Signals 135

Winter 2021

RSV Nuyina

Mighty ship of science

Great Southern Reef Ecology under threat

The Proteus project TM

A futuristic undersea habitat

Number 135 June to August sea.museum $9.95

Bearings From the Director

A giant hydroid, one of the first found in Australian waters, was among many discoveries made by Schmidt Ocean Institute’s RV Falkor off our coast in 2020. See article on page 28.

Image Schmidt Ocean Institute

2021 MARKS THE START of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the museum, as Australia’s museum of the sea, is proud to be helping lead the debate in this country. In this issue you will find a range of articles about marine science and technology as we look for ways to make our modern world more sustainable for the planet.

As 2021 unfolds, it is pleasing to see further loosening of COVID-19 restrictions throughout Australia.

Recognising that the pandemic has affected many people’s disposable income, the museum offered free entry throughout February. It was very gratifying to see record numbers of visitors during what is traditionally a slower month. Pleasingly, these numbers continued thereafter, demonstrating the public’s desire to get out and return to a way of life similar to that before COVID. We are well on the way to recovery!

On that recovery note, we are pleased to have been allowed to reopen public tours of HMAS Onslow.

With this, and the addition of Duyfken to our fleet, there is much to see at the museum. The initial season of twilight sails on Duyfken sold out almost immediately and the latest season of sails is now on sale. We know that many visitors will enjoy sailing on this unique vessel in the years to come, and we are optimistic that belowdeck tours of HMB Endeavour and Duyfken can also begin again soon.

Visitors to the museum will notice significant changes occurring. We are renovating the Shop, so you will find a temporary Shop situated in the Terrace Room, near the ticket desk. We look forward to an exciting new Shop opening in August. Our online store continues to operate and I urge everyone to browse our range of offerings – they are great for gift ideas!

On 21 March – Harmony Day – the Governor General, His Excellency, General the Honourable David Hurley AC DSC , elevated the status of our very popular Welcome Wall to that of Australia’s National Monument to Migration. It is a singular honour to have such a monument here at the museum and its elevation pays tribute to our work over many years in the area of migration. Migration is such an important part of the nation’s history and we will continue to develop exciting programs and initiatives. Please see page 16 for a story about the announcement and part of the Governor General’s address that pays tribute to the museum’s ongoing commitment to documenting migration to Australia.

Finally, we are currently revising our four-year corporate plan in light of the many changes COVID has brought us and the new thinking they have led to. I will update you in the next edition as we move further into a period of post-COVID recovery.

I wish you all the very best and I hope you enjoy our winter edition of Signals.

Kevin Sumption psm Director and CEO

Contents Winter 2021 Number 135 June to August 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.

2 The life and loss of kelp Shining a light on Australia’s Great Southern Reef

10 Nuyina Our ship of the future

16 ‘Your story is our story’ Museum’s Welcome Wall becomes the National Monument to Migration

20 The Sydney seahorse New homes support an endangered species

24 Engineering the impossible The Proteus™ underwater habitat

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

28 A year like no other

Supplied courtesy of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.

34 A first step

Cultural warning People of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent should be aware that Signals may contain names, images, video, voices, objects and works of people who are deceased.

Signals may also contain links to sites that may use content of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people now deceased.

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

RV Falkor’s Australian discoveries What does success look like for Australia’s ocean stakeholders?

36 The greatest voyage in maritime history Magellan, Elcano and the first global circumnavigation

42 An Englishman goes Makassan G E P ‘Pat’ Collins 1904–1991

52 Wreck Seeker New educational game uncovers underwater mysteries

54 Haenyeo divers of South Korea History surfaces in an international education collaboration

58 Exhibitions War and Peace: Hiroshima and Nagasaki and more

61 Museum events Your calendar of term-time and school holiday activities

62 Ocean technologies take us back to the future The CSIRO donates to the National Maritime Collection

66 A new acquisition of national significance Operation Jaywick material related to Edward ‘Ted’ Carse

70 A pearling pioneer Remembering the Manilamen

74 Readings Little Boats with Sails by Nicole Mays, Colin Grazules and David Payne Cover In 2020 RV Falkor undertook the first survey of midwater jellies in the South Pacific. Image Schmidt Ocean Institute

76 Currents Vale Rob Bowring OAM and Harvey Halvorsen

78 Fleeing persecution A young refugee forges prosperity in his new home

Bull kelp washed up onto the shore of King Island.

All images by Justin Gilligan unless otherwise stated

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The life and loss of kelp Shining a light on Australia’s Great Southern Reef

What is Australia’s largest and most commercially valuable reef? It’s not the obvious choice, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef. Instead it’s the Great Southern Reef, a name coined in 2016 to bring this vast and under-recognised area to public attention. Justin Gilligan profiles this fragile environment and the threatened kelp species that underpin its ecology.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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On King Island, off the northwest coast of Tasmania, bull kelp thrives, providing the basis for a primary industry 01

THE SKY IS BRUISED following the storm, the air hangs heavy with the smell of salty sea and something slightly putrid, and the kelp, delivered by onshore wind and swell, almost covers the rocky shore. It forms thick, slippery blankets and even hangs from the mouths of cows turned loose to graze on the nutritious castaways.

On King Island, off the northwest coast of Tasmania, bull kelp (Durvillaea potatorum) still thrives, providing the basis for a primary industry. Self-employed kelp harvesters hand-collect the valuable seaweed that washes up on the island’s rocky shore. The ‘kelpies’ clamber over the slippery rocks tying nylon rope to the kelp’s holdfasts, before winching the plants onto trucks and trailers weathered by the salty conditions.

These locals make their living or supplement their income by collecting the washed-up seaweed and selling it to the island’s kelp-processing plant to be turned into feed, fertiliser, food and ingredients for cosmetics.

Jason Russell has lived on King Island for most of his life, but only became a kelpie late in 2016. He used to unload southern rock lobsters from commercial fishing vessels, but made the switch when the price of kelp jumped from $300 to $700 a tonne. On a good day he can collect a tonne of kelp, which makes the industry a potentially lucrative option for locals.

In town, the brown algae fills the aisles of the Kelp Craft store, where it’s been fashioned into seahorses, weedy sea dragons and other decorative wall hangings.

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Growing to about six metres in length, bull kelp is a robust, low-lying species. It contains the highest level of any Australian seaweed of alginates – used as an additive to a vast range of products, from fruit drinks, ice cream, cosmetics and dyes to pharmaceuticals and bandages. And it can be put to myriad other uses, too, including as a feed in aquaculture, a fertiliser and soil conditioner to replenish depleted soils, and a dietary supplement.

This species is so pervasive on King Island that it’s hard to imagine a future in which it might not exist. But the outlook for the region’s kelp forests is anything but clear.

Just as warm water can cause coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, increasing water temperatures are significantly affecting Australia’s southern reefs.

Scientists have identified that Australia’s temperate seas are warming two to four times more rapidly than the global average, largely due to the influence of the East Australian Current off the east coast and the Leeuwin Current off the west coast, both of which transport warm water southward.

Long-term exposure to higher temperatures weakens the seaweed, slows its growth rate and impedes its ability to reproduce. Storms can compromise kelp, as the long algal ropes are frequently ripped loose from the ocean floor. In addition to these direct impacts, ocean warming allows new herbivores, including tropical fish and urchins, to move into kelp forest terrain. In some cases, especially in areas where their natural predators have been fished or hunted too heavily, these invaders can clear-fell large expanses of kelp forest in a matter of months.

01 Cattle are turned loose to eat the highly nutritious bull kelp washed onto King Island’s rocky shores by powerful seas.

02 Strands of bull kelp are hung to dry at the local kelp-processing plant.

Some King Islanders make their living or supplement their income by collecting washed-up seaweed and selling it to the local kelp-processing plant

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Australian National Maritime Museum

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The challenges faced by the Great Southern Reef include pollution, infrastructure development, introduced species, overfishing and, most destructively, a warming ocean

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The Great Southern Reef is much larger than its northern cousin, the Great Barrier Reef, and contributes more to the economy, but receives a fraction of the research funding

Giant kelp can reach towards the water surface from depths up to 30 metres, drawn upwards by teardrop-shaped gas bladders.

The GSR name was coined in a 2016 scientific paper written by a group of prominent scientists from leading marine research institutions who wanted to bring this valuable natural habitat to public attention as a single interconnected system. The authors hope that giving the reef a name will act as the first step towards educating people about the challenges faced by this fragile ecosystem. Those challenges are many and varied, arising from a combination of unprecedented population growth on the adjacent coast and global environmental change. They include pollution, pressure from infrastructure development, introduced species, overfishing and, most destructively, a warming ocean.

In Australian waters, kelp occurs in an area that covers around 71,000 square kilometres and runs for more than 8,000 kilometres along Australia’s southern coastline, from northern New South Wales to Kalbarri in Western Australia and around Tasmania. This area is known as Australia’s Great Southern Reef (GSR). Its northern cousin, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), is made up of more than 2,900 individual coral-dominated reefs, while the GSR comprises thousands of kelp-dominated rocky reefs. These range from intertidal rock pools to shallow reefs and deep-water environments dominated by sponge gardens.

It’s the reef’s keystone species group, kelp, that’s really feeling the heat. A recent study examining kelp cover around the world found that in roughly a third of sites it is declining. Unfortunately, that includes much of the GSR. Several mechanisms are behind the loss. In Western Australia, it is marine heatwaves.

In northern New South Wales, a ‘tropicalisation’ of the fish community on the reef has seen voracious kelpgrazing rabbitfish move south as the water has warmed.

And in South Australia, the kelp has succumbed to years of waste-water pollution. The most dramatic losses, however, have taken place off Tasmania’s east coast.

Kelp is a large, fleshy type of seaweed that can form underwater forests. Like coral, it provides a diversity of habitats for a wide range of other organisms, including crustaceans, chordates, bryozoans, sponges, echinoderms and molluscs. It adds vertical structure while providing shelter, a point of attachment for suspension feeders such as anemones and bryozoans, and a rich source of food for grazers such as marblefish and herring cale.

Tasmania was once home to vast forests of giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), the world’s largest and fastest-growing kelp species. Swimming through a healthy giant kelp forest, in which individual plants can grow 30 metres from the seafloor to the surface, is like flying through a forest of huge swaying beanstalks.

Teardrop-shaped gas-bladder floats pull each plant up towards the sun, while at the base, the spindly tendrils of the root-like holdfast secure it to the sea floor.

All this adds up to an extraordinary wealth of biodiversity that includes more than 1,500 seaweed species – substantially more than are found along coastlines of comparable length elsewhere in the world.

There are also high levels of endemism. For example, about three quarters of the 565 red seaweed species the GSR supports are found nowhere else, and among some invertebrate groups, the proportion of endemics is even higher.

The arrival of warm, low-nutrient water from the north has weakened the giant kelp forests, making them more susceptible to storms and eventually leading to their collapse across much of their former range.

To make matters worse, the warming has also allowed long-spined sea urchins to invade Tasmanian waters.

These herbivorous sea creatures can reduce healthy kelp forests to what are known as barrens – areas of bare rock completely devoid of seaweed.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Between the 1940s and 2011, Tasmania’s giant kelp forests have declined by a staggering 95 per cent

Great Barrier Reef

East Australian Current Leeuwin Current

NO RTHE RN TE RR ITO RY QUE E NSLAND

WE STE RN AUSTR ALIA

01 Less well known than the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Southern Reef is much more extensive and commercially lucrative, but is under threat from warming waters carried southwards by the Leeuwin and East Australian currents. Image Jo Kaupe 02 Divers from the University of Tasmania study the flow-on effects of transplanting common kelp onto artificial patch reefs near Maria Island.

SOUTH AUSTR ALIA NEW SOUTH WALE S Great Australian Bight VICTO RIA King Island

Great Southern Reef Great Barrier Reef

Bass Strait TA SM ANIA Tasman Peninsula

01

02

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Signals 135 Winter 2021

Professor Craig Johnson, Associate Director of the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and one of the authors of the paper, took up a position with the University of Tasmania in 1997, which coincided with the warming of the surrounding water.

He began documenting the impact of warming water on Tasmania’s marine ecosystems. Using a mix of historic and new aerial photography, he showed that between the 1940s and 2011, giant kelp forests have declined by a staggering 95 per cent. Giant kelp forests are now only found in areas that the warm southbound current doesn’t reach off Tasmania’s south coast, around the Actaeon Island Group and in a few sheltered pockets off the state’s west coast.

To better understand kelp as the basic building block of the GSR, Professor Johnson’s research team recently spent three years painstakingly transplanting 500 common kelp plants (Ecklonia radiata) – the most abundant kelp species on the GSR – onto 28 artificial patch reefs, covering more than a hectare near Maria Island.

By controlling the size and density of the kelp cover, the researchers were able to determine the flow-on effects of a thinning of the forests. The results showed that both of these variables had a strong influence on the structure of the communities that formed within the newly established forests, while also highlighting the kelp’s central importance to the health of the reefs.

Professor Johnson hopes the publication of his papers will focus attention on the plight of the GSR, since unfortunately Australia hasn’t been as effective as most of the coral reef community in promoting our temperate reefs. Although the GSR is much larger than its northern cousin and contributes more to the economy, it receives a fraction of the research funding.

The lack of profile is partly down to the fact that the GSR reefs can be relatively difficult to access.

Most are exposed to large swells and, even if you manage to get below the surface, the visibility can be poor. In contrast, it’s easy to get hundreds of divers and snorkelers into the warm waters of the GBR.

That is not to say that the GSR isn’t pulling its economic weight. Conservative estimates suggest fishing and tourism associated with it generate about twice the economic return of the GBR, which is worth about $5.5 billion to the Australian economy. Its most valuable commercial fisheries are rock lobster and abalone, which together contribute about $500 million annually to the nation’s coffers. Tasmania’s wild-caught abalone industry alone is worth $100 million a year. However, the incursion of long-spined sea urchins into Tasmania’s east coast waters is a threat to that industry.

Like the urchins, black-lipped abalone feed on seaweeds, but they are now being overtaken by the spiky intruders.

As a result, Tasmania’s east coast abalone production has halved. As with the last remaining stands of giant kelp, Tasmania’s most productive abalone grounds are now located off Actaeon Island and in the state’s south-east.

Only our southernmost waters are stable and out of reach from the warm water, with the reefs continuing to look much healthier than in areas of eastern Tasmania, such as the Tasman Peninsula.

Mick Baron, co-owner of the Eaglehawk Dive Centre, first came to Eaglehawk Neck in the 1970s, when it was a small town in a constriction of the Tasman Peninsula.

He made regular weekend visits with a friend from university, where he was studying marine science.

Over the years, Mick has watched with growing alarm the changes taking place in the surrounding seas.

When Mick set up the dive centre in 1991 there were giant kelp forests at every site he visited around the Tasman Peninsula. Today the picture is significantly bleaker, with no giant kelp forests occurring in the region.

The GSR is critical to our nation, and we need to look after it, and to acknowledge it in the same way as we do our coral reefs. There are two critical aspects to the future management of the GSR: preventing the loss of the kelp, and restoring parts of it before it is lost forever.

Justin Gilligan is a freelance photojournalist with an honours degree in marine science. He has worked on numerous projects with Australia’s Commonwealth and State Fisheries Agencies. Several of Justin’s images have received international acclaim in prestigious photography competitions. He was a finalist in Wildlife Photographer of the Year 55. For further information, see justingilligan.com.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Nuyina Our ship of the future

With a dazzling array of highly sophisticated instruments, the $1.9 billion Antarctic research vessel RSV Nuyina will provide Australian scientists with unprecedented access to the Earth’s last great wilderness – the frozen continent where global warming is fast eroding ancient glaciers and unleashing sea-level rises with potentially catastrophic consequences for the entire planet.

Bruce Stannard reports on the extraordinary capabilities of Australia’s three-in-one super-ship.

HISTORIC HOBART has seen a great many ships come and go over the years, but it’s safe to say that none has been as profoundly important to the future of the planet as the 160-metre icebreaker Nuyina. With a price tag of $1.9 billion, the newly built Nuyina represents Australia’s biggest-ever investment in science. This is in itself a clear indication of just how seriously we now take the search for answers to what must surely be the most pressing questions of this over-reach age. Oceans cover 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and although they bear many different names, each is connected to the others in a vast network of global currents that govern our climate and directly influence life on Earth. With human-induced climate change and global warming already responsible for melting billions of tonnes of ice from the hitherto frozen waters of the Arctic, urgent attention is now focused on the impact of unprecedented warming in Antarctic waters. In Antarctica, where Australia has long maintained three important scientific bases, ancient glaciers are now melting and calving enormous icebergs at an alarming rate. Should that disastrous trend continue – and all the indications are that it will – global sea-levels are expected to rise to heights unprecedented in the modern era. As a result, major coastal cities and low-lying island populations throughout the world will very likely face catastrophic inundation and disruption on a scale that will dwarf any other event in recent human history.

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The name Nuyina was chosen by school children. Pronounced ‘noy-yee-nah’, it is a Tasmanian Aboriginal term for the Aurora Australis. Image Damen/ Australian Antarctic Division

With a price tag of $1.9 billion, the newly built Nuyina represents Australia’s biggest-ever investment in science Australian National Maritime Museum

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The 25,000 tonne Nuyina is therefore arriving on the very cusp of this fast-developing emergency. She will be three state-of-the-art vessels in one: an exceptionally powerful icebreaker, a cutting-edge scientific research platform and a robust supply ship, providing a 30-year lifeline for three stations in the Antarctic as well as our sub-Antarctic World Heritage Wilderness, Macquarie Island and the remote Heard and McDonald islands. Nuyina represents a quantum leap in the Australian Antarctic Division’s scientific capability, a boost that will greatly enhance its well-established international reputation as the world’s foremost Antarctic research organisation.

After 10 years of meticulous planning and design, and three years in construction at the Damen Group’s vast shipyard in Galati, Romania, in August 2020 Nuyina was towed 6,800 kilometres to Vlissingen in the Netherlands for interior fit-out and to complete a program of trials.

Nuyina is now, without doubt, the most advanced scientific research vessel in the southern hemisphere.

While Nuyina and her scientific crew will not be able to mitigate the enormous changes under way in Antarctica, they will certainly be able to use the ship’s vast array of highly sophisticated equipment to explore and monitor those changes, predicting and providing some warning of when and where they may occur. To share some of the excitement of Nuyina’s capabilities, here is a brief guided tour of the ship, starting at the stern and going forward.

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Science deck and labs

Sheltered beneath the helicopter landing pad, the afterdeck can support almost every conceivable scientific activity. A large A-frame at the stern and different winches and lifting gear can be used to deploy fishing nets and dredges, robotic vehicles, mooring systems, cameras and sediment corers.

Propulsion

For silent operations Nuyina has two electric motors (7,400 kW total) powered by diesel generators.

These can be coupled with two 16-cylinder diesel engines to provide maximum power for ice-breaking (19,200 kW total). Two 50-metre-long propeller shafts connect the main engines and electric motors to the 40-tonne propellers at the stern.

Moon pool

The ‘moon pool’ housed amidships is a 13-metre vertical shaft running from the science deck to the open ocean.

Equipment such as the CTD (Conductivity, Temperature and Depth) instrument, nets and robotic vehicles can be deployed through it, even when the ship is in sea ice.

The CTD is a workhorse of oceanography that collects water samples from different depths. These provide information about the changes in the ocean’s salinity, temperature, nutrients and plankton.

Nuyina will be three state-of-the-art vessels in one – an exceptionally powerful icebreaker, a cutting-edge scientific research platform and a robust supply ship

01 RSV Nuyina captured during its first trial voyage in the North Sea in December 2020.

Image Flying Focus 02 Designer Lynda Warner created this limited issue of four Australian Antarctic Territory stamps, issued in September 2020. Image Australia Post

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ROVs

Drop keels

The Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are also housed amidships. These are connected to the ship and powered via an umbilical cord. They can be used to explore the underside of sea ice for krill and the sea ice algae that they feed on.

Nuyina has two drop keels that can be lowered three metres beneath the vessel about amidships. They house acoustic instruments that use sound to create images of the ocean environment to map the sea floor or measure the amount of krill or fish in the water. They also contain a hydrophone system to record marine mammal calls.

AUVs

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are programmed to work independently under sea ice or deep beneath ice shelves. They can carry a range of instruments for different purposes, such as mapping the sea floor or under-ice surfaces and measuring water properties.

Wet well

Nuyina’s unique ‘wet well’ is a watertight space beneath the waterline, which can process up to 5,000 litres of seawater per minute, piped from large inlets in the ship’s hull. The water feeds into large viewing tanks and ‘filter tables’, which allow aquarists to collect krill and fragile organisms such as jellyfish, in perfect condition.

Nuyina can carry 1,200 tonnes of cargo in up to 96 20-foot shipping containers. One of the two cargo holds can accommodate vehicles, including Hagglund snow tractors, LARC amphibious vehicles, rough terrain vehicles and Quadtracs. As befits a ship of this size and purpose, Nuyina carries a series of smaller support craft.

The 10.3-metre Science Tender, housed on the port side just aft of amidships, can carry up to six people and 500 kilograms of cargo. It has a moon pool to deploy instruments through the hull and an A-frame to deploy towed instruments. There are also two personnel transfer tenders and a stern tender that operates as a safety vessel whenever the helicopter takes off and lands from the helipad. Two 16.3-metre × 6.2-metre aluminium barges deployed by cranes are housed on the foredeck to transport up to 45 tonnes of cargo in ship-to-shore operations. The fisheries sonar, controlled and monitored from the science operation room and the bridge, uses pulses of sound to detect schools of fish, krill or other marine organisms in the water column around the ship.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Oceans cover 70 per cent of Earth in a vast network of global currents that govern our climate and directly influence life on Earth

Ship’s details Length 160.3 metres Beam 25.6 metres Maximum draught 9.3 metres Displacement 235,500 tonnes Ice-breaking Travelling at a speed of 3 knots (5.5 km/h), the ship can break through ice up to 1.65 metres thick Speed 12 knots cruising, 16+ knots max Range 16,000 nautical miles Endurance 90 days Cargo fuel capacity 1,671 tonnes Container capacity 96 TEU Cargo weight 1,200 tonnes Passengers 116

01 Nuyina features both a resupply deck and – when seas permit – a helipad for ship-to-shore movements. Image Flying Focus 02 Kim Ellis has visited Antarctica multiple times. Image Australian Antarctic Division 14

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‘… the Southern Ocean is an extraordinary resource, not just for food but also for the future of alternative energy: wave energy and tidal energy’

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Look south to see the future

The Australian Antarctic Division’s Director, Kim Ellis, has visited Antarctica several times over the last 40 years without ever losing the palpable sense of excitement and awe he feels for the frozen continent and its many wonders. ‘It’s just the most exciting place,’ he said. ‘The preservation of this incredibly important, pristine piece of landscape is vital to Australia’s national interests because what happens in Antarctica affects all of us. It’s just so precious. And although we tend to focus on the charismatic megafauna – the great blue whales, the vast colonies of emperor penguins, the magnificent wandering albatross and so on – there is just so much going on down there at every level. Our scientists also spend a lot of time researching phytoplankton, the smallest gelatinous creatures on the planet.’

Mr Ellis laments that very few people realise that Australia has had such a long and enduring history in Antarctic. ‘In the 2017 Antarctic season,’ he said, ‘we celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Australian Antarctic Program. That’s quite an achievement for a young country. People don’t realise that Douglas Mawson claimed almost 42 per cent of Antarctica for Australia and while those claims are on hold because of the Antarctic Treaty arrangements, Antarctica is in fact our southern border. Although we put an awful lot of energy into looking north, as a nation we really should be investing the same amount of energy into looking south because that is where our national interest lies.

It is incredibly important. It affects our weather and the Southern Ocean is an extraordinary resource, not just for food but also for the future of alternative energy: wave energy and tidal energy.’

Mr Ellis points out that Australia continues to play a very strong international leadership role in the consensusbased Antarctic Treaty system which is, he says, one of the world’s oldest, most enduring and most effective treaty systems. The Treaty has, he says, kept Antarctic peaceful, focusing on science and cooperation since it began in 1991. ‘For a small country,’ he said, ‘we punch well above our weight. We are highly influential in the Treaty process. We were one of the founding parties that developed it back in the 1950s and we have maintained that very strong role. We have the history. We have the interest. This is part of our region of influence and we need to be prominent and confident in it.’

Kim Ellis has seen his fair share of blizzards in Antarctica and raging seas in the Southern Ocean. ‘It’s an interesting thing about nature,’ he says. ‘No matter how strong and powerful human beings think they are, it only takes one great storm to make us realise just how incredibly small we really are. That is an important realisation and Antarctica reinforces that every day. This is why cooperation between a whole range of nations is so important down there. Earlier this year I spent three months in Antarctica undertaking a treaty inspection tour in which we travelled 10,000 kilometres to visit 17 different research stations, including all of our own.

Compliance and due diligence are what makes the treaty system work. It prevents individual nations breaching the articles of the treaty. Is it perfect? Probably not, but this treaty system is pretty good and I have a high level of confidence that in most cases it is being complied with.’

Mr Ellis is certain that Nuyina will allow the Division to make a quantum leap in its scientific capability in Antarctica. ‘The ship will allow us to take our scientists and their equipment into places that have been way beyond our operational limits,’ he said. ‘We will be able to stay out there for much longer and get out to very remote places like Heard Island and McDonald Island [between Madagascar and Antarctica]. It’s all very exciting.’

Bruce Stannard AM is a renowned maritime author and a Life Member of the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Each name on the monument signifies one main emotion – that of hope

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‘Your story is our story’ Museum’s Welcome Wall becomes the National Monument to Migration

On Sunday 21 March, Harmony Day, the status of the museum’s Welcome Wall was elevated to that of the National Monument to Migration, reports Steve Riethoff.

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THE NATIONAL MONUMENT TO MIGRATION commemorates those who have migrated from countries around the world to make Australia their new home. The name of any person who was born overseas and settled in Australia may be registered on the monument.

In a recorded address to those attending the latest ceremony unveiling new names on the monument, the Governor General of Australia, His Excellency, General the Honourable David Hurley AC DSC, stated: A little over 22 years ago, former Governor-General Sir William Deane presided over the official opening of the Welcome Wall in front of you today. During his speech Sir William described Australia as follows: ‘Our nation is the sum of us all – all those who came here, all those who were born here, and all those who are or have been Australian.’ Sir William said the great lesson of the Welcome Wall is that ‘our diversity has led to our unity.’

I agree with him.

01 Arriving in Sydney from Kenya in 1999, Rosemary Kariuki is the 2021 Australian of the Year Local Hero.

All images Jamie Williams/ANMM 02 Film producer Electra Maniakakis (left) was proud to see her family’s name inscribed into Australia’s National Monument to Migration.

‘In sharing our migration stories, you have helped create an important national resource for generations to come’

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That lesson is as true today as it was more than two decades ago. That lesson has endured. It is fitting, therefore, that in Harmony Week – a week in which we celebrate our diversity – that the status of the Welcome Wall be elevated to ‘Australia’s National Monument to Migration’.

Let me take my reflections on Sir William’s words further, especially his statement that ‘Our diversity has led to our unity’. In my view, there is a key link between ‘diversity’ and ‘unity’ that underlies our success as a multicultural nation. It is ‘learning’.

It is through learning that we become better informed and better understand people’s cultures and our differences.

They will be read, they will be digested and they will become topics of conversations – informed discussions …

In sharing our migration stories, you have helped create an important national resource for generations to come …This resource will make for a more inclusive, respectful, harmonious and stronger Australia – something we should all aspire to.

‘Learning’ is written all over Australia’s National Monument to Migration. It resides in the stories of the 846 names being added to this Monument today – indeed in the stories of all migrant Australians.

Stories that are integral to the Australian success story.

The monument features more than 30,000 names and behind each name is a story. There are stories that are dramatic, stories that are tragic, and stories that just tell of a desire for a new start. Each name signifies one main emotion – that of hope.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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‘… our diversity has led to our unity’

On Harmony Day the museum unveiled 846 new names on the wall. Kevin Sumption PSM, Director and CEO of the museum, said: The Welcome Wall honours the migrants who have helped shape our nation and, collectively, their stories speak to who we are as a nation. It is a celebration of multicultural Australia. We are so pleased that the wall has been recognised and elevated to a National Monument here in Pyrmont Bay, so close to the site of many arrivals to this country.

We are so grateful to our donors to the Migration Heritage Fund which supports our migration activities.

It is a beautiful way to mark and honour those really hard decisions to start a new life in Australia.

All donors are invited to contribute a brief story about the person being honoured and a brief biographical note is published on the museum’s website. The museum is amassing a selection of stories from these names – stories that, in turn, tell the story of modern Australia.

Speaking at the event were a number of people being honoured on the monument. Violi Calvert, Ashak Nathwani and Electra Manikakis all shared stories of their families’ journeys as new Australians. The invited audience also enjoyed a wonderful story from Rosemary Kariuki, the Australian of the Year Local Hero for 2021.

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On Sunday 21 March, following the announcement of the National Monument to Migration, the museum celebrated Harmony Day with The Sunday Stir, a celebration of multicultural Australia through story, song and dance. The museum collaborated with Blacktown Arts and visitors enjoyed more than 30 different artists sharing their experiences.

The museum is now accepting names for the next panels on the monument and has announced a new fundraising initiative to support the honouring of new arrivals and refugees. To add a name, visit sea.museum/nationalmonument

Postponed your international travels?

P&O poster of SS Maloja, 1910. ANMM Collection 00006902

It has been a difficult year for everyone worldwide.

In Australia, our lives have been disrupted and international travel plans put on hold. Travel allows us to see new places, meet new people and share their stories.

At the museum, we showcase the most interesting maritime stories from around the world.

Help us bring these stories closer to home.

You can donate to the museum via our website sea.museum/support/ donate or call the Foundation office on 02 9298 3777. Donations over $2 are tax deductible and by donating prior to 30 June, you can include your receipt in this year’s tax return.

To tide us over until we can travel again, we have created an online display of travel posters called Sea the World, which you can view at bit.ly/sea-the-world

Thank you

Join the Chairman’s Circle

Do you want to:

• See inside the vaults and behind the scenes?

• Learn more about the stories of the people who shaped our nation?

• Hear from our curators and conservators?

• Sail aboard historic vessels and learn about their history?

• Mix with like-minded donors passionate about all things maritime?

Get to know the museum at a deeper level. By donating $3,000 to support the Foundation’s work or pledging $1,000 each year for three years, you become a member of the Chairman’s Circle. You will be invited to become more involved with the museum, meet conservators, tour exhibitions with expert curators and sail on our historic vessels such as Duyfken.

For more information: Call 02 9298 3777 Email matt.lee@sea.museum Or go to sea.museum/chairmans-circle

Chairman’s circle member Arthur Cunningham and Head of Acquisition, ANMM Foundation Daina Fletcher.

ANMM image

As seagrass and sponge garden habitats decreased in Sydney Harbour, so too did the resident population of seahorses

A juvenile White’s seahorse.

All photographs courtesy David Harasti, NSW Department of Primary Industries/Fisheries 20

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White’s seahorse is the only Australian seahorse listed as endangered

The Sydney seahorse New homes support an endangered species

You may have heard of Sydney’s most recent media star, the White’s seahorse, which made international news when it moved into a purpose-built ‘seahorse hotel’ last year.

Emily Jateff profiles this endangered species and the efforts being made to save it.

WHITE’S SEAHORSE (Hippocampus whitei) is named after John White, principal surgeon of the First Fleet and later the first surgeon general of the colony of New South Wales, who included an illustration of it in his Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales (plate 50, page 264) as the Hippocampus or ‘Sea-Horse’.1 Sydneysiders have since claimed it as their own, and it’s commonly called the ‘Sydney seahorse’.

Seahorses, along with pipefishes and seadragons, belong to the family Syngnathidae. Like all syngnathids, the male White’s seahorse has a marsupium, fertilising, feeding and carrying eggs in a pouch on his lower abdomen until they are ready for birth. White’s seahorses vary in colour and have been known to change colour based on mood and the habitat they live on. They are tiny creatures, averaging 10 centimetres, with a long snout.

They can live in the wild for up to six years and have been sighted along the eastern coast of Australia to depths of 18 metres. They are most commonly spotted in Sydney Harbour, Port Stephens and Port Hacking.

This species is the only Australian seahorse listed as endangered and was included on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List in 2017. Seahorses like to live in seagrasses, corals and sponge gardens. They have only a small dorsal fin for propulsion, which means that they tend not to swim too far from home. As seagrass and sponge garden habitats decreased in Sydney Harbour, so too did the resident population of seahorses. In 2004, all members of the family Syngnathidae were protected under the New South Wales Fisheries Management Act 1994.

While protection and relocation ensure the survival of the few remaining wild seahorses, the resident wild numbers had decreased to such an extent that something more drastic had to be done to begin to lift the species from endangered status.

In 2019, SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium partnered with the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to undertake a White’s seahorse breeding program. Ten wild seahorses were transplanted from Clifton Gardens, near Mosman, to the aquarium at Darling Harbour. Safe from predators in aquarium tanks, the seahorses successfully bred at scale, and in May 2020, 90 juveniles were tagged and released back into the wild.

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In March 2020, nine ‘seahorse hotels’ were installed at Clifton Gardens in preparation for the re-release of the aquarium-bred seahorses

But how to ensure that, once released, the seahorses will prosper? The absence of traditional seagrass and sponge gardens means that the seahorses struggle to find adequate shelter for mating and breeding. The team looked at various options for purpose-built habitats and in 2018 and 2019 trialled a design inspired by crab traps at Port Stephens. The wire-mesh rectangular structures were slowly overgrown by corals, sponges and algae, creating natural protection and a source of food. The habitats were constructed by the SEA LIFE Trust’s Ocean Youth, Seadragon Diving Co and the Gamay Rangers (Indigenous Sea Rangers Program) with the support of DPI’s Marine Estate Management Strategy. In March 2020, nine of these structures, affectionately called ‘seahorse hotels’, were installed at Clifton Gardens in preparation for the re-release of the aquarium-bred seahorses.

These structures are located close to the Sydney Institute of Marine Science base at Mosman to allow for ease of monitoring. Professor David Booth from UTS, says: So far the seahorse rehab project has been a fantastic way to use SEA LIFE Sydney Aquarium expertise and student research and training projects to assist the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries Fisheries in saving the endangered White’s seahorse.

It is collaborations like this seahorse rehabilitation program, where industry and researchers work together, that ensure a sustainable future for our harbour and all its inhabitants.

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Three captive-raised juveniles living on a seahorse hotel at Clifton Gardens.

1 White’s seahorse was formally described by naturalist Pieter Bleeker (1819–1878) in Over eenige visschen van Diemensland. Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen Afdeeling Natuurkunde (About some fish from Diemensland. Reports and Announcements of the Royal Academy of Sciences Department of Physics) published in 1855.

2 See ‘Submerged Secrets’ in Signals 131 (June 2020) for more information about Operation Crayweed.

A published copy of Surgeon General John White’s journal has been donated to the museum; see Signals 134 (Autumn 2021).

The author wishes to thank David Harasti, NSW Department of Primary Industries, and David Booth, University of Technology Sydney, for their input and advice.

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

War and Peace The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sea.museum/war-and-peace From the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Part of ‘War and Peace in the Pacific 75’, an Australian National Maritime Museum USA Program supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund.

Left: National Maritime Museum Collection. Purchased with USA Bicentennial Gift funds. Right: Australian War Memorial.

Proteus™ can house up to 12 inhabitants for extended periods of time and includes the first underwater greenhouse, to produce fresh food at depth

Artist’s impression of Fabien Cousteau’s Proteus™. Concept designs by Yves Béhar and fuseproject All images courtesy Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center 24

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Engineering the impossible The Proteus™ underwater habitat

Marine research is set to enter an exciting new phase with the planned installation of scientific research station Proteus™. Marketed as the underwater version of the International Space Station, it is the brainchild of Fabien Cousteau, writes Emily Jateff.

FABIEN COUSTEAU LEARNED TO DIVE when he was four years old. When he was 11, he joined his first expedition on board his grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s vessel Calypso. He has spent almost every day since engaged in increasing our connection to the ocean and fighting for its survival.

In July 2020, he made a stunning announcement.

He unveiled plans for Proteus™, a scientific research station marketed as the underwater version of the International Space Station. Concept drawings by renowned architect Yves Béhar show a massive structure – more than four times the size of any previously known submerged habitat, with state-ofthe-art research labs, sleeping quarters and a moon pool.

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During the 31-day mission on Aquarius Reef Base in 2014, Cousteau and his team performed the equivalent of three years of research in one month

01 Mark Patterson and Sara Williams probing corals at Aquarius Reef Base, 2014. Operated by Florida Atlantic University, it is currently the only permanent underwater habitat in the world. Cousteau’s 31-day mission in 2014 proved the viability of the Proteus™ project.

Photographer Christopher Marks 02 Fabien Cousteau is the grandson of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. In 2016 he founded the not-for-profit Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center, based in New York. Photographer Carrie Vonderhaar 01

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So, in 2014, Fabien Cousteau led a full lunar cycle (31-day) mission on Aquarius Reef Base, moored in 19 metres of water off Key Largo in the Florida Keys. Operated by Florida Atlantic University, Aquarius Reef Base is currently the only permanent underwater habitat in the world.

This mission proved the viability of the Proteus™ concept, as Cousteau reported:

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It can house up to 12 inhabitants for extended periods of time and includes the first underwater greenhouse, to produce fresh food at depth. Proteus™ is envisioned to be powered by a combination of wind, solar, and Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. It will include a full-scale video production facility for documentary production, live links to the surface, and education. A site has been chosen for the $135 million project, at 18 metres water depth in a protected marine reserve within the waters of Curaçao in the Southern Caribbean. Discovery and planning are underway, with the aim of having the full station installed by 2024.

Proteus™ may seem impossible, but the Cousteaus are raised to think, dream and create under water. In 1962, Jacques-Yves Cousteau initiated the Precontinent Project, a multi-year expedition using habitats Conshelf I, II and III that tested the ability to conduct scientific research under water for up to one month, as memorialised in the documentary A World Without Sun (1964).

The results of these and other expeditions have provided critical information to the Proteus™ team for incorporating into their plans for the living quarters.

Time at depth isn’t easy. Lack of sunlight results in low vitamin D. Voices are affected by circulated air, water doesn’t boil, and after a while, you can’t taste your food. Ear infections are common. Sickness can decimate an entire crew. Aquanauts can also suffer from ‘creeping crud’, a symptom of the almost constant damp that results in rashes and increased acne. After extended periods, pulmonary toxicity is a worry. Not to mention the boredom and isolation. But given the projection that Proteus™ aquanauts will be able to conduct research under water for eight to 12 hours per day, rather than the usual two to three hours on scuba, I’d still bet that most marine scientists will line up for the chance to go.

By and large up until now, scientists have been studying these things by diving down from a boat or by sending an ROV. Those offer very finite moments [of observation].

What we are able to do [on Mission 31] is not only peek through the keyhole to try and figure things out, but also open the door and stick our foot in. We got a taste of what it could be like to really spend quality time at the bottom, and study these things day after day. To get a nice long data set that’s not just a month long, but maybe a year long. That would give us a much better pulse of what’s happening to the oceans.1 During this expedition, Cousteau and his team performed three years of equivalent research in a month. It resulted in 12 published scientific studies and 9,800 scientific articles and reached more than 100,000 students via telepresence.2 To be protean – mutable, adaptable – is one of humanity’s greatest strengths. With the Bajau Laut in mind, we may still be centuries away from the physical adaptation of growing gills—but we are capable right now of feats of imagination and skill that can engineer the impossible.

We have visionaries like SpaceX to return us to the moon, and we need dreamers like Fabien Cousteau to remind us that there is another world worth exploring here on Earth, a deep ocean world that may be even more vital than space to our continued survival on this planet.

As Jacques-Yves Cousteau said, ‘The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed’. I have no doubt that Proteus™ will succeed, and in doing so, will take the next steps towards a new future for humans under water.

1 Fabien Cousteau ideas.ted.com/what-fabien-cousteau-learned-fromliving-underwater-for-31-days/ (10 October 2014).

2 See the Mission 31 YouTube channel, youtube.com/c/ Mission31Cousteau To find out more about living under the sea, please visit the museum in August for Under SEA, an event produced for VIVID Sydney which includes temporary installation of Australian Lloyd Godson’s one-person underwater habitat at the museum.

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

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A year like no other RV Falkor’s Australian discoveries

While many normal activities came to a sudden halt in 2020, one research vessel revealed the astounding underwater riches off Australia’s shores. By Dr Carlie Wiener

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Falkor’s crew made connections around Australia through 2020.

All images Schmidt Ocean Institute

THE YEAR 2020 was an era of adaptations across the world. For Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI), it held more surprises and discoveries than we could have imagined. This was the year in which SOI undertook a year-long initiative in Australia, conducting expeditions with interdisciplinary teams of scientists from partnering research institutions in Australia and around the world. In a pandemic world, Research Vessel (RV) Falkor remained one of the only such vessels to operate throughout the year, leading to many notable finds.

During our first dedicated geographic campaign, we focused on bringing life to many stories of hope and wonder from the beautiful depths of Australia’s waters. Among them were newsworthy sightings of the world’s longest sea creature, a 45-metre siphonophore; a new coral reef standing taller than the Empire State Building; more than 50 new potential species; and a rare video recording of the Ram’s Horn Squid. In a year when human interactions were restricted, these extraordinary moments, filmed by the remotely operated vessel (ROV) SuBastian, were live-streamed for public audiences, making it possible for everyone with internet connectivity to experience the hidden treasures of the deep ocean. We made connections with communities throughout Australia, sharing our findings using virtual events and our Artist-at-Sea program. Technology on Falkor allowed for our first completely remote expedition, with the science team joining virtually. Subsequent expeditions continued to connect scientists globally, providing expert input from living rooms around the world.

Astounding ROV footage unveiled gardens of glass sponges, massive gorgonia forests and coral graveyards. The collected imagery, samples and data have important implications for protecting these underwater ecosystems and will aid in future management decisions within Australia’s vast marine estate, including the Coral Sea, Gascoyne and Great Barrier Reef marine parks.

Alongside the underwater surveys, SOI’s mapping effort will help scientists better understand the Australian continent’s history, its formation, and how ecosystems have responded to climatic shifts and tectonic movement in the geologic past.

SOI’s Australian research program includes a number of specific research cruises, highlights of which are outlined below.

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The Great Australian Deep Sea Coral and Canyon Adventure

A large array of new habitats and ecosystems were documented in Australia for the first time on this voyage.

All of the data gathered during the cruise is new and reveals for the first time what occurs below the surface waters in these canyon systems. Post-cruise analysis will yield an understanding of the variables enabling these animals – like deep-sea coral and sponges – to exist in extreme environments. The analysis will also aid in the quantification of deep-ocean warming and acidification over recent and, potentially geological, time scales (centennial to millennial). Quantifying deep-ocean warming and acidification over longer time scales will provide an understanding of how deep-sea calcifiers (animals which produce a calcium carbonate shell, like coral) will likely be impacted in a high CO2 world.

By extending sampling into the deeper reaches of the Perth Canyon (4,000 metres) and resampling the fossil coral graveyards discovered in 2015, which are approximately 30,000 to 18,000 years old, collections and paleo records will be expanded within and beyond the Last Glacial Maximum period that occurred 20,000 years ago.

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Envisioning the Coral Sea Marine Park

Within Australia’s largest marine reserve – the recently established Coral Sea Marine Park – lies the Queensland Plateau, one of the world’s largest continental margin plateaus, at nearly 300,000 square kilometres.

Here, a wide variety of reef systems range from large atolls and long banks to shallow coral pinnacles.

This region is virtually unmapped. The project addresses a range of Australian government priorities in terms of mapping and characterizing a poorly known frontier area of the Australian marine estate. The seabed mapping of reefs and seamounts in the Coral Sea Marine Park is a high priority for Parks Australia, the managers of Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks. The information from this research is likely to be of great interest to the general public, who were widely consulted on the zoning and activities prior to the nearly one million-squarekilometre Coral Sea Marine Park being declared in 2017 – the largest marine park in Australia.

The new multibeam data acquired will be added to the national bathymetry database of underwater depths, hosted by Geoscience Australia and released through the AusSeabed Data Portal. More than 35,554 square kilometres were mapped and 10 new species observed.

Illuminating biodiversity of Ningaloo Canyons

Seamounts, canyons and reefs of the Coral Sea

The deep-sea expedition was focused on discovering the biodiversity of two marine canyons in Gascoyne Marine Park, off the mid-coast of Western Australia, in the eastern Indian Ocean. The main aim of the work was to better understand the biodiversity in the Cape Range and Cloates canyons. The region is known for its extensive karst system of dissolved carbonate bedrocks and a network of subterranean water bodies, which support an incredible diversity of evolutionarily significant fauna in the surface waters. The deeper waters were unexplored until this expedition. Investigating the deeper regions with ROV surveys yielded a stunning array of marine biodiversity.

The science completed during this expedition will allow the research team to formally describe many of the new species of animals that were found, develop ROV methodology for monitoring marine parks in Australia, and screen deep-water samples for environmental DNA in the Indian Ocean. The footage and specimens collected are important records within the Gascoyne Marine Park, and will aid in future management of the park.

The overarching goal of this research was to identify the influence of long-term environmental processes on the present-day characteristics and distribution of sea floor biological communities in an important but poorly known region of Australia’s marine area – the northern Great Barrier Reef and adjacent Queensland Plateau.

The combination of high-resolution sea bed mapping, ROV observations and samples provides us with robust data sets from which we can build models of habitat distributions for the Coral Sea Marine Park and canyons in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Importantly, models can be built to represent patterns across depths and geomorphic features like reefs, canyons and seamounts, which will aid in our understanding of these deep-sea habitats. The new maps, samples and images give us a fresh understanding of the geological diversity and biological wealth contained in different zones of the Coral Sea Marine Park. An ancient reef was revealed when multibeam mapping showed reef platforms submerged in hundreds of metres of water. A sample of 40–50 million-year-old mudstone was collected, upon which the reef sits. This is the first collection of its kind.

Signals 135 Winter 2021

Many of Australia’s marine habitats and ecosystems were documented for the first time on this voyage

01 Biological and geological samples will aid in our understanding of these deep canyon ecosystems.

02 Imagery was captured of a huge extent of mesophotic (deep) coral reef in the Coral Sea Marine Park, with no evidence of bleaching from recent events that impacted the Great Barrier Reef in 2020.

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Over 40,000 participants engaged virtually with SOI and Falkor during National Science Week

01 First recorded observation for Australia of an extremely rare fish, Rhinopias agroliba – located in the deeper waters of the Tregrosse Reefs (Coral Sea).

The extent of its range was thought to end in Hawaii.

02 Deep-sea coral ecosystems were explored off Western Australia.

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Northern depths of the Great Barrier Reef

Looking back, looking forward

The Cape York Peninsula lies in the far northern Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The peninsula is one of the most isolated regions of the Australian continent and, prior to this expedition, little was known about what was beneath the offshore deeper waters. Sparse information from previous mapping expeditions indicated complex deep-sea canyons, massive landslides, and seven detached mesophotic reefs rising up from 500 metres below the sea surface. Mapping revealed complex undersea bathymetry and an eighth detached reef was discovered. Subsequent ROV surveys documented thriving new reef ecosystems. For the first time, the surveys significantly expanded the ranges for multiple species and captured live footage of rare organisms. The 49-day project focused on the offshore Cape York Peninsula area through multi-beam mapping of the shelf edge and upper continental slope adjacent to the barrier reefs, and around the seven detached reefs in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Overall, the project addressed knowledge gaps for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in terms of mapping and characterising a poorly known frontier area of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

It is thought that there are millions of as yet unknown marine species whose function and contribution to the ocean, global ecosystem and human health are still to be revealed. Understanding goes hand-in-hand with technology, but we have not had the tools to enable a complete view of the ocean until very recently.

Advances in technology have allowed for ground-breaking discoveries, including new species, and behaviours like those recorded in 2020 in Australia. Falkor’s multibeam sonars uncovered exciting new sea floor features, including a massive drowned waterfall basin and a 500-metre-tall detached reef in the Great Barrier Reef – the first discovered in this area in the last 120 years.

Engaging with the public

Demonstrating commitment to transparent and open data sharing in line with the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, in 2020 SOI brought novel and critical data to the world. The scientists and crew aboard Falkor mapped more than 153,500 square kilometres of previously unmapped sea floor and shared the new data with Seabed 2030 and AusSeabed, allowing almost real-time data of the sea floor. We were also the first external customer in 2020 to install the new Google Transfer Appliance (2.0) – hardware used to securely migrate large volumes of data to the cloud.

SOI engaged with communities around the globe like never before. When Falkor arrived in Australian waters at the beginning of 2020, nearly a thousand people came to the Welcome to Country ceremony and public ship tours, in collaboration with the Australian National Maritime Museum. SOI expanded outreach into the virtual realm in response to pandemic lockdowns, presenting plentiful opportunities for engaging with audiences. Virtual presentations reached almost 200,000 people, including during Australian National Science Week, where over 40,000 participants engaged with SOI and Falkor via the Sydney Science Trail.

ROV SuBastian aided in discovering more than 50 suspected new species and recorded several known species in the wild for the first time, including the Ram’s Horn Squid and the Short-tail Catshark. Footage of what is thought to be the longest animal on Earth – a 45-metre-long siphonophore – was recorded, among other exciting finds. These included new species of coral, massive range extensions for species like the pumpkin star, and the discovery of giant hydroids in Australian waters. The achievements of SOI and the scientists who joined us from institutions in Australia, Japan, Italy, and the United States made more than 50 top scientific discovery lists for 2020, including in National Geographic and Smithsonian Magazine.

In 2021, RV Falkor bids farewell to Australia, headed back to its home port in Hawaii. Data and specimens collected during the SOI 2020 initiative will feed Australian oceans research for years to come.

In short, it’s been a year like no other.

Luckily, this isn’t the last you’ll see of these fantastic discoveries.

SOI has partnered with the Australian National Maritime Museum on our upcoming exhibition One Ocean–Our Future. In this exhibition visitors will experience large-format, ultra-high resolution video footage and interactive displays of some of the most amazing animals and natural features found during SOI’s Australian adventure.

One Ocean–Our Future opens in August 2021.

SOI 2020 research voyages included a number of Australian and international partners, including University of Grenada, James Cook University, Queensland University of Technology, University of Queensland, Queensland Museum, Museum of Tropical Queensland, University of Sydney, Macquarie University, University of Wollongong, University of Tasmania, Curtin University, University of Western Australia, Western Australian Museum and the Foundation for the Western Australian Museum, Geraldton Senior High School, CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, Parks Australia, Biopixel, Coral Sea Foundation, JAMSTEC, Marine Biodiversity Hub, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Instituto di Scienze Polari and Instituto di Scienze Marine. This article is adapted from the Schmidt Ocean Institute 2020 Annual Report.

Dr Carlie Wiener is the Director of Communications and Engagement Strategy at Schmidt Ocean Institute.

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A first step What does success look like for Australia’s ocean stakeholders?

Australians have a deep connection to the ocean.

As an island nation on the blue planet, it is no surprise that there are hundreds of organisations, institutions, communities and individuals invested in using, valuing, managing and governing the ocean.

We work and play, explore and enjoy our ocean.

Our lives are interconnected with its ubiquitous influence, write Cay-Leigh Bartnicke and Emily Jateff.

Australian stakeholders in the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development met at the museum in March 2021.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM 34

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The museum is proud to partner with Ocean Decade Australia to support collaborative engagement and decision-making

IN MARCH, the museum hosted the first Australian stakeholders’ meeting for the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021–2030, in collaboration with Ocean Decade Australia. The event consisted of two separate panels. The first comprised an overview of the project’s issues with Karen Evans (CSIRO) and Kim Picard (Geoscience Australia) in conversation with Jas Chambers. The second event entailed a panel with key stakeholders across industry, government and private institutions.

Jas, Karen and Kim are the brains behind Ocean Decade Australia, a collaborative volunteer initiative that recognises that Australia’s ocean stakeholders are diverse – we come from every sector and industry and we interact with the ocean in multiple ways.

The museum is proud to partner with Ocean Decade Australia on events like this stakeholder meeting to support collaborative engagement and decision-making across all sectors.

The second round of panellists spoke of the speed at which change needs to come. These high-level and knowledgeable operators included Veronica Papacosta, CEO of Seafood Industry Agency; Miranda Taylor, CEO of Energy Resources Australia; Sue Barrell, Vice President of Science and Technology Australia; Tony Worby, CEO of the Flourishing Oceans initiative – Mindaroo Foundation; Amy Low, Brand and Marketing Director for fashion house Piping Hot; and Blair Palese, Global Climate Editor for Climate and Capital Media.

Encouragingly, while acknowledging the considerable work that needs to be done, these industry leaders unanimously wanted to promote the urgency of enacting change and of moving forward with evidence-based discussions. With many different interests represented, panellists stayed on topic and views were discussed fairly by regularly referencing science-informed strategies.

The conversation returned again and again to the idea that we need a dramatic transformation to occur as a societal and economic overhaul rather than a comfortable progression forward. We can no longer afford to be comfortable.

The temperature of the ocean is ramping up. This year, the environmental issues we are experiencing globally are the result of choices made years or even decades ago due to a system called ‘feedback’. Even with today’s increased shipping, manufacturing, air travel and unsustainable fishing we are not yet directly experiencing the fallout from our own choices – but our children may.

In line with the 2020 Paris Agreement, countries are not required to submit reports on environmental progress until 2024 – including initiatives for the ocean. By the time reports are assessed and feedback handed out, we will likely be half-way into the Ocean Decade. This only gives nations five years to act on feedback from the first round before the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development is complete. Time is of the essence, and we all need to do our part.

Representation is a hot-button topic and that is where the next phase of this journey will be heading for Ocean Decade Australia. In this first meeting, representatives of government and industry groups provided background on their role in contributing to a broad understanding of Ocean Decade-related international objectives for a clean, predictable, transparent, sustainable, healthy and safe ocean (for more on UN Decade objectives see Emily Jateff’s article in Signals 133, or oceandecade.org/).

The second Ocean Decade Australia stakeholders’ meeting will include more representation from youth, grassroots and community leaders. This is an exciting expansion to the future of these discussions.

Being face-to-face for this meeting was also in itself an achievement, after an extended quiet period of Zoom calls and digital mingling. Organisers Jas Chambers, Kim Picard and Karen Evans estimate the audience numbers at well over 350 from across numerous fields, including energy, finance, primary industries, education, research, fashion, communications and the creative sector.

The meeting was recorded and is available on the Ocean Decade Australia website: oceandecadeaustralia.org/ Time moves quickly; people move slowly. But with a successful first Ocean Decade Australia stakeholders’ meeting under our belts, we are off to a great start.

The museum would like to thank Jas Chambers for her input and advice.

Cay-Leigh Bartnicke is the museum’s Assistant Curator for Special Projects and Emily Jateff is Curator of Ocean Science and Technology.

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The greatest voyage in maritime history Magellan, Elcano and the first global circumnavigation

The last two months of their journey must have been a nightmare, for Victoria was little more than a floating wreck and its crew the living dead

The route of the first circumnavigation of the world, Battista Agnese, c 1544. Image courtesy Library of Congress

There is no doubt that the greatest voyage in maritime history is the first circumnavigation of the world by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian de Elcano in the Spanish ship Victoria.

This voyage was completed almost 500 years ago and lasted three years, from when they left the Castilian port of San Lucar de Barrameda on 10 August 1519 until their return on 6 September 1522. Ian Burnet traces this expedition that changed our understanding of the globe.

AFTER CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS reached the Americas, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal bisected the world along a line of demarcation in the Atlantic Ocean halfway between the Portuguese-claimed islands of Azores and the island of Hispaniola reached by Columbus. The two Iberian powers had conveniently divided the world in half and the treaty allowed Spain to claim any territory discovered to the west of this line and Portugal any territory discovered to the east.

In the 15th century the aromatic spices of cloves and nutmeg, grown only in the remote Spice Islands of present-day Indonesia were, after they reached Europe, said to be worth their weight in gold and counted as some of the most valuable of traded commodities.

The Portuguese and the Spanish were now in a race to reach the Spice Islands and to claim them for themselves, by sailing in opposite directions around the world and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans respectively – even though neither of them could accurately measure longitude or knew in whose supposed half of the world the Spice Islands were actually located.

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Magellan’s Armada de Moluccas

Understanding of the world’s geography had changed since Columbus first reached the Americas in 1492.

The Spanish explorer Vasco Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and seen the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean laid out before him. Furthermore, in 1515 a Spanish expedition commanded by Juan Diaz de Solis had explored down the South American coast, reaching as far south as the entrance to the Rio de la Plata between Uruguay and Argentina. They returned believing this could be the entrance of a western passage to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1519 five vessels departed Spain seeking a route around South America to the Pacific Ocean. The five ships, Trinidad, Victoria, San Antonio, Concepción and Santiago, all painted black and crewed by 237 men under the command of Ferdinand Magellan, left San Lucar de Barrameda on 10 August 1519 heading into the South Atlantic. Their purpose was to find a western route to the Spice Islands of Eastern Indonesia, which were the world’s only source of cloves and nutmeg.

By March 1520, the Armada de Moluccas had reached 49 degrees south, the days were getting shorter, the temperatures colder and the storms more ferocious, so to continue would have put the whole expedition at risk. Magellan decided it would be prudent to winter in a sheltered Argentinian bay he named Port St Julian.

In August 1520, after more than five months of winter, the ships of the Armada de Molucca resumed their voyage south, and after only three days sailing reached a small inlet leading into a series of westward-trending bays.

Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India in 1497. The Portuguese captured Goa in 1509 and then Malacca in 1511, before following the traditional Malay trade routes to the Spice Islands in 1512. This Portuguese map, pictured above, from the Atlas Miller shows the Atlantic and Indian Oceans bounded by land and depicts the known world before the departure of Ferdinand Magellan and his Armada de Moluccas in 1519.

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The Portuguese and the Spanish were now in a race to reach the Spice Islands

01 Map of the known world from the Atlas Miller, Lopo Homen, 1519.

Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France 02 Map of the Pacific Ocean showing the Spice Islands, Battista Agnese, c.1544.

Image courtesy Library of Congress

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Subsequently named the Straits of Magellan, this series of interlinking waterways extend for 660 kilometres between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.

By the time the armada entered the Pacific Ocean, Santiago had been lost to shipwreck and San Antonio had turned back to Spain. Not knowing the size of the Pacific, Magellan believed it could be crossed in one month, a time similar to the crossing of the Atlantic

by Christopher Columbus. In fact it took Trinidad, Victoria and Concepción three months to cross the Pacific and many of the crew had died from scurvy by the time they reached the Philippines in April 1520.

Their time in the Philippines was a disaster because Magellan and eight of his crew were killed when he tried to establish his authority over a chief on the island of Mactan, then 27 crew members were killed in a massacre on Cebu and they were forced to scuttle one of their ships. Without Magellan’s determined leadership the two remaining ships, Victoria and Trinidad, took until November 1521 to finally reach the clove island of Tidore.

After a month of recuperation and the loading of spices, the ships and their precious cargo were ready to leave for Spain, with João Lopez Carvalho in command of Trinidad and Juan Sebastian de Elcano in command of Victoria. As they moved out from the harbour, Trinidad began taking on water and the flagship of the Armada was on the verge of sinking. It had fallen into a state of disrepair through sheer neglect and would need extensive repairs. The northerly monsoon had begun and the two captains decided that Victoria should immediately depart westwards for the Cape of Good Hope and that after repairs Trinidad would attempt to sail eastwards back across the Pacific to the port of Darien in Panama.

The two ships would now be alone on the high seas with no mutual support in case of shipwreck, encounters with the Portuguese or just the failure of their worm-ridden vessels. The decision by the two captains to return separately and in opposite directions meant their chances of ever returning to Spain had gone from little to almost none, and Trinidad only made it as far as the Philippines.

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In the 15th century the aromatic spices of cloves and nutmeg were some of the most valuable of traded commodities 01 A very early Portuguese depiction of the Moluccan clove islands, with Tidore (where Elcano landed in the sole surviving ship of the Magellan expedition) second from the left.

Note the simplified depiction of clove plantations up the sides of the exaggerated volcanic cones.

Image courtesy Jeffrey Mellefont 02 View from Ternate showing the islands of Maitara in the centre and Tidore in the background.

The site of Elcano’s landing is visible on the distant shoreline at the left.

Image courtesy Jeffrey Mellefont

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The two ships would now be alone on the high seas with no mutual support in case of shipwreck The last two months of their journey must have been a nightmare, for Victoria was little more than a floating wreck and its crew the living dead. The survivors were forced to man the pumps 24 hours a day to keep the vessel afloat. Working the sails to keep the ship on course drained the rest of their energy, and three more men died of hunger and fatigue. It is impossible to describe how they must have felt as they approached Spain, for all would have despaired many times during their voyage around the world of ever sighting their homeland again. History has described their return as triumphant, but the condition of Victoria and its wretched crew must have been a pitiful sight.

A floating wreck and the living dead

Victoria sailed from Tidore on 21 December 1521 with 60 crew on board. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope against the prevailing winds was an ordeal: a fierce storm brought down their foremast and the voyage took them seven weeks of constant struggle with gigantic waves that threatened to sink their leaking and worm-ridden ship. Back in the Atlantic, Victoria sailed a north-westerly course for two months, until in June 1522 they crossed the equator. With their food supplies already consumed, the effects of scurvy were inevitable and within the space of these two months, 21 of the crew died.

With nothing left to eat and with the weak and exhausted crew dying around him, Elcano took the risk of putting Victoria into the port of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands. This was Portuguese territory and they had to invent a story that they were a stormbattered Spanish cargo ship seeking refuge.

Elcano sent some of the crew ashore in a longboat to obtain desperately needed food and water. The Spanish only had cloves to trade for food and the Portuguese authorities soon became suspicious of the true nature of their voyage. While making a second trip ashore in the longboat, 13 of the crew were detained by the Portuguese. Fearing they would soon all be arrested, Elcano hurriedly weighed anchor and set sail for Spain with only 21 men remaining on board.

Of the five ships and 237 men of the Armada de Molucca that departed from San Lucar de Barrameda three years earlier, Victoria and its 18 survivors had achieved the greatest voyage in maritime history – the first circumnavigation of the globe – and the maps of the world were to change forever. These thin and ragged sailors had measured the true dimensions of our planet and turned the concept of a spherical earth by the Greek astronomers, such as Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, into a hard-won reality. The skill of their captain Juan Sebastian de Elcano had brought them home, but they would have wished that Magellan were still with them, for without his vision and determination Victoria would never have found the Straits of Magellan nor crossed the Pacific Ocean.

Juan Sebastian de Elcano was exalted as a returning hero. The King of Spain rewarded him with the promise of an annual pension of 500 ducats and granted him a coat of arms displaying two crossed cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs and 12 clove buds. But Elcano’s triumph would fade into history. Sadly today, there are many who think that Magellan was the first ship’s captain to circumnavigate the world.

More details of this voyage can be found in Ian Burnet’s book Spice Islands (Rosenberg Publishing, 2011)

Ian Burnet has spent 30 years, living, working and travelling in Indonesia. His fascination with the diverse history and culture of the archipelago is reflected in his books on Indonesia and maritime history: Spice Islands, East Indies, Archipelago – A Journey Across Indonesia, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map and his latest work, Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages.

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An Englishman goes Makassan G E P ‘Pat’ Collins 1904–1991

Whatever happened to this Oxford drop-out after he ran away to the East, found love and a passion for ‘native’ sailing, became a best-selling author and built his dream boat – a Makassan prahu?

Museum honorary research associate Jeffrey Mellefont pieces together a forgotten life.

THE MAKASSANS OF THE INDONESIAN ISLAND called Sulawesi are of special interest in the study of Australia’s pre-colonial contact history. They were a ship-building, seafaring and trading people who had centuries-old, commercial and cultural relations with Aboriginal societies during annual fishing voyages to Australia’s northern coasts. Their chief catch was trepang, edible sea slugs that abounded in the shallows of Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. Starting long before British settlement, Makassans dried and smoked the trepang on Australian beaches, sailed home on the monsoon winds and traded them on to China where they were a prized delicacy believed also to be an aphrodisiac.

This story of cooperation between Indigenous communities and seafarers from the Indonesian archipelago is the first that visitors encounter in the museum’s exhibition Under Southern Skies.1 When I first began researching Indonesia’s diverse, unique but little-recorded maritime traditions, 40 years ago, information was hard to come by.

But in the State Library of New South Wales I encountered two remarkable books published in the 1930s about the Makassan clans of South Sulawesi and their distinctive sail-trading craft, or prahus.

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East Monsoon (1936)2 and Makassar Sailing (1937)3 were written by a young English adventurer who had lived and sailed with the fierce Makassans of the remote and arid south-western peninsula of Sulawesi – the island widely known as the Celebes during colonial times, when the Dutch ruled the East Indies.

In East Monsoon the author, George Ernest Patrick Collins, relates his experiences voyaging as a guest on a Sulawesi trading prahu called a palari pinisi in the Makassan language. He relishes the utterly spartan life under sail with no engine, no safety or navigational equipment and no comforts, living on rice and dried fish cooked in a kerosene tin over a wood fire. The book introduces the Makassans’ seamanship and Muslim culture as Collins negotiates to have them build him a palari pinisi of his own.

The subsequent volume, Makassar Sailing, details life in this traditional Islamic boat-building society: its stories and folklore; religion, magic and superstition; piracy, warfare and conflict. It’s a district where Dutch colonial authority scarcely extends. We read of Collins’s trials there, dealing with malaria and dysentery epidemics, plus with wily, sometimes cheating and uncooperative, boat-builders. He records the communal ceremonies of building and launching prahus and the ancient, pre-Islamic spells and rituals that were essential for a ship’s welfare.

The 1930s fleet of trading palari pinisi running under dry-season skies.

Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections

These were shipwrights who had never seen a plan, sculpting their prahus by eye to proportions based on the human body

Collins was a superb photographer, capturing the essence of these Muslim sailors and their seamanship

This was a time when the English-speaking world knew little about the many diverse cultures of the Netherlands East Indies beyond Java, and next to nothing about maritime Makassans. Such information, where it existed at all, was in Dutch-language field reports and journals. Collins, a sympathetic and involved observer of his Makassan hosts, was a keen amateur ethnographer. As well, he was a superb photographer, capturing the essence of these people, their seamanship and the timeless cycles of their seasonal, monsoon-wind trading voyages.

For a long time, these two handsome, richly illustrated hardcover books were the only detailed, English-language studies of this maritime culture that once played a significant role in Australian history.4 Makassar Sailing includes Collins’s own design drawings of the local trading boat that he ordered, with the yacht-like coach house he added for improved accommodation. These were shipwrights who had never seen a plan, sculpting their prahus by eye to proportions based on the human body. At last his boat was launched, costing a total of 590 Guilders or £80 fully rigged – a bargain price, in his era, for a ‘yacht’ 53 feet (16.2 metres) overall length and built of solid teak. He called it Bintang, which means ‘star’.5 But the two-book series ends with that launching, so that generations of readers and researchers have wondered whatever became of Collins and Bintang.

They disappeared from sight. Why nothing more about his voyages from this prolific writer? Did misadventure befall his ship?

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Library catalogues revealed one earlier book by Collins, a novel published in 1934 called Twin Flower: a Story of Bali.6 It’s more of a rambling travelogue than a novel, with its long expositions of Balinese village life and customs. Curiously, it’s illustrated by many of Collins’ accomplished, National Geographic-style photos, some of which depict its supposedly fictional Balinese characters.

This leads readers to suspect that it is autobiographical ... but where did the fiction end and real life start?

The book’s protagonist, an Englishman called Garland, declares himself from the first page to be one of those outcast colonialists who rejects the conventions and racial prejudices of his fellows and is happy to ‘go native’.

We first meet him in Singapore, about to embark for Bali on board a cockroach-infested Sulawesi sail-trading prahu whose nakhoda (captain) is an old friend.

In Bali, Garland mixes with both simple fishermen and aristocrats of the north-eastern kingdom of Karangasem, while learning how to sail the fishermen’s jukung – the lateen-sail, outrigger fishing dugouts that can still be found there today, 90 years later. The tide-ripped waters of the strait between Bali and the neighbouring island Lombok are his training ground.

The peculiarities of English culture are contrasted with Balinese traditions in lengthy dialogues between Garland and his native friends (speaking together in the East Indies traders’ and sailors’ language, Malay). Just when the ‘novel’ seems close to ending, still searching for a plot, it introduces a sensational cross-cultural affair between Garland and a young Balinese girl called Mas (‘Gold’). This would have been confronting for many English readers of the period ... as would Collins’s photo of Mas, showing her topless.

01 At sea on the trading palari pinisi Mula-Mulai Muslim seafarers can perform their obligatory daily prayers anywhere, kneeling in the approximate direction of Mecca.

Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections 02 A study in Makassan seamanship; backing the mizzen to help push the bows through the wind while tacking.

G E P Collins photograph published in East Monsoon 1936

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03 Galley in a kerosene tin, the cook blowing the wood fire embers.

Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections

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Generations of readers and researchers have wondered whatever became of Collins and Bintang

01 G E P Collins’s cruising ‘yacht’ Bintang was based on the seven-sail Makassan palari pinisi trading ketch, with some minimal accommodations added.

Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections 02 Collins’s Makassan crew toast their voyage. They feature individually, by name and nature, in Komodo: Dragon Island: centre, wearing the hat, is boatswain and chief steward Hoedoe. Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections 01

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Mas is an outcast too, banished from a royal Balinese family since she has a twin brother. In many Indonesian societies such a birth is feared as an incestuous disaster, threatening the natural order of things. Exiled into a Lombok fishing community, Mas is also a skilled jukung sailor. Garland woos her afloat and they have a sailing honeymoon round Lombok’s gorgeous coastline.

It doesn’t end well, with a sudden, shocking, tragic fate for Mas and her royal twin brother Rai. Garland gets off quite lightly and shrugs it all off as native adat, or custom.

The timing of Twin Flower, published in 1934, was perfect.

A craze for exotic, bare-breasted Bali, the ‘Island of the Gods’, was stirred in the 1920s–30s by a series of celebrity visitors including anthropologist Margaret Mead, actor Charlie Chaplin, and some high-profile film-makers, artists and musicians. The novel sold very well and helped to finance Collins’s Makassan prahu-building venture in Sulawesi – as well as boosting sales of East Monsoon and Makassar Sailing when they appeared soon after.

Twin Flower threw some light on Collins’s previous East Indies travels and his intense interests in local people and their sailing traditions – quite unusual in the colonial context where ‘natives’ and their activities were generally considered inferior. But the fate of the man and his Makassan prahu Bintang remained a mystery.

Until an email from Belgium crossed my desk at the Australian National Maritime Museum some 70 years later.

The letter was from a Dutchman called Rudi van Reijsen, who said he was Collins’s nephew. He had inherited all his late uncle’s archives, which included a manuscript written by Collins in the late 1930s about his voyages on Bintang, as well as many unpublished photographs. In 2003 Mr van Reijsen self-published the posthumous manuscript, with a selection of photographs, in a limited, 330-page paperback edition of 100 copies. Its title was Komodo: Dragon Island.7 He contacted our museum to ask if we wished to buy a copy and you can imagine how quickly I ordered some.

Van Reijsen’s uncle, it transpires, had hired a crew of six Makassans and sailed Bintang to the islands of the Komodo dragon. The crew included a cook and enough hands to man the oars, his engineless prahu’s only auxiliary power if the wind failed or currents were contrary in these difficult, reef-strewn waters.

Collins had initially aimed for the Moluccas further to the east: the original Spice Islands, source of the precious cloves and nutmeg that had first lured Europeans to the Indies. But the famed wind of his earlier book title, the East Monsoon, was blowing hard and it forced them south to Sumbawa, hundreds of kilometres across the Flores Sea. With difficulty they reached the island of Komodo where the eponymous dragons lived.

There Collins spent six months studying and photographing Varanus komodoensis (called ‘ora’ in the local language), with the same passionate curiosity that he had applied to his Makassan hosts in Sulawesi.

The large carnivores were little-known at that time, and Collins disproved some wildly inaccurate published reports that the dragons were seven metres long and ran on their hind legs like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Nonetheless they grew to nearly four metres and could prey on careless villagers as well as their usual diet of wild pigs and deer. Collins used the rotting carcases of chickens and goats to lure the dragons within camera range.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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G E P ‘Pat’ Collins was an unusual enthusiast for the sailing traditions, cultures and people of the East Indies

Living on Bintang and mixing with local Bajau seagypsies, and Manggarai hunters from the nearby large island of Flores, he explored the Komodo archipelago with his customary relish. The harsh life and poor nutrition he endured in this remote, dry, rugged ‘paradise’ led to illness and infection that put him in hospital in the Dutch regional outpost of Ruteng, Flores, in 1937. There he met a Warner Brothers team hoping to film this ‘lost world of prehistoric creatures’, and he ferried them to Komodo on Bintang.

Komodo: Dragon Island paints an unvarnished picture of Collins. He was a lively writer but one who had benefited greatly from the highly professional editors of his London and New York publishers in the 1930s.

The manuscript finally published by his nephew is unedited, preserving all the idiosyncrasies and excesses of its often quixotic author.

In a foreword, nephew Rudi van Reijsen wrote a brief biography of the man he called his ‘favourite uncle’.

It answered many of the questions about Collins’s life that I had harboured for decades. In 2016 I was able to visit the elderly Mr van Reijsen at his home in Brussels, to find out even more about his uncle.

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George Ernest Patrick Collins was born in India on 17 April 1904, but was sent to England as an infant and brought up by a relative. In an introduction to his final book, ‘Pat’ (as he called himself) describes a childhood obsession with ancient ships and the tropics: Caravels off palm-fringed shores, in a picture book given to me on my fourth birthday, made me want one of those old sailing ships … When I read about ancient Greek, Roman and Carthaginian ships they displaced the caravels. The tropical attraction grew stronger as I learned about Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago.

Collins read Greek, Latin and Ancient History at Wadham College, Oxford, in 1923–26, but perhaps distracted by his obsessions he failed his final exams, so he couldn’t get a foreign service job. Instead he joined the Blue Funnel Shipping Company and was posted to Penang and Singapore as a shipping agent.

He learned to speak Malay, met South Sulawesi sailors trading to Singapore and fell in love with their prahus, which had double side-rudders like ancient Greco-Roman ships and high sterns like old Portuguese caravels.

01 The autobiographical novel Twin Flower: A story of Bali (1934) has photographs of its supposedly ‘fictional’ characters including this one of the protagonist’s romantic interest, the Balinese exile Mas. Image G E P Collins

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In 1929 he resigned his desk job and took passage from Singapore to Bali on a Makassan-built trading ketch or palari pinisi, just like Garland in the ‘novel’ Twin Flower that followed. Whether Collins actually had an affair with the Balinese girl in the book’s photo, his nephew Rudi van Reijsen couldn’t tell me. He did explain that after the Komodo adventure, his Uncle Pat had sailed Bintang back to the port of Makassar and laid the vessel up on a beach.

02 Pat Collins and his wife Lida van Reijsen in the USA in the 1940s.

Photographer unknown

After the war Collins didn’t return to the East Indies, which was briefly re-occupied by the Dutch until international recognition of Indonesian independence in 1949. He had received news about Bintang from the Dutch harbourmaster of Makassar, who wrote: ‘... on account of bombing and machine gunning [during Allied air strikes], the hull of the vessel is a total loss and not worth repairing’.

In 1940 Collins married a Dutch airline employee, Lida van Reijsen, in Batavia (Jakarta) where he found work in the British Consul-General’s information bureau.

In February 1942 the couple barely escaped the invading Japanese with their lives, as evacuating ships were bombed. They reached the United States via Australia and New Zealand. As an expert on the East Indies, Collins worked for the US Offices of War Information and Strategic Services, aiding Allied plans to retake the islands.

It seems likely that World War II and subsequent post-colonial conflicts were the reason why this prolific writer’s Komodo: Dragon Island went unpublished during his lifetime. His London publisher probably received the manuscript about the time that war with Hitler was declared. After the war, Indonesian struggles against the Dutch and the turmoil of Indonesia’s early decades of independence made the story of a young English vagabond’s curious adventures in a pre-war Dutch colony somewhat dated or irrelevant.

In wartime USA, Collins lectured about his Indonesian experiences. An article he wrote for the January 1945 edition of National Geographic, called ‘Seafarers of South Celebes’, earned him a tidy US$500 – several times more than he had spent on building and crewing his prahu Bintang.

Collins had a post-war career in various United Nations agencies, becoming an expert on aquaculture for developing countries. He and his wife Lida had no children, retiring to Florida, where Collins died in 1991 at the age of 87. His widow, the youngest sister of Rudi van Reijsen’s father, died in 2000.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Collins spent six months studying and photographing Komodo dragons Varanus komodoensis with passionate curiosity

Baits of rotting carcases lured Komodo dragons into camera range.

Previously unpublished G E P Collins photograph, Leiden University Library special collections

G E P ‘Pat’ Collins was an unusual, quirky ‘colonial’ for his time, an enthusiast for the sailing traditions, cultures and islands of what we now call Indonesia – then the East Indies or Malay Archipelago. He’s been something of an inspiration to me, in that respect.

I have often visited the boat-building beaches of South Sulawesi where Collins’s prahu Bintang was made, including on several Australian National Maritime Museum tours where I introduced Members to the Makassans.8 Their shipwright traditions are still thriving, hand-building prahus of solid teak or ironwood beneath the coconut palms. Indeed, much larger, modernised, motorised versions of Collins’s palari pinisi are built there today as tourist charter or dive boats.

It was my good fortune to meet Rudi van Reijsen just a few years before he died, aged 91. I was eager to see what other unpublished Collins photographs there might be; some of them appear here, for the first time.

Not long before my visit, Mr van Reijsen had donated Collins’s entire archive – negatives, prints, manuscripts, field notes and correspondence – to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, a noted research centre for Dutch colonial history and Indonesian ethnography.

Fortunately for me he had kept digital scans of the photographs, which he shared with me.

The archive will become a rich record of pre-war maritime Indonesia when, in due course, it has been catalogued by the University of Leiden and made available to researchers.

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1 Makassans as well as Bugis, Butonese, Mandar and Bajau (Sea-Gypsy) people took part, trading trepang through the major Sulawesi seaport Makassar. These related seafarers, all from Sulawesi, are grouped under the Anglicised term ‘Macassans’ in the seminal study, The Voyage to Marege by Campbell MacKnight, 1976 Melbourne University Press.

2 G E P Collins, East Monsoon, 1936 Jonathan Cape, London; 1937 Charles Scribner Sons, New York. All the Collins books are available in the museum’s Vaughan Evans Library.

3 G E P Collins, Makassar Sailing, 1937 Jonathan Cape, London; 1992 Oxford University Press, Singapore 4 Annual Makassan fishing voyages to Australia were banned

by Australian customs and immigration officials in 1906.

Collins would have met living veterans of these voyages, 30 years later.

5 Collins’s prahu was based on the principal Makassan trading ship of the 20th century, with its Dutch-style gaff rig. A model of their earlier ships, which had no such Western influence, appears in the exhibition Under Southern Skies. See the author’s essay on the evolution of Makassan prahus at sea.museum/2018/01/24/unesco-heritage-lists-indonesianwooden-boat-building/ 6 G E P Collins, Twin Flower: a Story of Bali, 1934 Jonathan Cape, London; 1992 Oxford University Press, Singapore 7 G E P Collins, Komodo: Dragon Island, 2003 Editions Clepsydre, Brussels: limited edition of 100 8 See Jeffrey Mellefont, ‘Members in Makassar’, Signals No. 108 September–November 2014 pp16–21

Jeffrey Mellefont was the founding editor of Signals 1989–2013. In retirement he continues to research, write and lecture on the history and seafaring traditions of Australia’s archipelagic neighbour, Indonesia.

Wreck Seeker Can you unlock the secrets of Australia’s most prized shipwrecks?

Play now sea.museum/wreckseeker

Well-designed games can engage players not only with content, but also skill development and empathy building

Wreck Seeker New educational game uncovers underwater mysteries

A crashed World War II Bristol Beaufort bomber is just one of six underwater sites to explore in Wreck Seeker. ANMM image

The museum is a leader in producing educational video games for students. Peter Tattersall profiles its latest game, Wreck Seeker, which allows students to research and explore shipwrecks.

THE MUSEUM RECENTLY LAUNCHED WRECK SEEKER, a new online game developed for classrooms across the country. In it players will research, hunt for and explore the final resting places of six semi-fictionalised wrecks from Australian and international waters.

Wreck Seeker, developed over three years, is a gamified learning platform with a direct focus on helping teachers to explain, develop and refine student historical skills explored in the Australian curriculum. Using the backdrop of wrecks from the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, players will speak to historians, eyewitnesses, local fishers and other subject experts before deciding which sources offer the most reliable information. They will then overlay this research onto a map before diving, in 3D, on six beautifully re-created underwater environments.

Important tools for the classroom

It is now well established that gamified learning experiences can provide meaningful educational outcomes. This is as true for K–12 education as it is for tertiary, vocational and workplace learners.

Perhaps more interesting is the role that well-designed games can play in engaging players not only with content, but also skill development and empathy building.

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Unique to video games is the capacity to transport players into powerful scenarios while giving them agency to interact in these spaces and deal, in a realistic way, with the consequences of their actions.

Further, such games allow players to replay scenarios a number of times and refine their reactions and skills to reach a desired outcome.

A side-effect of the remote learning practices forced upon us during COVID-19 has been a growing comfort with digital learning technologies from both teachers and students. At the museum we have seen this play out in the skyrocketing popularity of our online games and resources over the past 12 months.

An exciting challenge

As we are a maritime nation, shipwrecks hold a special place in the minds of Australians. Further, due to the complexity of uncovering what lies beneath the surface of our oceans and seas, mystery persists. Given these factors, the topic is fertile ground for a video game.

The development of Wreck Seeker follows that of two existing successful games (The Voyage and Cook’s Voyages) and five years of game development experience.

Despite this formidable background, the development of Wreck Seeker has proved the most challenging to date.

Pandemic disruptions aside, this has largely been due to the complex nature of the gameplay, and particularly the stunning detail in which the 3D environments have been rendered.

Despite these challenges, the drive to build a game that explored the world of maritime archaeology never faded. One reason for this was put best by the game development team: There’s a constant set of dilemmas that maritime archaeologists are faced with and a constant stream of decisions they have to make. As such it’s actually the perfect subject for a game.

To ensure an appropriate level of accuracy and attention to detail, the development included an extensive process of consultation and review with our maritime archaeology team. This included recorded interviews and feedback loops during the development process – a degree of access to this level of technical and professional knowledge and expertise that is not possible in almost any other workplace. The research also drew on the museum’s Vaughan Evans Library.

Education resources for every Australian student

The museum is extremely excited by the prospect of making Wreck Seeker available to classrooms across the country. The choice to focus on gamified learning experiences is a considered an important one for the museum, reflecting the evolving nature of classroom learning in Australia. With three completed games, the museum is a global leader in this field among cultural institutions. Investment in online games has allowed the museum to reach students across the country (and the world) and has been a major contributor to the impressive growth of educational outreach from 65,000 to more than 400,000 visitors in a four-year period.

Where to from here? We’re always looking for ideas to inspire students and take them on a journey of discovery!

Peter Tattersall is a former high school teacher and now the museum’s Head of Learning.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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‘I was proud of myself when I felt success as a haenyeo’

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Haenyeo Joungja Hyun at work, 2017.

Photographer Hyungsun Kim

Haenyeo divers of South Korea History surfaces in an international education collaboration

In March the museum launched a powerful exhibition about the haenyeo free divers of South Korea. An accompanying international education program has revealed personal links and extended our understanding of this ancient cultural practice.

By Daina Fletcher and Rita Kusevskis-Hayes.

HAENYEO: THE SEA WOMEN OF JEJU ISLAND is a photographic exhibition featuring life-size portraits of female free divers by Korean artist Hyungsun Kim (see article in Signals 134, March 2021). It forms part of a program of international collaborations run by the museum to promote and strengthen cultural links across the world’s oceans in stories about sea-based cultures.

While the exhibition was being installed, our education team was delivering a series of virtual cultural and language exchange programs in the Republic of South Korea, in partnership with the Asia ConneXions team at the University of New England (UNE). The program connects Australian classrooms, including the museum’s, with schools primarily in South Korea and also in Japan, China and Indonesia. The museum’s collaboration with UNE was established five years ago, with a handful of virtual programs being presented twice a year.

The opportunity for high school students to connect with the museum on an international level became even more important during 2020, when schools and museums across the world were in COVID-19 lockdown.

In 2021 there are 30 Australian schools connecting with South Korean schools for classes about Australian and Korean culture. So far this year, some 120 students from years 9 to 12 have been involved in virtual sessions with the museum’s Education team. Of particular note has been the involvement of Jeju Jungang Girls High School on the island of Jeju, where the haenyeo divers work.

This school participated in a class focusing on Indigenous history and the impact of James Cook and the British First Fleet, during which student Jihye Yang revealed that her great-grandmother had been a haenyeo.

This led to questions of place and identity, and with the permission of the school, Ms Jihye conducted and translated an interview with Joungja Hyun, aged 78.

Ms Joungja, from Biyangdo island, Jeju Province, was one of her great-grandmother’s fellow haenyeo.

The results of her interview provide a first-hand account of the experiences of these remarkable women divers, unlocking stories behind the portraits by Hyungsun Kim in the exhibition.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Jihye Yang: When do you and your friends (haenyeo) usually dive? Do you have any particular time to dive?

Joungja Hyun: There is no particular time for us to dive into the sea. We usually go into the sea at low tide or when the sea is calm. We come out from the sea when we feel too cold or feel the physical limitation.

Season doesn’t affect our routine to dive. We dive almost every day.

I was proud of myself when I felt success as a haenyeo.

I felt proud of myself when I harvested the biggest one or the most products among friends. When I was young, we competed [with] each other to catch the most. It is a happy memory.

What motivated you to be a haenyeo?

From whom did you learn to dive?

What is the most danger for haenyeo?

How do you manage the risk?

I had no right to choose it. As a matter of fact, we, most of the woman divers at that time, did not have any choice. We did not have TVs or any particular toys to play with. The closest playground was the sea. I swam and played with my friends at the sea. Most of my memories of my childhood are related to the sea.

I got to become a haenyeo for no apparent reason.

At my childhood, most girls should earn money to support their families, so they had to dive and became a haenyeo.

Sudden high waves or typhoon is the most dangerous.

I think almost all haenyeo are afraid of sudden changes of the sea. Even if we try really hard to get out of the sea, only to fail. Sometimes we happened to be swept away to the distant sea by high waves. Now we wear diving suit, but when I was younger, there was no diving suit. We dived wearing ordinary clothes. It was too cold in winter, and we shivered with cold and felt our hands and feet being curled up like an octopus when coming out of the sea in winter.

We could not walk properly because of the frozen body.

I took no class to learn to dive. Girls at my age learnt to dive from their mother or grandmother. Sometimes older sisters helped the younger or friends helped one another. Recently there have appeared a few schools [that] raise and educate haenyeo.

What position do you think haenyeo have in the community or on Jeju Island?

What do you think life is like as a haenyeo?

It is a very tough life. However, I could raise my children and support my family due to the work at the sea. I think I have lived almost the same life as current workers do.

The only difference is that the sea is my workplace.

The sea provides a lot of things. I catch and sell various marine products to support my family.

What do you harvest or catch?

Mostly, I catch murices [rock snails], but there are [a] bunch of marine products to catch such as abalones, octopus, sea mustard, sea urchins and top shells.

Have you ever received any support from the local Jeju governing authority?

Certain part of medical fees is free. I have the certificate of haenyeo, which is a kind of a licence to approve me to work as a haenyeo. It does not cover dental fee, but unserious medical fee is free. Also, some money is provided. About 400,000 Korean won [about $470 Australian] is provided by the local government once a year. In addition, haenyeo in their 70s receive about extra 100,000 Korean won, ones in their 80s or older receive 200,000 won, and retired haenyeo in their 80s or older receive 300,000 won for three years.

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Tradition and life now may be different from those in the past. What did you enjoy most about the life as a haenyeo?

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It is getting better. In the past, the rich did not need or want to be a haenyeo. In general, girls from poor families dived, so a haenyeo was regarded as a humble job. However, the haenyeo is registered as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, and people’s recognition of haenyeo has changed toward a positive direction. Recently some young women are taking courses to be a haenyeo, not because of the money but because of their own job.

Are there still haenyeo in your community?

There are a few haenyeo near my town. One haenyeo is in her 80s, and about six haenyeo are in their 70s.

Do you have any other comments about life as a Haenyeo?

I hope more young people join the haenyeo community.

A woman diver haenyeo can get a good reputation and [they] are getting more support. However, we also need to protect our sea because [over-exploitation] has reduced the amount of sea products.

Haenyeo: the sea women of Jeju Island is showing at the museum until 10 October 2021.

Touring exhibition produced by the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Korean Cultural Centre Australia with assistance from the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province. It has been supported by the Embassy of the Republic of Korea to commemorate the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australian and the Republic of Korea in 2021.

Daina Fletcher is the museum’s Head of Acquisition, ANMM Foundation, and Rita Kusevskis-Hayes is its Senior Education Officer.

‘It was too cold in winter, and we shivered with cold and felt our hands and feet being curled up like an octopus’

Many haenyeo began their diving career without the warmth of wetsuits, but they are now commonly worn.

Photographer Jihye Yang

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Exhibitions

War and Peace The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 21 May–29 August

FROM THE DEATH, DESTRUCTION AND DESPAIR created when atom bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 grew a movement for nuclear disarmament and peace.

Student ambassadors from the museum’s ‘War and Peace in the Pacific 75’ International Learning Program1 went to Japan in 2019. They visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, met a survivor of the bombing and heard her story. From this meeting grew a relationship that has resulted in this extraordinary exhibition.

Sadako Sasaki was two years old when the A-bomb blast blew her through the window of her house.

Apparently unscathed, she developed radiation-induced leukaemia in 1955. While in hospital, she began folding a thousand paper cranes that according to legend, would grant her a wish. Before she died in August 1955, Sadako had exceeded her goal and folding paper cranes has become symbolic of a wish for peace.

In the exhibition some of Sadako’s cranes are displayed beside a crane folded by US President Barack Obama in 2016, when he was the first leader of a nuclear power to visit the museum in Hiroshima.

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The exhibition tells the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from pre-war prosperity and wartime industrial power to their utter devastation under atomic attack, and then their recovery and prosperity as peace cities. It tells of Australian prisoners of war who survived the bombing and of the fateful voyage of USS Indianapolis, the heavy cruiser that raced uranium-235 across the Pacific to Tinian, where the atomic bombs were assembled.

War and Peace – the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an exhibition from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Part of ‘War and Peace in the Pacific 75’, an Australian National Maritime Museum USA Program supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund.

Visitors are warned that the exhibition contains images and stories of death and destruction that may disturb some people.

1 sea.museum/wapip75 Mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. ANMM Collection, 00030434.

Purchased with USA Bicentennial Gift funds

Exhibitions

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 56

Mariw Minaral (Spiritual Patterns)

Duyfken replica Now on display

Now showing

Now showing For the first time, we bring together works by artist Alick Tipoti, from Zenadth Kes (Torres Strait Islands). Tipoti is respected for his work in regenerating cultural knowledge and language. His storytelling encompasses traditional cosmology, marine environments and ocean conservation – focusing on what it means to be a sea person.

We are pleased to announce that following negotiations with the Duyfken Foundation in Western Australia, the museum has assumed ownership and management of Duyfken, the replica of the ship in which Willem Janszoon arrived at Cape York in 1606. Twilight sails on Duyfken are now available for bookings. Please check our website for more information.

Mariw Minaral showcases Tipoti’s linocuts, award-winning sculptural works, contemporary masks and film.

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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 55 years. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. sea.museum/wildlife

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Father protector. Male atrato glass frog, Ecuador. © Jaime Culebras/Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Fire on Water’s Edge

Map It!

Haenyeo: the sea women of Jeju Island

Now showing

Now showing

Through the words and images of navy personnel and surf life-savers, this exhibition documents the bushfires that devastated vast tracts of coastal Victoria and New South Wales over the summer of 2019–20. It also examines the immediate response to the events through the artists of the Bushfire Brandalism Collective, their works making a strong plea for climate action in the wake of destruction.

Undertake a quest across land, sea and space to explore the role of mapping and navigation in everyday life. Visitors will find seven ‘quest’ stations to solve puzzles and collect different parts of their own map, which can then be viewed and brought to life through augmented reality.

The exhibition also has direct links to the Australian Curriculum. For children aged 5–12 years and their families.

A free outdoor exhibition in the museum’s Wharf 7 forecourt

Exhibition developed by SciTech and produced by Imagine Exhibitions.

Large-scale photographic portraits by Korean artist Hyungsun Kim explore the human face of this centuries-old, sustainable sea harvest.

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Showing until 10 October The haenyeo are communities of Korean women who dive for hours at a time to harvest food from the sea floor.

For generation after generation, they have performed this skilled, physical and dangerous work in all conditions and weathers.

Huyn Sukjik, Samdal, Jeju, 2017.

Photographer Hyungsun Kim

Exhibitions

Travelling Exhibitions

Remarkable – stories of Australians and their boats Albany Historic Whaling Centre, WA, 14 June–30 July Ballina Naval Museum, NSW, 7 June–31 July City of Canada Bay, NSW, 26 June–11 July Cundletown Museum, NSW, 25 June–6 August Echuca Historical Society, VIC, 1 June–31 August Lakes Entrance Regional Historical Society, VIC, 25 June–22 July

Sea Monsters – prehistoric ocean predators

James Cameron – challenging the deep

Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand 7 July–25 October

Durham Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, USA Until 12 September

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!

In an exhibition that integrates the power of the artefact and the thrill of experience, visitors will encounter the deep-ocean discoveries, technical innovations and scientific and creative achievements of underwater explorer James Cameron.

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This project was assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.

Frank Mitchelson surrounded by salmon on the deck of the Anchovette, one of the vessels featured in Remarkable. Image Mitchelson Collection, ANMM

Produced in association with Avatar Alliance Foundation and toured internationally by Flying Fish flyingfishexhibits.com/cameron

Millicent Branch of the National Trust, SA, 14 June–31 July With over 1,087 rivers and a coast that stretches more than 36,000 kilometres, it’s no surprise that Australia’s history abounds with stories of people who have lived and worked on the water.

This banner exhibition presents 12 stories, canvassed from the breadth of Australia, that explore the remarkable connections between people and their boats. Remarkable has been produced by the Australian Maritime Museums Council, its members, and the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Created by the Australian National Maritime’s USA Programs and supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund

Challenging the Deep. ANMM image

Container – the box that changed the world

Voyage to the Deep – underwater adventures

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, NT Until 25 July

DoSeum, San Antonio, Texas Until 12 September

This outdoor exhibition dedicated entirely to the history and impact of the humble shipping container goes beyond the corrugated steel to reveal the fascinating story of this revolutionary maritime invention. Housed entirely within specially modified 20-foot containers, the exhibition quite literally takes our visitors ‘inside the box’ to explore the economic, geographic, technical, environmental, social and cultural history and impact of containerisation.

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

Kids can slip on a deep-sea dive suit and venture through the world below the waves, including the octopus’ garden with its giant clamshell, a giant squid to slide down, and a maze of seaweed to wander through in the kelp forest. They can also explore the lost world of Atlantis.

Museum events

Kids and family activities

Term-time programs

Kids on Deck

School holiday fun

Kids are born explorers – and our family programs and exhibitions are designed to stimulate learning!

There’s something to discover every day for kids of all ages, from babies to teens.

5–12 years and carers Sundays during term, daily during holidays.

27 June–11 July Go wild at the Maritime Museum these school holidays with exhibitions, vessels, hands-on workshops, themed creative activities and more. It’s a day of fun for the whole family!

Our winter holiday program includes:

Sea-side Strollers

Kids on Deck – creative art making and science experiments, with family workshop sessions daily.

0–18 months and carers

Ocean Lab – drop-in discovery space, open daily.

Activity Trail – self-guided activity, available every day.

Creative Workshops – full-day photography and animation workshops, on selected dates.

Mini Mariners Tour – for under 5s, on selected dates.

Saltwater Sunday – Celebrating NAIDOC Week through lively performances, art making and tours, a one-day event.

Dive into sea.museum/schoolholidays for full program information On the Activity Trail. Image Andrew Frolows/ ANMM

Visit sea.museum/kids for more information

An educator-led tour through new exhibitions, including catered refreshments from our café, plus baby play time in a specially designed sensory space.

Play, discover, create and get your hands dirty with printmaking, sculpture or painting. Then take home your treasures!

Kids on Deck activities.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

Sensory-friendly Sundays – access program All ages

Monthly sessions. Group booking options available

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

Mini Mariners

Monthly sessions. Bookings essential

2–5 years and carers Theatrical tours, creative free-play, craft and story time in our themed activity area.

Runs every Tuesday in term time and one Saturday each month

Dates listed for onsite and travelling exhibitions are subject to COVID-19 restrictions and guidelines, and may change at short notice. Please check our website sea.museum for updates.

Ocean technologies take us back to the future The CSIRO donates to the National Maritime Collection

How can you be a museum with a focus on contemporary ocean science and technology without a comparative collection? The answer is: you can’t. A recent donation from the CSIRO has filled some gaps in the National Maritime Collection and will benefit both exhibitions and national marine science education, writes Emily Jateff.

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01 The CSIRO’s research vessel RV Investigator has a wide range of onboard scientific laboratories, including a Conductivity Temperature and Depth (CTD) instrument of the type recently donated to the museum.

This advanced, high-accuracy electronic system measures the conductivity, temperature and depth of sea water.

All images courtesy CSIRO unless otherwise stated

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02 The mechanical bathythermograph (MBT) uses a liquid-in-metal thermometer to register temperature and a Bourdon tube sensor to measure pressure. It is restricted to 300 metres water depth and was largely replaced by the expendable bathythermograph (XBT) in the 1960s.

WHEN I STARTED as the inaugural Curator of Ocean Science and Technology at the Australian National Maritime Museum three years ago, we had a wonderful collection of 20,000-plus objects, many of which were related to ‘marine technology’ or ‘the environment’.

But very few of those referred to technologies developed and used to collect marine scientific data over the past 100 years and into the future. We didn’t have anything that related to the contemporary stories we wanted to tell in the museum. So it was pretty obvious that collecting in this space was to be a major focus of my new position.

Luckily, the marine science and technology community agreed that having a comparative contemporary science and technology collection in the national maritime museum was a no-brainer. Not only is it incredibly useful for exhibitions, it is of benefit to national marine science education to have these objects available for public access via the museum’s website. This allows for public research into how the marine community develops and uses technologies to collect data. That then helps inform our understanding of biogeochemical processes and what these processes mean for the future of our ocean.

For example – do you know how the salinity and temperature of the ocean at different depths are measured? Water sampling techniques have ranged from the Nansen bottles developed by Fritjof Nansen in 1894 and used throughout the early to mid-20th century to a home-made water sampler cobbled together from dunny plungers and sewerage pipe by CSIRO oceanographer Herb Jitts. By the 1990s, however, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and other leading international institutes had adopted the use of the CTD instrument, Australian National Maritime Museum

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The MUFTI-2, a beautiful giant goldfish-shaped object, has a fascinating and important history

01 MUFTI-2 prepares for deployment in the mid-2000s.

Image courtesy Matthew Sherlock, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere 02 Deep-tow camera image of orange roughy (at right) and oreos.

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The museum has recently acquired from the CSIRO numerous objects used by Australian researchers for measuring ocean systems over the past 100 years 02

an advanced, high-accuracy electronic system to measure Conductivity, Temperature and Depth.

Data from the instrument is continuously transmitted to the scientists on board ship, thus transforming their ability to study the ocean in real time compared to earlier techniques.

How does it work? Seawater is collected in an array of 24 cylinders, called Niskin bottles, attached to a frame called a rosette. Sensors attached to the rosette relay information in real time, with conductivity being used to calculate the water’s salinity. As the CSIRO puts it: ‘Think of the oceans as the world’s lungs, and the currents are the veins moving nutrients around, and the CTD is the way we are able to monitor its blood pressure’.1 The museum has recently acquired from the CSIRO the central sensor section of a CTD rosette for the National Maritime Collection, along with 25 additional objects used by Australian researchers to measure ocean systems over the past 100 years. These include an early mechanical bathythermograph and its successor, the expendable bathythermograph (or XBT), a series of water-sampling devices, reversing thermometers (used to measure the temperature of seawater at specific depths), an MRV SOLO II Array for Real-Time Geostrophic Oceanography (or ARGO) float, and a MUFTI-2 acoustic towed body.

The MUFTI-2 is one of my favourite new acquisitions.

Not only is it a beautiful giant goldfish-shaped object, it has a fascinating and important history. Two of Australia’s major fisheries stock, blue grenadier and orange roughy, are both deep-water species, found at depths below 300 metres and 700 metres respectively. The fish schools cannot be adequately detected with hull-mounted transducers in some weather conditions and single fish can’t be detected at all. The CSIRO designed and developed this towed acoustic body to finally enable researchers to deploy instrumentation to accurately measure stocks at the required depth. This leads to better species discrimination and more accurate assessment of the stock of target species, in turn leading to improved fisheries management for vulnerable species.

Many of these objects will go on display in our upcoming exhibition One Ocean – Our Future, which opens in August. A rotating selection of objects will also be available for research purposes via the museum’s website.

The museum is grateful to the CSIRO for donating these objects to the National Maritime Collection and for supporting increased public awareness of the importance of marine technological development for accurate measurement of Australia’s oceans and its inhabitants.

To my delight, our acquisition in this area continues, with new objects coming in all the time. So stay tuned for more stories of the burgeoning ocean science and technology collection at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

1 CSIRO blog, 2 October 2013 blog.csiro.au/the-pieces-to-the-ctdscientific-equipment-puzzle-fall-into-place/

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

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Collections

A new acquisition of national significance Operation Jaywick material related to Lt Hubert Edward ‘Ted’ Carse, RANVR

Operation Jaywick was the codename for an incredible feat of daring that occurred on the night of 26 September 1943, when members of Z Special Unit, aboard a small boat named Krait, carried out a clandestine incursion against Imperial Japanese shipping in Singapore Harbour. The museum recently acquired an important collection relating to the raid and the life of Krait’s commander, Lieutenant Hubert Edward ‘Ted’ Carse of the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve. By Dr James Hunter and Daina Fletcher.

OPERATION JAYWICK IS LEGENDARY as one of the most audacious operations of World War II. A 14-man team of Z Special Unit commandos motored from Australian waters deep into Japanese enemy territory, disguised as local fishermen aboard a Japanese-built fishing vessel renamed Krait. Six of the men then launched their attack using folding kayaks and limpet mines. The mission was a complete success, resulting in damage to, or destruction of, seven Japanese ships, with no Allied losses.

A nationally significant collection of items owned by Krait’s commander, Ted Carse – service medals, personal papers, a military-issue knuckle knife, and a fake Japanese flag flown from Krait as it traversed enemy waters – was recently acquired by the museum. This was made possible with the support of the Australian Government through the National Cultural Heritage Account and the Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation, and through the generosity of the families of Ted Carse’s brothers.

The Carse collection was formally accepted into the National Maritime Collection on 20 April by the Honorable Paul Fletcher, Federal Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts, in the presence of the Carse family and special forces veterans.

Minister Fletcher noted that the collection ‘contributes to our understanding of an extraordinary mission of remarkable courage ... with challenges unimaginable in ordinarily civilian life in peacetime’.

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Collections

Fake Japanese ensign, reportedly flown aboard Krait as a form of subterfuge during Operation Jaywick, and souvenired by Ted Carse after the raid. It was one of two made in secrecy by Fay Manderson, the wife of Special Operations Australia operative Harry Blyth Manderson.

She created the deep red of the circle by dyeing fabric in the family’s bathtub in Melbourne.

ANMM Collection 00055854

All objects purchased with the support of the Australian Government through the National Cultural Heritage Account and the Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation through the generosity of the families of Ted Carse’s brothers

‘The bloody brains behind the mission never appreciated what it was like to hide in view of the enemy while the canoes were raiding’

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Collections

The Operation Jaywick mission took 48 days to complete, most of it in enemy waters

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01 Four medals awarded to Carse for his WWII military service: 1939–45 Star, Pacific Star (with Burma clasp), War Medal 1939–45 (with Mentioned in Despatches oak leaf), and Australia Service Medal (1939–45). Shown at far left is the Commando Association Cross of Valour (with Operation Jaywick clasp), an unofficial military decoration awarded to Carse posthumously in 1978 to commemorate members of Z Special Unit who participated in Operations Jaywick and Rimau.

ANMM Collection 00055851 and 00055852 02 Portrait of Ted Carse in later life.

Photographer unknown.

ANMM Collection 00055859

Collections

Minister Fletcher unveiled the historic objects and a replica of the fake Japanese flag flown on Krait during the mission. This historic replica will be used in education programs for school students across the country to help explore the role of Operation Jaywick in World War II. The original was made in secret by Fay Manderson at her Melbourne home. Fay was the wife of Special Operations Australia (SOA) operative Harry Blyth Manderson, who was involved in planning and supplying the operation.

The education program, including an online resource, is being developed with the support of Jonathan Herps, in honour of his father, World War II Z Special Unit commando Sergeant Douglas Herps, and Mrs Patricia Herps. In the 1960s, Douglas Herps campaigned with Ted Carse and other former commandos for Krait’s preservation as an historic vessel.

Former members of Australia’s special forces who met Ted Carse in the 1960s were represented by Allan Miles OAM, who recalled another of Ted’s stories about the mission: The bloody brains behind the mission never appreciated what it was like to hide in view of the enemy while the canoes were raiding. The stress of just waiting to be discovered was a bitter taste in the mouth for every one of us aboard for each hour of daylight … The Z Special operatives were giants in the eyes of us as newly minted commandos and as the years passed, we came to understand who they really were and the debt we owed for their courage, their service and in so many cases, their lives.

Lieutenant Hubert Edward ‘Ted’ Carse was assigned command of Krait in September 1943. He largely ensured that the former fishing vessel successfully navigated the 4,000-mile return voyage between Exmouth, Western Australia, and Singapore Harbour.

The mission took 48 days to complete, most of it in enemy waters. Carse was also responsible for the successful insertion and extraction of Operation Jaywick’s commando team under the cover of darkness.

Carse was born on 28 May 1901 at Rutherglen, Victoria, one of six sons. He joined the Royal Australian Navy as a 13-year-old cadet midshipman on 31 December 1914, following the outbreak of World War I. He was appointed midshipman (in his words, a ‘snotty’) on 1 January 1919 and seconded to the Royal Navy’s base at Portsmouth on HMS Renown, eventually transferring back to Australia. There he served aboard HMA Ships Brisbane (I), Australia (I) and Geranium before being posted to the new submarine base at Geelong, Victoria. But the life of a submariner was not for Carse: ‘After one submerge, I resigned,’ he later noted. He left naval service on 17 December 1921.1

In subsequent years Carse spent time on tramp steamers, pearling luggers in Australia’s north, sailing in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, prospecting for gold, camel racing and running a betting shop.

When World War II broke out, Carse was mobilised by proclamation and he reported for duty on 28 September 1942 with the rank of Sub-Lieutenant in the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve (RANVR). He was promoted to Lieutenant (provisional) on 4 January 1943 and joined Z Special Unit later the same month.

Following Operation Jaywick, Carse married Patsy Millane in Sydney. He continued to work with the special forces and went on to command the Services Reconnaissance Department vessel HMAS Alatna.

Carse was described, while stationed at Townsville’s HMAS Magnetic in 1944, as ‘exemplary in his duties.

A pleasant if somewhat rugged personality, with a strongly developed sense of humour. So popular with his messmates.’

Tragically, many of his fellow commandos from Operation Jaywick were killed in a follow-up raid on Singapore Harbour in October 1944, called Operation Rimau. Carse was mentioned in despatches for gallantry the same year and discharged in 1946, ending military service that spanned two major international conflicts.

One of the few members of Operation Jaywick to survive the war, he dedicated himself to honouring his fellow covert operatives by compiling ‘a true historical account’ of Operations Jaywick and Rimau. He once again took Krait’s helm when it motored into Sydney Harbour from Borneo in 1964. The vessel was acquired by the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in 1985. Today it is moored at the museum’s wharves, where it is held in safekeeping on behalf of AWM and the nation.

Ted Carse spent the remainder of his life in Sydney, where he was a regular attendee at Z Special Unit reunions and commemorative functions. He died at Newtown in 1970.

This important collection joins other material in the National Maritime Collection that belonged to Lieutenant Ted Carse, including his RANVR dress uniform, which was donated by Joe Millane, the brother of Ted’s wife, Patsy. His service medals, knuckle knife and the fake Japanese flag are currently being prepared for display in the museum’s Navy Gallery.

1 Ted Carse letter to Tom Mitchell, MLA for Corryong, 1967, family papers, private collection.

Dr James Hunter is the Museum’s Curator, Royal Australian Navy Maritime Archaeology, and Daina Fletcher is the Head of Acquisition, ANMM Foundation Australian National Maritime Museum

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National Monument to Migration

Pearl diving was a dangerous and sometimes deadly occupation that relied heavily on indentured Aboriginal and Asian labour

A pearling pioneer Remembering the Manilamen

While this year marks the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and the Philippines, our migrant connections date back to the second half of the 19th century, when Filipino divers (known as ‘Manilamen’) were recruited for the booming pearling industry in northern Australia. By Kim Tao.

A FREE-SPIRITED ADVENTURER, Filipino-born Telesforo Ybasco (1879–1972) loved the water. By the age of 17, he had already left his hometown of Daet, capital of the province of Camarines Norte, to travel the world on a sea freighter. In 1896 Telesforo landed in Broome, the Western Australian coastal town that by the turn of the century would become the pearling capital of the world.

Telesforo was lured by the prospects of deep-sea diving for the prized Pinctada maxima, the world’s largest pearl oyster. Today the species is cultivated to produce lustrous South Sea pearls, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the pearling industry was centred on harvesting pearl shell for the manufacture of mother-of-pearl buttons, buckles and fine cutlery.

Pearl diving was a dangerous, and sometimes deadly, occupation and the industry relied heavily on indentured Aboriginal and Asian labour. The recruitment of Japanese, Chinese, Malay and Filipino divers from the 1880s saw Broome develop into a vibrant multicultural port town.

By 1910, more than 400 pearling luggers operated out of Broome, carrying crews of hard-hat divers into deeper waters, and the town supplied about 70 per cent of the world’s pearl shell.

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It was around this time that Telesforo Ybasco met Theresa Marques (1899–1979), who was born in Broome to a Japanese mother and a Spanish father. Despite their 20-year age difference, Telesforo courted Theresa and the couple married in 1917.

Theresa’s mother Omito (Omisca) Serotame had come from Japan as a teenager. Omisca married Basilio Marques in 1896 and sadly died soon after giving birth to their daughter in Broome’s infirmary.

While Basilio wanted to raise baby Theresa on his own, Catholic mores of the day prescribed that a single parent – particularly a father – was not a suitable caregiver.

The broader political climate was also one of growing intolerance towards ‘coloured’ people, reflected in the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901 and expressed in the ethos of the White Australia policy.

Basilio was forced to give Theresa up and she was placed in a Catholic mission at Beagle Bay, north of Broome.

The mission was involved in the removal of children from Aboriginal or mixed-raced families before the Stolen Generations (1910–1970). Theresa finally left the Beagle Bay mission at the age of 17 and married Telesforo Ybasco.

National Monument to Migration

The recruitment of Japanese, Chinese, Malay and Filipino divers from the 1880s saw Broome develop into a vibrant multicultural port town

Theresa and Telesforo Ybasco in Broome, Western Australia, 1930s. Reproduced courtesy Cecilia Manalang-Spurrier

Australian National Maritime Museum

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National Monument to Migration

The hazards of pearl diving ranged from ear and chest infections to shark attacks, cyclones and diver’s paralysis (‘the bends’)

01 Pearling lugger at work in Broome, Western Australia, c 1926. Photographer R A Bourne.

Reproduced courtesy National Library of Australia

01

02

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02 Grading and sorting motherof-pearl shell in Broome, Western Australia, c 1953.

Photographer Frank Hurley.

Reproduced courtesy National Library of Australia

National Monument to Migration

You can honour a migrant – yourself, a member of your family or a new arrival – on Australia’s new National Monument to Migration (formerly the Welcome Wall) at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Register online to be part of the next unveiling ceremony.

Telesforo and Theresa had 12 children between 1918 and 1945. The five boys and seven girls – Joseph, Olivia, Mary, Paul, Anastasia, Magdalena, Theresa, Elizabeth, Peter, Rosemary, James and Martin – were all born in the upstairs bedroom of the family’s wooden cottage in Napier Terrace. Today the building is heritage listed and houses the Som Thai restaurant in the heart of Broome’s Chinatown.

With an expanding family, Theresa was reluctant for Telesforo to continue pearl diving, where the hazards ranged from ear and chest infections to shark attacks, cyclones and diver’s paralysis (or ‘the bends’, caused by bubbles of nitrogen gas forming in the blood and bodily tissues). Wearing a canvas suit, copper helmet and leadweighted boots, Telesforo would dive up to 45 metres under water and walk along the seabed to collect pearl shell. Telesforo and Theresa’s seventh child, Theresa (born 1929 and known as Tess to distinguish her from her mother), remembers: The physical rigours of diving and the inevitable toll it took on a diver’s body, including and especially internal organs such as the lungs and heart, meant my father’s occupation could not be sustained in the long term. In an early form of workplace health and safety, if not union mandating, divers were supposed to retire upon reaching 30.

Dad lasted in the water as long as his age would allow.

His growing family dictated that he could not rest, however, so he learnt to cut hair and shave beards, becoming the only hairdresser in Broome in the early 1920s and 30s.

Telesforo operated his barber shop from the downstairs front room of the family’s home until the outbreak of World War II, when the Australian government ordered civilians to be evacuated from Broome to Darwin.

Tess, who was 11 years old at the time, says: I couldn’t understand why we would be sent [to Darwin] – indeed, this location further north may well have placed us in more peril, given its easier access from the north and the Japanese threat to bomb the Northern Territory port city [Darwin was attacked by the Japanese on 19 February 1942 and Broome was attacked on 3 March 1942, constituting the two worst air raids in Australia’s history].

For more information, go to sea. museum/nationalmonument or call Adam Sherar on 02 8241 8309.

The Ybasco family remained in Darwin for six months before they were forced to relocate again, this time to Perth. Tess recalls: Leaving Darwin for Perth in 1940 was a nightmarish experience. The ship sailed under the darkness of night, only the moon casting any illumination. Lights could not be seen in case it might broadcast our location to the Japanese who, it was feared, could at any time launch an attack. It was in this darkness that we were told to be very quiet all the time we were on the ship.

In Perth, the family lived in a small house (now part of a row of shops) on the north side of the Horseshoe Bridge in the city centre. Telesforo opened a barber shop on William Street, near Perth’s central railway station.

In 1949 Telesforo and Theresa decided to return to the Philippines with six of their younger children.

They ran a small takeaway shop in the capital, Manila.

Telesforo died in 1972, aged 93, and Theresa died in 1979.

In 1999, their daughter Theresa Manalang-Robertson registered Telesforo Ybasco’s name on the Welcome Wall to honour one of Broome’s pioneering deep-sea pearl divers and Manilamen.

The author wishes to thank Cecilia Manalang-Spurrier, Eugene van Prehn, Tina Ferrer and Deborah Ruiz Wall for their assistance with this article.

Kim Tao is the museum’s Curator of Post-Federation Immigration.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Forgotten classics The 21-Footers: a unique Australian sailing class

WHY DO SOME ONE-DESIGN YACHTS ENDURE while others wither into obscurity? Why does the Dragon still prosper after 82 years while – if they survive at all – the Bluebird (1947) and Thunderbird (1958) seem to serve mainly as mooring minders?

The answer is probably a combination of factors – performance, aesthetic appeal, durability, patronage, competitive fleets and resale value – but there’s no doubt particular designs find that ‘sweet spot’ and enjoy extended popularity. Others rise and fall within a few decades, for reasons that can be difficult to fathom.

This splendidly detailed new book contains some clues to this mystery, tracing all the influences that determined the initial success and then slow decline of a uniquely Australian class.

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The prototype of the class, Idler, was built in Melbourne in 1909 to a design by Charles Peel. It was 24 feet long, 21 feet on the waterline, with a beam of 8 feet and 2 foot 3 inch draught. Sail area on a lug, gaff or gunter rig was around 450 square feet with a small bowsprit.

The maximum drop of the plate keel was 3 foot 6 inches and it sailed with a crew of six. Idler was quick, and within a few years its rough dimensions became the basis of the 21-foot restricted class rule.

The outbreak of World War I halted further development, but in the early 1920s racing resumed with gusto in Port Phillip Bay. The class then spread to Sydney, with the sail area of the Sydney boats reduced by 25 square feet in response to the sudden gusts on Port Jackson.

Readings

The era from the mid-1920s to the beginning of World War II in 1939 was the heyday of the 21-Footers

Little Boats with Sails: The History of Australia’s 21 Foot Restricted Class

Australia’s 21-Footers were built in every state. Image courtesy Nicole Mays

By Nicole Mays, Colin Grazules and David Payne, published by Navarine Publishing, Hobart, 2021. Hardcover, 244 pages, illustrations, index. ISBN 9780-6487252-3-7 RRP $55.00

Australia in those days had been a federated nation for less than a generation. Interstate rivalry between the old colonies was still fierce, especially in sport. New South Wales and Victorian sailors were itching for a contest and the 21-Footers emerged as an obvious candidate.

All that was needed now was some heavyweight patronage and the traditional prize of a challenge cup.

By happy coincidence, the new Governor-General of the Commonwealth, Lord Forster, was a keen sailor.

He had arrived in mid-October 1920 and by December had ordered himself a new boat, Corella, to be built to the class rule. In 1922 he donated a trophy for the inaugural interstate series, the Forster Cup. With the prestige of vice-regal involvement, the 21-Footers boomed. Tasmania joined the fray and their well-designed and expertly built boats began to dominate. Examples of the class were also built in South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia. Held in a different state each year, the annual Forster Cup series enjoyed prominent press coverage.

The mid-1920s to the beginning of World War II in 1939 was the heyday of the 21-Footers. Little Boats With Sails records the boats and sailors of that golden period in impressive detail. The co-authors have unearthed a wealth of newspaper and photographic sources to document just about every 21-Footer ever built, every skipper, every builder and every race ever sailed.

It is an engaging account, rich in controversy and tales of yachting derring-do. There are generous tributes to the tough old sailors who competed ‘for keeps’ and the talented builders and designers who kept seeking to squeeze that extra half knot of boat-speed from the rule’s dimensions.

The Forster Cup was last sailed in 1955. By then the class was in terminal decline, with many states not sending a representative. So why did the once dominant 21-Footers dwindle to just a few boats still sailing at Goolwa in South Australia?

One answer is that with Melbourne to host the Olympics in 1956, all attention had shifted to the Olympic sailing classes. Another reason is that the design was a difficult size – too big and heavy to be trailed comfortably, and neither an all-out modern racer nor a workable cruiser. More modern boats and construction methods had made the 21-Footer an awkward antique. But the historic arc of these boats is a wonderful story, well told in this book by a clearly enthusiastic trio of authors.

This is an edited version of a review first published in Afloat magazine, April 2021.

Reviewer David Salter is an independent journalist, author and television producer and an experienced offshore racing sailor.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Currents

Vale Rob Bowring OAM 9 April 1947–27 February 2021

Rob Bowring on board PS Marion.

Image Australian Maritime Museums Council

and then ensuring that this historic vessel remained in survey and operating for the benefit of visitors to Mannum and, ultimately, for the nation.

THE AUSTRALIAN MARITIME MUSEUMS COUNCIL (AMMC) and the museum are saddened to farewell long-serving AMMC Board member and occasional treasurer, Rob Bowring OAM, who died on Saturday 27 February 2021 after a long battle with cancer.

Rob was much admired and greatly respected, not least for the energy, humour and good company he brought to the AMMC Board, and as an attendee and significant contributor at AMMC meetings, conferences, workshops and associated activities over a period of more than 10 years.

Despite his illness, he continued to make a significant contribution of his time and energy to preserving maritime and river heritage as the Chair of the Mannum Dock Museum of River History and a member of both the AMMC Board and the Council of the Australian Register of Historic Vessels (ARHV).

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Twenty-two boats gathered at Goolwa, South Australia, for a sail-past on Sunday 28 February to pay tribute to Rob, indicating the esteem in which he was held by his fellow river men and women.

At the conclusion of Rob’s funeral, on Friday 5 March at Mannum, there was another sail-past held in his honour.

As Chairman of the Mannum Dock Museum’s Board and a hands-on volunteer, he was the leader and an integral part of the workforce which transformed that museum.

It now has more than 25,000 visitors per year and is nationally recognised as the museum that best tells the story of the maritime history of the Murray and Darling rivers and of the paddle steamers that traded and travelled the lengths of both river systems.

Rob was also the driving force in restoring the paddle steamer Marion to a fully operational condition,

When speaking with Rob it was clear that his passion and enthusiasm for the river, its people and boats came from a deep understanding of the river as the fundamental heart and soul of the communities along it, giving the river people a unique identity.

The AMMC Board and the ARHV Council are very proud and grateful to have had Rob’s involvement and support for so many years.

We celebrate the great deal of pride that Rob took in the community for which he worked so hard and tirelessly. His work and inspiration will endure long into the future.

As Deb Alexander, Executive Officer of the Mannum Dock Museum, said: His endless and tireless devotion and passion to maritime history did not waver until his last days.

Our nation has lost a great river man who worked for the past 30 years to preserve and promote inland water heritage vessels across Australia.

Our sincere condolences and thoughts are for Rob’s family and all those who knew him.

Currents

Vale Harvey Halvorsen 20 July 1939–26 March 2021

Photographed at a sail-past commemorating Harold Halvorsen’s 90th birthday in 2000, three generations of the family were captured together. Left to right: Harold, Mark and Harvey Halvorsen.

Image Brendan Read

WITH THE RECENT DEATH OF Harvey Halvorsen, Australia has arguably lost the last of this country’s great designers of beautiful wooden boats.

Born in 1939, Harvey was the second child of Harold, who in turn was the eldest child of immigrants Lars and Bergithe Halvorsen. As a toddler during World War II, Harvey would visit his father at the firm’s state-ofthe-art boatbuilding yard at Ryde in Sydney, where more than 250 boats were built for the war effort.

At the age of 14, Harvey began working at the firm’s hire-boat base at Bobbin Head. He commenced as a mechanic and then, moving to the Ryde yard, worked in fitting and machining and chrome plating.

Harvey studied technical drawing, as well as completing an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner. He began his designing career in 1960, drawing plans for Lars Halvorsen Sons.

With a sleek design and timeless and elegant lines, Harvey’s favourite was the last motor cruiser built at the Ryde yard.

The 90-foot Emma, launched in 1976, was a fitting bookend to the Halvorsen wooden boat legacy in Sydney. Emma epitomised the classic boats for which Harvey and his father and grandfather were well known. However, unlike the more sedate builds of his forebears, Emma had twin 1,350 horsepower V12 engines and could make 26 knots!

When boatbuilding in Sydney became uneconomical, Harvey took his dream to China, where, by 2002, more than 650 boats were built. Harvey’s designs for those boats had the distinctive Halvorsen lines, but also incorporated new technologies that his grandfather, Lars, could only have dreamed of.

Boats, and the sea, were in Harvey Halvorsen’s blood. With this background, it was no surprise that Harvey had a strong affinity with the sea, like his ship-captain and boatbuilder forebears. He was also an accomplished yachtsman.

Harvey Halvorsen succumbed to Parkinson’s Disease on 26 March 2021. He leaves his wife, Nancy, and children, Brett, Mark, Danielle and Amy, and five grandchildren.

Harvey will be remembered by friends and family not only for his prodigious talent and work ethic, but also for his mischievous – and sometimes wicked – sense of humour.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Irfan Ali Nasiri proudly graduating from Western Sydney University.

Image courtesy Irfan Ali Nasiri

Fleeing persecution A young refugee forges prosperity in his new home

Irfan Ali Nasiri’s father arrived in Australia by boat in 2010, after making the decision to risk his life for the long-term safety of his family, writes Rebeka Selmeczki

‘MY DAD TOOK THE DECISION to search for security.

First and foremost safety and then a better place to live’, Irfan explains. ‘Back then, I didn’t pay too much attention but, now that I am 23, I can’t even imagine what it was like for my mum thinking about my dad coming over here by boat.’

The Nasiri family are Hazara, an ethnic minority originally from Afghanistan. They moved to Pakistan in the mid-1990s seeking security when life became increasingly unsafe for Hazaras in Afghanistan.

Irfan arrived in Australia from Pakistan with his mother and four siblings in 2016, reuniting with his father in Auburn, Sydney, after years of separation.

Although Irfan has come far on his journey and succeeded on many fronts, including studying finance and economics at Western Sydney University, he found that resettlement presented many challenges.

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‘I am grateful for the refugee support services here in Australia and the programs and supports they offer’, Irfan says. ‘I’m the first in my family to go to university, and I consider it one of my biggest achievements.’

Irfan is one of many refugees whose stories are celebrated by Settlement Services International during Refugee Week, 20–26 June 2021.

Refugee Week is Australia’s peak annual activity to inform the public about the positive contributions made by refugees to Australian society.

Within the theme of ‘Unity’, Refugee Week 2021 reminds us that, given the volatility of life in recent times, we need to support and encourage one another, sometimes merely to survive. To thrive and progress we should take the opportunity to start afresh, count our blessings and build on them as existing and emerging communities work together.

As part of the Australian National Maritime Museum’s commitment to preserving and sharing migration stories, we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Settlement Services International. For more information, visit ssi.org.au/.

Rebecca Selmeczki is Senior Communications Officer with Settlement Services International.

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 Valerie Taylor Ambassadors Norman Banham 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 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 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 Robyn Holt William Hopkins Julia Horne Kieran Hosty RADM Tony Hunt AO Marilyn Jenner John Jeremy AM Vice Admiral Peter Jones AO DSC Hon Dr Tricia Kavanagh John Keelty Kris Klugman OAM Judy Lee Matt 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 VADM Jonathan Mead AM RAN Arthur Moss Patrick Moss Rob Mundle OAM Alwyn Murray Martin Nakata 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 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

Congratulations to Matt Coady, who won the Signals 134 caption competition with this entry: ‘I’m sure I dropped the keys here.

Just keep looking will you?’

Australian National Maritime Museum

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

Editorial and advertising enquiries signals@sea.museum – deadline midJanuary, April, July, October for issues March, June, September, December Signals is online Search all issues at sea.museum/signals Signals back issues Back issues $4 each or 10 for $30 Extra copies of current issue $4.95 Email the Shop at thestore@sea.museum Australian National Maritime Museum Opening hours 10.30 am–4 pm during COVID-19 2 Murray Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia. Phone 02 9298 3777

ANMM Council Chairman Mr John Mullen AM Director and CEO Mr Kevin Sumption PSM Councillors Hon Ian Campbell Mr Stephen Coutts Hon Justice S C Derrington Rear Admiral Mark Hammond AM RAN Mr John Longley AM Mr Nyunggai Warren Mundine AO Ms Alison Page Ms Judy Potter Ms Arlene Tansey Dr Ian Watt AC Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation Board Chairman Mr Daniel Janes Mr Peter Dexter AM Ms Arlene Tansey Ex officio Chair Mr John Mullen AM Ex officio Director Mr Kevin Sumption PSM Mr David Blackley Mr David Mathlin Mr Tom O’Donnell Dr Jeanne-Claude Strong Mr Simon Chan

The Australian National Maritime Museum is a statutory authority of the Australian Government

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Winter warmers

Open 7 days a week Email: thestore@sea.museum Shop online: sea.museum/shop We also offer click-and-collect!

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War Books Our selection of books related to WWI, WWII, submarine warfare and special interest topics is currently on sale. Stop by our new in-shop reading nook to browse!

Indigenous Art

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Mask Up

‘Portfolio 30’ displays the awardwinning images from 2020, accompanied by their fascinating stories. Also available are a range of exclusive prints and related products. $54.95 / Members $49.45

Children adore these animal design face masks! You’ll love them for being reusable and washable. Available in a range of fun styles. $5.00 / Members $4.50

Mugs

Rug up and feel warm in a soft fleece hoodie this winter. Made exclusively for the Australian National Maritime Museum, these hoodies are unisex sizing and look great on everyone! $30.00 / Members $27.00

Did you know we keep a beautiful range of Aboriginal art like these gorgeous Tiwi bird carvings?

All carvings are reduced by up to 50%.

Add some flair to your winter morning cuppa with one of our mugs.

There’s something for everyone, including nautical, whimsical, maps, native birds – even dinosaurs!

Scarf Sale

Ships Ahoy!

Why be drab when you can be fab!

Wrap up in style this winter with a new scarf. Right now all of our scarves are 40% off.

Love boats but can’t have your own?

Maybe you know someone who loves all things nautical? A model ship makes the perfect gift.

Hoodies

Members’ discounts and further special reductions now available in the Shop. (Members’ discount is not available on already discounted items.)

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