raid on shipping in Singapore Harbour

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01 Moss Berryman aboard Krait at the museum, 2014. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM 02 Mostyn Berryman (front row, centre) and fellow commandos on board MV Krait en route to the Singapore area during Operation Jaywick. Image Australian War Memorial P00986.001

For many years he was owed an additional five shillings per day in ‘danger money’ that had been promised to the Jaywick operatives, and when it was finally paid the amount was topped up to $5,000.

After the war, Moss returned to stockbrokers S C Ward & Co, for whom he had he worked as a clerk before the war began. He remained with them until his retirement 46 years later. He married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Cant, who died in 2018.

The museum was fortunate to form a direct association with Moss when restoration of Krait commenced.

This work was carried out in collaboration with the Australian War Memorial (in whose collection Krait resides) and involved the combined efforts of the museum’s Curatorial and Fleet staff and external contractors to return the vessel to its 1943 appearance and configuration. The restoration coincided with the 75th anniversary of Operation Jaywick and was intended to share the raid’s story and significance with the public.

From his home in Adelaide, Moss liaised with curator David Payne and reviewed plans of Krait’s 1943 configuration, advised on aspects of the vessel’s appearance and outfitting, and regularly checked up on the restoration’s progress. His input reinforced the team’s confidence that the restored vessel would genuinely reflect what the Jaywick operatives saw when they undertook their dangerous mission aboard Krait during September and October 1943.

Krait’s restoration was completed in time for the 75th anniversary of Operation Jaywick on 26 September 2018. Unfortunately, for medical reasons Moss was unable to travel to Sydney, but thanks to mobile phones, he was ‘virtually’ brought aboard during early sea trials.

This enabled him to again hear the sound of the reliable Gardner engine that took him and his mates deep into enemy territory, and safely back to Australian shores.

Moss and his family have kindly offered objects to the museum that he carried with him aboard Krait during Operation Jaywick. These include a machete and truncheon that are now part of the National Maritime Collection. Other items, including his RAN boatswain’s whistle and a sarong worn as part of his Malay fisherman disguise, were recently offered as a donation by his daughter Rosemary Hayward.

Moss Berryman is survived by his four daughters and numerous grand- and great-grandchildren.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Acknowledgments 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 Fellows John Mullen AM Peter Dexter AM Ambassadors Christine Sadler David and Jennie Sutherland Major Donors – SY Ena Conservation Fund David and Jennie Sutherland Foundation

Honorary Life Members Yvonne Abadee Dr Kathy Abbass Robert Albert AO RFD RD Bob Allan Vivian Balmer Vice Admiral Tim Barrett AO CSC Maria Bentley Mark Bethwaite AM Paul Binsted Marcus Blackmore AM David Blackley John Blanchfield Alexander Books Ian Bowie Ron Brown OAM Paul Bruce Anthony Buckley Richard Bunting Capt Richard Burgess AM Kevin Byrne Sue Calwell RADM David Campbell AM Marion Carter Robert Clifford AO Helen Clift Hon Peter Collins AM QC John Coombs Kay Cottee AO Helen Coulson OAM Vice Admiral Russell Crane AO CSM John Cunneen Laurie Dilks Anthony Duignan Leonard Ely Dr Nigel Erskine John Farrell Kevin Fewster AM Bernard Flack Daina Fletcher Sally Fletcher Teresia Fors Derek Freeman CDR Geoff Geraghty AM Anthony Gibbs

Brian Gibson am RADM Stephen Gilmore AM CSC RAN Paul Gorrick Lee Graham Macklan Gridley Sir James Hardy KBE OBE RADM Simon Harrington AM Christopher Harry Gaye Hart AM Peter Harvie Janita Hercus Philip Hercus Robyn Holt William Hopkins Julia Horne RADM Tony Hunt AO Marilyn Jenner John Jeremy AM Vice Admiral Peter Jones AO DSC Michael Kailis Hon Dr Tricia Kavanagh John Keelty Helen Kenny Kris Klugman OAM Jean Lane Judy Lee David Leigh Keith Leleu OAM Andrew Lishmund James Litten Hugo Llorens Tim Lloyd Ian Mackinder Stuart Mayer Jack McBurney Bruce McDonald AM Lyn McHale Ronald McJannett VADM JOnathan Mead AM RAN Ron Miller Arthur Moss Patrick Moss Rob Mundle OAM Alwyn Murray Martin Nakata

Congratulations to Stephen Martin, who won the Signals 132 caption competition with this entry: ‘Pink curtains, you said?’

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David O’Connor Gary Paquet David Payne Prof John Penrose AM Neville Perry Hon Justice Anthe Philippides Peter Pigott AM Len Price Eda Ritchie AM John Rothwell AO Kay Saunders AM Kevin Scarce AC CSC RAN David Scott-Smith Sergio Sergi Mervyn Sheehan Ann Sherry AO Shane Simpson AM Peter John Sinclair AM CSC Peter R Sinclair AC KStJ (RADM) John Singleton AM Brian Skingsley Eva Skira Bruce Stannard AM J J Stephens OAM Michael Stevens Neville Stevens AO Frank Talbot AM Mitchell Turner Adam Watson Jeanette Wheildon Hon Margaret White ao Mary-Louise Williams AM Nerolie Withnall Cecilia Woolford (nee Caffrey) Honorary Research Associates Lindsey Shaw Jeffrey Mellefont Paul Hundley Rear Admiral Peter Briggs Dr Ian MacLeod Dr Nigel Erskine David Payne John Dikkenberg

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Archie Moore, Aboriginal Anarchy (detail), 2012, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2013 © courtesy of the artist and The Commercial Gallery, Sydney