Signals 137

Summer 2021–22

The museum turns 30 Memories from our members

RV Falkor

An ambitious virtual voyage

The Pearl Trail

Highlights of our collection

Number 137 December to February sea.museum $9.95

Bearings From the Director

THIS, SADLY, IS MY FINAL BEARINGS after the pleasure of leading the museum for nearly ten years. Over this time the museum has seen great changes and while it is hard to select a few highlights, I would like to share one or two of my favourites.

The success of our navy warships pavilion, Action Stations, has been greatly satisfying. Back in 2015 this was a pioneering project that gave me an opportunity to work closely with the architects at FJMT. This was a rare privilege and undoubtedly a career highlight for me.

The building is significant, not just for its award-winning design, but because its form and function combine perfectly to showcase the importance of the navy in our maritime history. The architecture, exhibition design and interactive cinema have garnered almost 20 national and international awards.

Other sensitive transformations of Philip Cox’s architectural masterpiece have been our new Sydney Harbour Gallery and the Ben Lexcen Terrace. Both give the museum a new transparency that allows the harbour and our floating fleet to be appreciated from inside the building.

Developing our collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander maritime heritage was my most important goal when I took up this role in 2012. Now we have an Indigenous maritime curatorial team who have developed a world-class collection of art and artefacts that speaks to the central role played by lakes, rivers and oceans in First Nations societies, histories and traditions. And with these collections we have gone on to build multi-award-winning exhibitions like Gapu-Mon_uk Saltwater – Journey to Sea Country and Mariw Minaral (Spiritual Patterns).

I arrived in Australia as a migrant in 1991 having lived in Cyprus, the Netherlands, South Africa and Wales.

So it’s not surprising that the stories of migrants and their arrival in Australia were deeply personal to me, and the success of our On their Own exhibition was very important. On their Own focused on the stories of British child migrants to this country. The exhibition’s tour of the UK and Australia had a profound impact and helped to usher formal recognition of the plight of child migrants.

Director Kevin Sumption PSM in front of the multi-award-winning Action Stations. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

Early in my museum career I was a curator of computing sciences and I have always had a passion for all things digital. The development of our innovative online education games The Voyage, Cook’s Voyages and the recently launched Wreck Seekers is also a highlight for me, and I am thrilled to know that they will continue to educate students right across Australia for years to come.

Our rebranding to the muSEAum is another important and powerful change that ensures the museum stays vibrant and relevant. And as my very first work was in advertising, working on corporate identities, I am particularly proud of the contemporary ‘voice’ this new identity gave the museum.

It is a rare privilege to be asked to lead a museum, particularly one as fine as this with so many outstanding staff and volunteers. To all of you I owe an enormous debt, for it is your creativity and passion that have made the museum truly world class. Finally, I wanted to acknowledge the guidance and support of my executive colleagues both past and present, particularly Frank Shapter, Peter Rout, Deanna Varga, Richard Wesley, Zena Habib, Tanya Bush, Michael Harvey and Paul McCarthy. Most of all, I would like to thank Linda Hardy, my Executive Assistant, without whose tireless work, dedication and infinite patience I could never have successfully carried out my duties as director.

Kevin Sumption psm Director and CEO

Contents Summer 2021–22 Number 137 December to February sea.museum $9.95

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

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

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

Supplied courtesy of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.

Cultural warning

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Remote control

An ambitious virtual expedition explores the Coral Sea Marine Park

10 One Ocean – Our Future

Behind the scenes of our new exhibition

16 A 30th anniversary toast

Reminiscences from some of our founding members

22 2022 program highlights A preview of what’s to come

26 Treasures from the collection

Intriguing and poignant collection items on our new Pearl Trail

32 A suburban treasure house

A wonderful private collection of ethnographic art

40 A second transportation

An extract from Australia & the Pacific: A history by Ian Hoskins

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.

46 Antipodean passages

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

58 Museum events

Joseph Conrad in Australia

50 Containerisation

BC (Before Containers) versus AD (After Derricks): a sailor’s lament

54 From ship to shore

Queenscliff, Mavis III and the Port Phillip Sea Pilots Your calendar of term-time and school holiday activities

62 Exhibitions

Ocean Wonders and more

66 Collections

Unique artefacts commemorate the launch and loss of AE1

70 Education

Innovative remote learning programs take off during lockdown

74 Australian Register of Historic Vessels Social sailers and ocean racers

78 National Monument to Migration Cover A deep-water octopus (Octopoda sp.) sighted by ROV SuBastian at Ribbon Reef Canyons in the Coral Sea Marine Park on 19 August 2020. See story on page 2. Image Schmidt Ocean Institute

Afghan refugee Hedayat Osyan builds a new life in Australia

82 Assistance for a new start

Support for refugees fleeing Afghanistan

84 Readings

An expanded section of book reviews, plus new titles in our library

This close-up image of a black coral was taken by ROV SuBastian at a depth of 1,200 metres on the Cairns Seamount. It shows in amazing detail the delicate structures of this poorly understood coral.

All images Schmidt Ocean Institute

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Signals 137 Summer 2021–22

Remote control My (virtual) research voyage with RV Falkor

How do you coordinate a survey of hundreds of kilometres of Australia’s ocean depths from your home, during a pandemic lockdown?

Dr Robin Beaman shares his story of managing the ‘Visioning of the Coral Sea Marine Park’ expedition aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s RV Falkor.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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I built a small virtual team from their locked-down homes across Australia, in readiness for a month and half of adventure 01

I FIRST REALISED that the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s RV Falkor was in serious trouble early in April 2020, just as the COVID-19 crisis was sweeping across Australia. The ship had been in Australian waters since January, committed to a year-long series of deep-water expeditions. Having successfully completed expeditions in the Bremer, Perth and then Ningaloo canyons off Western Australia, Falkor was now caught up in the frantic shutdown of ports and quarantine restrictions.

My email query to Eric King, Director of Operations at Schmidt Ocean Institute, received a terse reply: ‘significant blow … very difficult’. Much was at stake.

Falkor is one of the world’s most advanced research vessels, equipped with multibeam swath-mapping systems that provide a high-resolution 3D picture of the sea floor. The two Kongsberg EM302 and EM710 multibeam transducers are fixed to a gondola mounted underneath the hull to reduce bubbles and ship noise.

Together, these systems can provide beautiful detail from depths ranging from 30 metres to more than 3,000 metres. They have the ability to resolve seabed features between 2 and 20 metres in length.

Research permits were already in place to allow Falkor to collect multibeam data around Australia.

There is only one other blue-water research vessel in the country with similar mapping capabilities: the CSIRO’s RV Investigator. Therefore, every opportunity must be taken to contribute mapping data to improve the detail of our large exclusive economic zone and network of marine parks. Having been involved with every blue-water research ship sailing through the Coral Sea in the past 15 years, I was looking forward to a Great Barrier Reef expedition on Falkor, scheduled for August 2020.

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But with many research vessels now laid up due to the crisis, including Australia’s Investigator, years of research fieldwork planning were cancelled. However, Falkor was still at sea and committed to its research program – if allowed by the authorities. I was already in lockdown at home in Cairns, Queensland, when Falkor finally escaped Western Australia in April. The vessel headed east, awaiting a decision. After a few very tense weeks, we got the word: Falkor had been granted an exemption and could remain in Australian waters to conduct science. It was such a relief!

The ship was fully crewed, with 26 people on board, including a team to operate the purpose-built underwater robot SuBastian. Weighing 3.2 tonnes and rated to 4,500 metres depth, this remotely operated vehicle (ROV) has the ability to take exquisite 4K (4,000 pixel wide) videos and photos, and to collect physical samples. As a result of the shifting schedule, the Schmidt Ocean Institute asked whether I could plan an opportunistic expedition of a month and a half.

I had just two weeks to prepare for and lead a virtual voyage without any scientists physically onboard.

This intensive schedule of mapping and ROV dives had to be conducted entirely remotely.

01 Long-spined urchins graze on food detritus accumulating on the muddy seafloor at depths of more than 1,000 metres.

02 Gorgonian corals are known as soft corals as they don’t have solid skeletons like the hard, reef-building corals. They are more flexible and look almost like underwater plants.

Several of the images in this article feature in our outdoor exhibition Ocean Wonders, opening on 1 December.

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Australian National Maritime Museum

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An intensive schedule of mapping and ROV dives had to be conducted entirely remotely

01 Dumbo octopuses are rare and found only in the deep open ocean. This sighting at 1,300 metres depth created much excitement.

02 Large orange-coloured brisingid seastars and other soft corals attach to exposed limestone rocks.

Choosing an area to study was easy. I had long gazed at maps of the Queensland Plateau within the Coral Sea Marine Park. It features a scattering of 30 shallow coral reefs and banks, including several of the largest atolls in the world. But, I wondered, what might its steeper flanks look like? Airborne LiDAR bathymetry collected by the Australian Hydrographic Office covered all of these reefs, so the underwater landscape was well understood to about 60 metres in depth. However, the detail beyond these shallows remained a mystery, except for a small area on northwest Osprey Reef where we had previously logged tourism dive-boat depth data to 800 metres.

Osprey Reef is considered the jewel in the crown of the Coral Sea Marine Park. Adventure vessels visit the reef regularly so people can dive with the abundant sharks.

In 1987, Jacques Cousteau visited in the famous Calypso, then dived Osprey Reef using the submersible SP350 to around 240 metres. In 2009, I was involved with the German ‘Deep Down Under’ expedition, which sent an ROV to 800 metres. Except for these infrequent efforts, virtually nothing was known of the Coral Sea’s marine life beyond scuba depths. Here was an opportunity to map the steep flanks of all 30 reefs and reveal what marine life existed within their mesophotic (twilight) and deeper aphotic (lightless) zones.

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As for conducting a survey entirely remotely? Well, that required a leap of faith. Neither I nor the Schmidt Ocean Institute had ever participated in such an operation.

As chief scientist, I was determined to make this work.

I built a small virtual team from their locked-down homes across Australia, in readiness for a month and a half of adventure. In late April, Falkor sailed from Cairns to Osprey Reef, and the ‘Visioning of the Coral Sea Marine Park’ expedition was born.

We soon settled into a daily routine of early morning video meetings with the captain, first officer, ROV lead pilot and the marine technicians who ran the ship’s numerous instruments and multibeam systems.

Falkor is a 24/7 operation, so discussions covered science objectives and numerous operational plans to allow for contingencies and the vagaries of weather.

Any notes and plans were shared in Google Docs that we could all view and edit. Google Chat allowed us to text message each other when necessary. TeamViewer software became invaluable in sharing the multibeam mapping screens in real time.

I will never forget the first results of the multibeam mapping around Osprey Reef. The ship had completed several laps of the 30-kilometre-long Osprey Reef, with the multibeam pinging every few seconds.

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Each ping generates up to 800 depth points in a swath that stretches 70 degrees on either side of the hull.

Those millions of depth soundings were brought together into a 3D model that we viewed using visualisation software similar to that used by gamers. Marine technician Deborah Smith showed me the steep flanks, corrugated with many canyons cut into their sides. We also witnessed evidence of massive underwater landslides where whole pieces of the reef – some several kilometres long – had broken off and left debris blocks scattered at the base.

Others are attached to the dark iron-stained rock, including colonies bearing names such as golden, black and precious corals.

Planning for the ROV SuBastian dives was a serious business, as expected with a complex machine full of electronics. In morning video meetings, we would discuss the science objectives, such as visioning an underwater landslide or submarine canyon, plus factors to consider, including currents, terrain, distances and the weather.

Being fully remote, this dive was the first test of audio commentary from my home office. It was quite a juggle, with numerous screens open to watch the live feed, speaking to what I could see and explain, all the while watching the YouTube chats coming in from many people watching from around the world. The video first travelled up SuBastian’s fibre optic cable to Falkor, and was then transmitted via satellite to a station on land. My voice travelled back via satellite, being received aboard the ship 300 kilometres away. The audio was mixed with the stream on board, then transmitted back to land via satellite, and shown live within seconds on YouTube and Facebook.

The first dive at Osprey Reef was everything I hoped it would be. Descending past 200 metres, only the barest glimmers of sunlight remain in these clear waters.

Below 400 metres the temperature rapidly drops, so that at 1,500 metres the seawater measures just 3°C. This is where SuBastian revealed the cold-water corals that are not reliant on sunlight. These corals exist in the darkness in a surprising variety of shapes and colours.

Some appear as bright pink buttons with long tentacles.

The next dive was at North Horn, Osprey Reef, a site known for chambered nautiluses. These strange-looking cephalopods are distantly related to extinct ammonites.

They use their large pinhole camera eyes and up to 90 arms to scavenge food during daylight hours in depths below 500 metres. Soon our first nautilus bobbed into view at about 700 metres, perhaps attracted by the ROV’s lights. By the end of the dive, we had counted 18 sightings, giving everyone a huge thrill to see these creatures thriving.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Virtually nothing was known of the Coral Sea's marine life beyond scuba depths

01 Chiroteuthidae squids have long necks, slender bodies and thin tentacles, so are sometimes called whip-lash squids. This mid-water squid was seen at 1,000 metres depth at Osprey Reef.

02 The nautilus is known as a living fossil, with a body plan largely unchanged for about 400 million years. Researchers spotted up to 18 on one dive at Osprey Reef, between 500 and 700 metres depth.

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Signals 137 Summer 2021–22

The ROV dives continued to amaze, from deep-sea dumbo octopus lazily swimming past using their ear-like fins, to nautiluses seen on nearly every dive

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As the journey progressed, further ROV dives revealed abundant deep-water fish – particularly eels. I could see this variety was generating much interest among the fish experts watching from the shore. The YouTube chats were full of ‘I think it’s an [insert species]’ or ‘this could be a range extension’, meaning a sighting for a fish beyond the area it is currently known to live in. I called them the ‘fish army’ and welcomed their input. I contacted one prolific Twitter contributor, Kai Tea from the University of Sydney, and asked whether he would like to join the science team. This development led to more scientists being added to the virtual expedition, including fish and coral reef specialists.

More underwater surprises appeared. Four conicalshaped drowned reefs were found on the plateau surface, 1 kilometre down. With heights of up to 600 metres, the peaks were probably drowned millions of years ago when the plateau subsided. Only reefs that maintained coral growth in that narrow photic zone were able to become the shallow, tall reefs we can see today. Yet for those ancient reefs that Falkor mapped, we witnessed the results of massive, catastrophic erosion. Hundreds of giant debris blocks lay scattered around their flanks where the edges of the reefs had collapsed.

The ROV dives continued to reveal amazing sights, from deep-sea dumbo octopus lazily swimming past using their ear-like fins, to nautiluses seen on nearly every dive.

A relict fauna of stalked crinoids – common in the fossil record – live in the depths of the Coral Sea where environmental conditions have remained near constant for millions of years. Delicate glass sponges are attached to rocks on long silica stalks like tulip bulbs.

Giant isopods, similar to pill bugs, burrow into soft sediments leaving behind numerous holes like Swiss cheese. From the fish army, potential new species of fish were observed, together with many significant range extensions for fish living in the mesophotic zone.

So after its adventure, Falkor returned to Cairns, my hometown, which was still locked down. I couldn’t even visit the ship at the wharf. The experience for me, and the rest of the science team, had been intense.

We had all juggled family obligations, home schooling and work commitments, while engaging with the crew at sea from early morning until late at night. But the ‘Visioning of the Coral Sea Marine Park’ cruise was deeply satisfying, as the first fully virtual expedition by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. It was also a testament to the resilience of Falkor’s crew and the science team in overcoming the significant challenges brought on by the pandemic.

Dr Robin Beaman is a marine geologist at James Cook University. He has participated in numerous ocean-mapping expeditions around Australia, the South Pacific and Antarctica. His research focuses on revealing the deep Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea underwater landscape using advanced mapping technologies and underwater imagery.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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One Ocean – Our Future Wonders and warnings

How do you even begin to interpret climate change for a museum audience? And how do you demonstrate, in an authoritative and accessible way, the impacts of global warming on the maritime world?

Richard Wood explains how the museum tackled this complex and sensitive topic when developing its newest exhibition.

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Signals 137 Summer 2021–22

The stunning vision that streamed live from SuBastian had the potential to transfix even the most blasé viewer

An Apolemia siphonophore observed off Western Australia, possibly the longest creature ever seen.

All images courtesy Schmidt Ocean Institute unless otherwise stated Australian National Maritime Museum

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IN DECEMBER 2019, the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Research Vessel (RV) Falkor visited the museum’s wharves before departing on a voyage of nine expeditions into the furthest reaches of our part of the ocean. This visit kick-started a process that would culminate in our new exhibition One Ocean – Our Future.

Using advanced technology, particularly Falkor’s remotely operated submarine SuBastian, scientists from Australia, the USA and many other nations would discover, collect and analyse species and map seascapes never before seen (see previous article). At a meeting aboard Falkor, Carlie Weiner, the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Director of Communications and Engagement Strategy, offered to sponsor the museum to create a 3D interactive virtual aquarium using this unique footage. From this impetus grew the exhibition.

The stunning 4K (4,000 pixel wide) resolution vision that streamed live from SuBastian had the potential to transfix even the most blasé viewer, particularly when enhanced with the sound of the unfettered excitement of scientists as they encountered a new wonder.

This expression of sheer amazement at the ocean provided the hook on which to hang the more serious aspects of the exhibition.

A small exhibition team worked intensively over the next two years (the process disrupted by two major Covid-19 lockdowns) to research and collect objects, data and stories for the exhibition. We developed an interpretive strategy that would both entertain and inform our visitors without preaching or scare-mongering about the impending crisis facing our ocean.

We also aligned our efforts with the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) and the fundamental principles of ‘ocean literacy’ – a strategy for increasing awareness and understanding of the ocean’s influence on us, and our influence on the ocean – which is crucial to living and acting sustainably.

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What easier way to engage visitors about the ocean than to let them delight in some of SuBastian’s most spectacular discoveries, projected onto a massive screen? These wonders range from a 1-centimetre-long seahorse clinging to a strand of seaweed to a massive, swirling Apolemia siphonophore, a colony of identical individual zooids that scientists estimated at 120 metres in length, possibly the longest creature ever seen.

And to follow, in a 3D virtual aquarium visitors can closely examine ‘living’ specimens of the short-tail catshark, an elusive ram’s horn squid, everyone’s favourite dumbo octopus, a creepily faceless cusk eel and a mesmerising nautilus. All these digital creatures are controlled by gesture rather than touch, to suit Covid requirements, and were co-developed with Dan Novy, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, USA. For small-screen aficionados, we designed the SeaMe game, an ‘ocean personality’ quiz using QR codes (we all know how to use them now!). The game assigns attributes of the ocean to the player, and offers a selfie opportunity in the form of a spectacular backdrop of the relative moods and aspects of the ocean.

But now to some more alarming matters.

Developing an exhibition around the contemporary topic of global warming, climate change and the ocean, based on mainly statistical evidence, was a challenge for a museum which, after all, deals mainly in material culture.

The impacts of global warming on the ocean are felt around the world, particularly among First Nations communities of Oceania. Artworks by First Nations artists from the museum’s collection and on loan form the spine of the exhibition.

01 Dumbo octopus are deep-sea umbrella octopuses, which move by slowly flapping their ear-like fins.

02 Some of the specimens available for virtual examination in the 3D aquarium: cusk eel, nautilus, ram’s horn squid and short-tail catshark.

3D renderings by Dan Novy

In a 3D virtual aquarium visitors can closely examine ‘living’ specimens

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Australian National Maritime Museum

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The impacts of global warming on the ocean are felt around the world, particularly among First Nations communities of Oceania

01 Billboards announce and investigate the relationship between the exhibition’s themes, the ocean, our lives and global warming.

02 A Continuous Plankton Recorder being installed in the exhibition.

For the past 80 years this CPR has been measuring the ocean’s smallest inhabitants – plankton – as a guide to the health of the world’s seas.

ANMM images 01

Science Fresh Water Skin Disease

The ocean is largely unexplored. It remains so despite hydrographers having systematically measured, mapped and analysed parts of it over the past 200 years to ensure the safety of marine traffic. They map the coastlines and the sea floor and measure sea level, ocean currents, temperature and salinity.

Biological and physical oceanographers investigate the biology, chemistry, physical attributes and geology of the ocean in the quest to understand ocean health and how it changes, and the organisms that live in the sea.

Townsville Queensland

London UK

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) is developing FathomNet, an online platform that collates the deluge of ocean-based visual data being collected globally by autonomous programs and machines. It will collect data in order to train machine-learning algorithms. These will provide fast, sophisticated analysis of visual data that will lead to greater understanding of the wonders of the ocean and its inhabitants, and to more effective marine stewardship.

The Australian Institute of Marine Science National Sea Simulator (SeaSim) in Townsville, Queensland, provides state-of-the-art aquarium facilities for research into tropical marine organisms.

Rising global levels of atmospheric carbon-dioxide gas (CO2) dissolve in the ocean, rendering it more acidic. This can make it difficult for marine calcifying organisms, such as coral and some plankton, to make their shells and skeletons.

Using SeaSim, Australian and international scientists conduct large-scale long-term experiments in which they manipulate key environmental inputs to mimic complex environmental change and measure how species react.

Researchers at London’s Kingston University and Science Museum compared the shells of Neogloboquadrina dutertrei and Globigerinoides ruber plankton collected on the HMS Challenger expedition (1872–76) with specimens collected from the same places on a 2009–13 Tara Oceans expedition. They found the more recent specimens had consistently thinner shells – some up to 76 per cent thinner.

Leeuwin was an adult female Burrunan dolphin. This close-up of her right pectoral fin was taken shortly after she died in the Swan River, Western Australia. It shows both the FWSD skin lesions and a fishing line entangled around her pectoral fin.

MBARI’s FathomNet correctly identifies individual examples as being of the same species.

SeaSim can mimick natural coral spawning conditions.

Computerised tomography scan comparing plankton shell thickness over the past 130 years.

Image courtesy Dr Simon Allen, University of Western Australia

Image courtesy Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

Image courtesy Australian Institute of Marine Science. Photo: © Budd Photography

Image courtesy Dr Lyndsey Fox, Dr Stephen Stukins, Dr Thomas Hill and Dr C Giles Miller

Coastal erosion

Background image: Scientists on the deck of research vessel RV Falkor.

Image courtesy Schmidt Ocean Institute. Photo: Alex Ingle

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Monterey Bay CA, USA

Over five months from September 2019, six rare Burrunan dolphins in the Gippsland Lakes, Victoria, died. All had discoloured ulcers on their skin, similar to third-degree burns in humans. Fresh Water Skin Disease (FWSD) results after fresh water suddenly flows into saltwater ecosystems. This disrupts the electrolytes in the dolphins’ bloodstream, leading to organ failure and skin lesions that become infected.

Dr Nahiid Stephen, Lead Researcher and Lecturer in Veterinary Pathology at Murdoch University, attributes the increase in dolphin death from FWSD to changing weather patterns and climate change.

These stories share the ways that we use the ocean, and explain how science and technology is used to measure and predict human-caused climate changes.

Signals 137 Summer 2021–22

Thinner plankton shells

National Sea Simulator

FathomNet Gippsland Lakes Victoria

Satellites and AI

Ecosystem collapse

Science at sea 250+ Number of research voyages

Technology enables scientists and researchers to measure and understand the intricate and complex interconnections between the ocean and humans.

Australia

Plymouth UK

Bangalore India

Beachport in South Australia has lost about 135 metres of sand to erosion since the 1940s.

Flinders University researchers have developed a GPS-controlled robotic vessel with sonar to record the depth and movement of sand around the town’s beaches. Understanding how the ocean erodes and transports sand gives scientists a tool for predicting and managing the impacts of future sea level rise along our coast.

Research by scientists from Australia’s Wollongong, Deakin and Macquarie Universities, plus the University of Exeter (UK), has identified 19 Australian ecosystems as being ‘in collapse’ and unlikely to recover. They include marine systems of the Murray–Darling River basin, mangroves of northern Australia, the Great Barrier Reef, Shark Bay on the Western Australian coast, kelp forests of southern Australia and moss beds in Antarctica.

Satellite data paired with artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to help researchers at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (UK) spot accumulations of plastic in the ocean.

The system uses high-resolution images from two satellites, processed by an algorithm that detects the specific wavelengths of light that plastic reflects. This enables plastic waste to be clearly picked out from surrounding organic material.

Tardigrades, colloquially known as ‘water bears’ or ‘moss piglets’, are almost microscopic animals with long, plump bodies and scrunched-up heads. The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, has discovered a species of tardigrade that might have the ability to protect itself from potentially lethal amounts of ultraviolet (UV) light.

They appear to process UV light into a fluorescent blue glow, but how they do it and whether this applies to all species of the tiny organism is unknown.

Autonomous robotic vessels, controlled by GPS, are used to collect data on coastal erosion.

Over the last few years, the Great Barrier Reef has suffered consecutive mass bleaching events, which have weakened coral polyps and made them susceptible to disease, and hence more likely to die.

Satellite image of Henderson Island, part of the Pitcairn Island Group in the South Pacific. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) reported that the island’s beaches hold the highest density of plastic waste in the world.

Tardigrades are typically 0.5–1 millimetres long when fully grown.

Photo: Isadora Bogle

Shutterstock 108490289

Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory. Photo: Jesse Allen

Shutterstock 1055532119

The study also supports previous work showing that substances produced by these creatures can possibly protect other organisms from harmful environmental conditions, such as increased UV radiation linked to climate change.

• From the early 19th century, research vessels explored oceans and engaged in mapping coastal lands, islands and ocean passages.

• By the 1870s, oceanographic research and deep-sea biology took centre stage.

• During the world wars, research pivoted to support wartime priorities.

• Post-war, military vessels were often redeployed for oceanographic research.

• In the mid to late 20th century, creation of new technologies allowed for deeper and sustained data collection.

• Now, there are more than 250 private and government-funded research vessels in operation.

Tardigrades

Beachport South Australia

Humans have mapped waterways and collected from the environment for as long as we have travelled the planet.

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1873–1914

13 1925-1940

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1947-1960

1961-present

• In the future, autonomous technologies, more sustainable long-range ships, and underwater habitats – where scientists can stay underwater for up to three months – will ensure continuous scientific connection with the ocean.

Representative list of research vessels used in oceanographic deep-sea research (1873–present) (Represented nations from period 1873–1960 include Norway, Germany, Denmark, USA, Netherlands, Britain, Monaco, Russia, Japan, Sweden, Argentina and Scotland. Represented nations from period 1961–present include Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Taiwan, United Kingdom, USA, Vietnam.)

Data sourced and periods adapted from ‘Georg Würst, The Major Deep-Sea Expeditions and Research Vessels, 1873–1960: A Contribution to the History of Oceanography’, Progress in Oceanography 2 (1964): 1–52

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The striking Ocean Sentinels – seven sculptures lent

by Selena Griffith and Jeremy Sheehan – are the fourth in a series of works by the Small Ocean Collaboration.

They highlight the social, cultural and environmental impact of human-caused climate change and plastics pollution across the Pacific region. Each sentinel is a traditional figure or totem representing First Nations communities in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Nukuoro Atoll and the Philippines.

From this spine emerge the exhibition’s other major themes – Weather, Habitat, Science, Ice, Plastic and Progress.

We created dramatic billboards to announce and investigate the relationship between these themes, the ocean, our lives and global warming. Each billboard holds short stories from across the globe, acknowledging scientific research as evidence of the way the ocean is changing. The billboards also include visualisations that interpret data about the ocean, ocean sciences and community attitudes in simplified graphic form.

Sometimes an exhibition presents the museum with a unique opportunity to expand its collection.

One Ocean – Our Future became the focus of determined systematic collecting, and as a result, a world-class record of a century and a half of oceanographic technology has been added.

The theme of Ice is about the scientific analysis of ice as a record-keeper of climate and the impact that melting land-based ice has on the ocean environment – so what better focus than a real Antarctic ice core?

Many months later, a freezer has been built and the Australian Antarctic Division is kindly lending us an ice core that dates from 1756 – the dawn of the industrial revolution that has so profoundly affected the ocean and our climate.1 As Signals goes to press the ice core is in Hobart awaiting transfer to Brisbane, where it will undergo gamma irradiation to ensure that any organisms locked in the ice are made harmless before it is released for display.

Tying this panoply together, we developed an at-times eerie soundtrack that pervades the exhibition space.

Populated with the voices of witnesses to how the ocean is changing – from Russia to Alaska and Australia to South America – it includes words of warning and wisdom from older champions of the ocean, such as Valerie Taylor AM, Sir David Attenborough, Sylvia Earle and HRH Prince Charles.

One Ocean – Our Future is the culmination of collaboration between the museum and Australian and international scientists, artists, filmmakers and media gurus, who worked together to reveal the treasures of the ocean and the threats to its – and our – future.

Richard Wood is the museum’s Senior Manager USA Programs.

1 The freezer’s 24-hour electricity consumption is offset by the power generated by the museum’s photovoltaic array on the roof of our Wharf 7 building (see Signals 128, September 2019).

One Ocean – Our Future is a USA Program supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund. Sponsored by the Schmidt Ocean Institute. sea.museum/one-ocean Australian National Maritime Museum

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Les Génies de la Mer – masterpieces of French naval sculpture (2005), from the Musée de la Marine, Paris, displayed elaborate wooden figures and emblems that decorated the ships of the French navy from 1660 to 1860.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM 16

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A 30th anniversary toast Reminiscences from our founding members

Turning 30? It’s an exciting time of life – a time to savour, a time for reflection.

As part of the museum’s 30th birthday celebrations this year, we talked to some very special members of our community who are celebrating their three-decade involvement with our museum – our highly valued founding members.

By Daina Fletcher and Matt Lee.

THE MUSEUM HAS 30 FOUNDING MEMBERS who joined us in our first year of opening. So, who are they and why did they join the brand-new museum back in 1991? What are their observations of the museum over its 30 years and their recommendations for the future?

Many, like former Senator for New South Wales Vicki Bourne, were attracted to the idea of joining a national museum at its very inception and being part of a growing museum community dedicated to exploring and communicating the cultural history of Australia’s maritime identity. Vicki is very proud to be member number nine and was one of those who joined up before the museum doors had actually opened.

Others, including sailor John Jeremy AM, former CEO of Cockatoo Island Dockyard, either come from maritime walks of life and or have friends or family who do.

Others had careers in the Royal Australian Navy.

Some just love boats and ships – as sailors, would-be sailors, romantics, workers or athletes – and were dazzled by the idea of seeing a tremendous variety of craft displayed in and around the museum.

Some members were attracted to the working lives of the vessels that were then being assembled at the museum’s wharves and in nearby Berrys Bay – tall ships, the wooden pearling lugger John Louis from northern Australia, the smaller couta boat Thistle from the south and the former naval destroyer HMAS Vampire. As well, there were elegant racing craft such as the 1888 gaffcutter Akarana and robust world-cruising ketch Kathleen Gillett, built in 1939 – what a feast for boat-lovers.

Among the favourite themes of founding member Richard Newton, a video producer, are the floating vessels, the Wharf 7 watercraft display, maritime archaeology, navy and defence. He nominated James Cameron’s Challenging the Deep exhibition and SY Ena among his highlights, on top of long lunches at the museum’s waterside café.

One of the many benefits our members noted was the idea of belonging, friendship and fun. So many enriched their social lives and networks through the museum, meeting like-minded people and sharing similar interests and an enthusiasm for all things maritime.

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Above all, most of our founding members melded their interests in the maritime world, museums and history.

They connected to us through their passion and shared aspirations to demonstrate Australia’s interdependence on the world’s oceans and seaways, and its status as a nation of islands whose waterways define and sustain it.

Marion Carter is both a founding member and a founding volunteer. She has dedicated nearly 15,000 hours to the museum, many of them in its Members’ Lounge. Marion joined the museum for a unique reason – she loves cruise ships. Back in 1991 the Overseas Passenger Terminal, where most cruise ships docked, was located opposite the museum.

Marion visited the museum a few days after it opened, noticed that it was the perfect place to take photographs of the ships berthed opposite, and joined up.

Our members’ support is deep and multifaceted – many have donated objects and funds. From our perspective this represents a critical contribution because, as the future unfolds, we will depend more and more upon community support and involvement, including gifts to the collection and financial support from dedicated key individuals. Many founding members have deepened their involvement by joining specialised supporter groups such as our Chairman’s Circle.

Our founding members are also often called upon for advice. Vexillologist John Vaughan OAM donated a model of the Cutty Sark and at our launch in 1991 designed a house flag for the museum. As a flag historian he has proved an invaluable ‘brains trust’ over the years, when consulted by our curators puzzling over ship flags on early artworks.

John Jeremy AM, often called the ‘Dr Google of shipping on Sydney Harbour’, has contributed to the museum in many ways. He was a founding member of the Council of the Australian Register of Historic Vessels (ARHV) in 2006 and has been part of varied consultative groups, including the steering committee for the development of the Action Stations building. He too has joined our Chairman’s Circle.

The bonds between our members and the museum underscore the old adage that relationships are indeed a two-way street.

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Founding member Vaughan Evans OAM made a huge impact on the museum’s core narratives and research capability

Author and professional fisherman Garry Kerr lives in Victoria and is an ‘Out of Port’ founding member, a category of membership for people who live more than 150 kilometres from Sydney. Garry has a passionate interest in all Australian boats, especially fishing craft, and has made special visits to Sydney for our Classic & Wooden Boat Festival. He loves that the museum gives a national voice to Australia’s maritime history and delights in seeing working watercraft at our wharves.

Garry believes more people need to know about these vessels and the sailors and fishers who worked on them.

He has produced many books and documentaries on the subject, which are available in our Vaughan Evans Library.

The late Vaughan Evans OAM (1924–1993) was a founding member. An avid maritime historian, he made a huge impact on the museum’s core narratives and research capability, consulting with Professor Peter Spearritt to draft the museum’s first collection development policy.

Vaughan and his wife Halycon gave Vaughan’s extensive collection of maritime books to our library in 1986 and it was named in his honour.

Halcyon Evans grew up by the water and loves the sea and boats. She has been a strong supporter of the museum since before it was built. Halcyon’s favourite exhibitions are Escape from Pompei (2017) and Bateaux Jouets – Toy Boats from Paris (2008), an exhibition of mechanical tin toys from France’s Musée National de la Marine. Her choices illustrate the broad subjects that make up the maritime world – proving that it is much more than ‘blokes and boats’.

01 Founding members Wendy Hardiman, Lyndyl Beard, Jeanette Wheildon and Marion Carter at a Fourth of July dinner at the museum, 1994.

Image Jenni Carter/ANMM 02 The Museum’s North Wharf during the Classic & Wooden Boat Festival 2018. Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

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Some just love boats and ships – as sailors, would-be sailors, romantics, workers or athletes

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Detail from a mural painted

by D H Souter for the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

While Halcyon loves the boats at the wharves outside, her favourite indoor object is Blackmores First Lady, the yacht of solo sailor Kay Cottee AO, which allows visitors to imagine Cottee’s world during her six months at sea in 1987 and 1988.

So many members enriched their social lives and networks through the museum, meeting like-minded people and sharing similar interests

Schoolteacher Anna Mellefont and her husband Jeffrey joined because the maritime world was a huge part of their lives, and later their children’s. Jeffrey, a sailor, journalist and specialist on Indonesian sailing craft, also joined the museum staff.

Jeffrey’s favourite exhibitions are Les Génies de la Mer – masterpieces of French naval sculpture (2005) and Secrets of the Sea – myth, lore and legend (1999). Anna nominates Sailor Style – art fashion and film (2004) and Lamalera: whale hunters of Indonesia (1998). Jeffrey’s favourite objects are the boats, especially Akarana. Anna’s are D H Souter’s impressive five-part mural for the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club, painted between 1920 and 1934, and Au Karem Ira Lamar Lu, the Torres Strait Islander ghost net installation in the museum’s foyer.

Jeffrey cites Indigenous cultures, international maritime history and maritime archaeology and shipwrecks as his top themes, while Anna rates migration, Indigenous culture, ocean sciences and the marine environment as hers.

So what for the future? A common wish is for more research to underpin museum programs. Richard Newton advocates that we: Maintain or increase the academic research budget.

In my opinion this is the fundamental requirement for such an institution, as well as the curation and maintenance of the collection.

The last word goes to to John Jeremy: Above all, the maritime history of Australia … is a human story.

People relate well to immersion in this story at a human scale … Like all museums, the maritime museum faces a number of challenges today. Glass cases of artefacts with long and detailed captions may be an important part of any museum but they do not encourage access and involvement by younger generations with short attention spans. New ways of engaging with the public are needed.

Another major task of the museum is to reach out to Australians everywhere. It is a national museum.

The technology we are surrounded with today may well make this more feasible, though engaging effectively with new audiences has never been easy.

So as we celebrate 30 years of the museum, we say a special thank you to those of you who have supported us from the start, and to all our members who have joined us since.

We look forward to the next 30 years and the stories and experiences we will share.

Daina Fletcher is the museum’s Head of Acquisitions Development. Matt Lee is Manager – VIP Relations.

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What’s on in 2022 Highlights of the year ahead

Throughout 2022 we will celebrate the museum’s 30th anniversary. This preview of our upcoming program highlights the many areas that we focus on – our maritime and migration heritage, Indigenous knowledge and cultures, our physical environment and the health of our oceans and waterways.

EVERYONE AT THE MUSEUM IS EXCITED to be open again after lockdown and we look forward to seeing you very soon.

We hope you enjoy the following exhibitions, talks, cruises and family programs throughout 2022, in addition to those listed on pages 58–65.

Ocean Decade

The museum is proud to be part of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, a 10-year global program that aims to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources.

2021–2030 sea.museum/ocean-decade Wildlife Photographer of the Year

This world-renowned exhibition, on loan from the Natural History Museum in London, features exceptional images which capture fascinating animal behaviour, spectacular land and seascapes and the breathtaking diversity of the natural world.

April 2022–March 2023

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Our upcoming program demonstrates the museum’s wide-ranging scope

Sea of Light by Patch Theatre is an interactive installation for the whole family. ANMM image

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01

Shaped by the Sea

Endeavour voyaging

In this new permanent exhibition, hundreds of objects from the museum’s collection will be on display, some of them for the first time. These include several significant and iconic pieces, such as Alick Tipoti’s bronze sculpture Kisay Dhangal.

The museum is currently making plans to sail the Endeavour replica. While living and sailing on board, crew members can imagine what life was like for James Cook and his crew 250 years ago.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a commissioned work by the Mulka Art Project. This stunning contemporary video installation called Dhaŋaŋ Dhukarr (Many Pathways) brings together all the elements of the exhibition (land, water and sky) into an immersive, cyclic reflection on deep-time Australia.

May 2022 sea.museum/shaped-by-the-sea Diver

Diver is an exciting new installation by Sydney-based artist Tim Kyle. Standing 4.5 metres high, the sculpture is a metaphor for anonymity and introspection.

Until April 2022 sea.museum/diver

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March and April 2022 sea.museum/endeavour-voyaging Aquatic Imaginarium

Step inside our indoor play and discovery space to encounter a wonderland of giant inflatables, evocative sensory installations, object storytelling and hands-on art-making activities.

9–24 April 2022 sea.museum/imaginarium

01 The forthcoming new permanent exhibition Shaped by the Sea is a reflection on deep-time Australia. ANMM image 02 Maritime archaeology is one of the many topics to be explored in our Beneath the Surface series of talks. Image taken on Boot Reef, Queensland, by Julia Sumerling/ Silentworld Foundation

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New Beginnings Festival

The Great Ratsby Murder Mystery

This one-day, family-friendly festival showcases the work of more than 70 culturally and linguistically diverse artists, makers and entrepreneurs. Performances take place on the main stage, which is surrounded by a workshop hub, chill-out zone, world food village and the world bazaar.

Sydney in the mid-1920s is a city ready to explode.

Gangs, plague, police and the legend that is ‘The Great Ratsby’ come together on a steamy night of mystery and intrigue. At a ritzy party on board SY Ena, gangsters mix with the Sydney party set until a body is found floating in the harbour. Who did it?

19 March 2022 sea.museum/new-beginnings NAIDOC Week celebrations

Take a journey from the Blue Mud Bay flag to the dugong dancing on the tail of the moon, from virtual songlines to the Tribal Warrior pearling lugger as we celebrate the stories, culture, language and lore of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations across Australia.

3–10 July 2022 sea.museum/naidoc

October 2022 sea.museum/murder-mystery Beneath the Surface

Beneath the Surface is our new monthly talk series hosted by the museum’s Knowledge team and their guests.

The 2022 series presents a diverse range of discussions related to maritime history and stories of the sea.

Join our expert curators as they dive into topics they’re most passionate about, such as maritime archaeology, migration, ocean science and Indigenous cultures.

February–December 2022 sea.museum/beneath-the-surface Please check our website for regular updates and additions.

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Treasures from the collection Journey with us along the Pearl Trail

The museum marked its 30th birthday in November 2021, and throughout 2022 we will celebrate with a very special type of exhibition – a ‘Pearl Trail’ that will showcase some of the most fascinating objects from both the National Maritime Collection and private collections.

Head of Acquisitions Development Daina Fletcher provides a preview.

THE PEARL TRAIL – to be installed progressively throughout 2022 – will take the form of special, regularly changing installations dotted throughout the museum.

From time to time, it will also include artefacts from select private owners that have never before been seen in public.

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Many of them raise enticing and intriguing questions.

How has the object survived? What is its story?

Why is it so significant? How did we acquire it? And how did private collectors or owners become involved?

Important artefacts from European explorations of Australia feature prominently in the trail. They include maps and silver from 17th-century Dutch encounters along Australia’s northern and western coastlines by ships from the powerful United Dutch East India company, or VOC, sailing out of bases in the Spice Islands (now Indonesia). These encounters resulted in the first landings on Australian soil by Europeans and their first interactions with local peoples.

The Pearl Trail’s treasures include eye-opening objects from early colonial times and the maritime world of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, artefacts recovered from some of nation’s worst shipwrecks, including Batavia (1629) in the west and Dunbar (1857) in the east, the migration experiences of mid-20th-century brides or brides-to-be, and Oskar Speck’s epic seven-year kayak journey after he left Nazi Germany in 1932.

They also led to the first detailed mapping of the Australian coastline by European voyagers.

Although we may think of maps as antiquated museum objects, in their day they were often sensational, top-secret documents. They afforded glimpses of new lands largely unknown to Europeans, as well as knowledge of trade routes more advantageous than those of Amsterdam’s competitors.

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The Pearl Trail will also be about the collectors, owners and enthusiasts who acquired these objects that span more than five centuries

01 Rijksdaalder of the province of Holland, United Provinces of the Netherlands, minted in 1622.

From the wreck of the Batavia.

ANMM Collection 00016449 Transferred from the Australian Netherlands Committee on Old Dutch Shipwrecks 02 Map of the East Indies by Jodocus Hondius (1563–1612). This is one of the few maps of the period to show evidence of Francis Drake’s visit to Java during his first circumnavigation of the globe (1577–80). On temporary loan from the collection of Dr Gary S Holmes and Dr S Anne Reeckmann

01 02

On loan from the private collection of Dr S Anne Reeckmann and Dr Gary S Holmes, and created when Amsterdam was a centre for world trade, these rare 17th-century maps show very early tracings of parts of the Great South Land and the Australian coastline, from a time now known as the golden age of Dutch mapmaking.

The display will feature the rare celestial globe that famed cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu designed to pair with his terrestrial globe in 1602. It is being conserved with funds from our museum members.

The Dutch vessel first associated with landfall in Australia was of course Duyfken, in 1606, after its Captain Willem Janszoon travelled the western edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria on his voyage to explore opportunities in ‘the islands east of Banda’ and the south and west coasts of New Guinea, which were then unknown to Europeans.

The trail includes a fine Admiralty style model made from prized European boxwood that shows the inner construction of this small, fast, armed jacht – a ‘pursuer or hunter’ of the VOC fleet. This detailed and exacting model, made by expert modelmaker Michel Laroche, was donated to the museum by Prince WillemAlexander of the Netherlands after his 1996 visit to Fremantle to ceremonially lay the keel of a replica Duyfken. After an adventurous sailing schedule that included a voyage to Indonesia and to the Wik people of Cape York in 2000, the 24-metre replica has recently found a new home in Sydney where it sails out of the Australian National Maritime Museum. The vessel was a gift from The Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation.

Historic coins from the Batavia, the most famous of four VOC vessels known to have been wrecked off the west coast of the continent, will also form an important part of the Dutch section of the Pearl Trail.

These are from a hoard of about 10,000 coins, trading currency carried on Batavia, recovered and conserved by the Western Australian Museum – silver rijksdaalders from the United and the Spanish Netherlands, and a variety of thalers from German states and cities of the Holy Roman Empire. The coins date from 1542 to 1628 and are some of the oldest objects in the collection.

They speak of the riches to be won on the trading routes to China, Japan, Indonesia and India, and of the formation of the Dutch Republic.

From the VOC to veils and wedding vows, the Pearl Trail will take you on many journeys – from the ambitions of empire to personal hopes for a better life after World War II. 28

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On 9 July 1956 bride-to-be Lina Mussio disembarked from the SS Neptunia in Sydney Harbour and into the arms of her fiancé Rizzeri Cesarin. For five years she had waited after Rizzeri left their village in southern Italy to make his new life in Australia. Two days later the couple married in a church in Sydney’s Leichhardt and then returned to the home Rizzeri had made for them in Cooma, five hours’ drive inland. There he was building base camps for workers on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. Lina was one of thousands of proxy brides or brides-to-be who voyaged to Australia to take up new lives. The wedding dress that she brought from Italy, which held her aspirations and anxieties, will be on display in our Pearl Trail.

The trail also explores women artists and the story of Muriel Binney, who painted a remarkable 20-metre-long panorama of Sydney Harbour in a frieze that won her honours at the First International Exhibition of Women’s Work in Melbourne in 1907, as well as a silver award in the Franco-British exhibition in London the following year.

Other fascinating artefacts along the Pearl Trail include a magnificent Chinese export-ware ceramic punchbowl from the early 18th century (one of only two known to feature a view of Sydney Harbour), an engraved medal from the arrival of the First Fleet in Kamay Botany Bay in 1788 and the journal of Surgeon General John White, donated by Peter Chaldjian.

There is also a rousing trade union banner from 1903 featuring ships in dock, painted by Edgar Whitbread for the Federated Ship Painters’ and Dockers’ Union of Australia, and Olympic medals on loan from our golden sailors of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, held belatedly in 2021 due to Covid-19.

Most importantly for an installation specially created to celebrate the museum’s 30th anniversary, the Pearl Trail will be about much more than the fascinating objects spanning five centuries. It is also about the collectors, owners and enthusiasts who acquired them, for the stories behind the objects are often more fascinating, more intriguing and more adventurous than the artefacts themselves.

The Pearl Trail will take you on many journeys, from the ambitions of empire to personal hopes for a better life after World War II

Lina Cesarin’s wedding dress.

ANMM Collection 00004697 Gift from Lena Cesarin

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Many items raise enticing and intriguing questions. How has the object survived?

What is its story?

Why is it so significant?

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02

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01 Chinese export-ware bowl with an image of Sydney Harbour.

ANMM Collection 0039838 Gift from Peter Frelinghuysen through the American Friends of the Australian National Maritime Museum and partial purchase with the USA Bicentennial Gift funds 02 Model of Duyfken built by Michel Laroche and donated to the museum by Prince WillemAlexander of the Netherlands.

ANMM Collection 00029117

The Aurora lifebuoy is an example of a compelling artefact of the famous Arctic sealing and whaling vessel purchased for Sir Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14, and after that Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Transantarctic Expedition of 1914–17. It was lost mysteriously with all hands in 1917.

Incredibly, this tattered and weathered lifebuoy was plucked from the seas off the north coast of New South Wales six months after Aurora disappeared, the only surviving remnant of the ship and its crew.

It was given to its former wireless operator, Sir Lionel Hooke, who later became chairman of Amalgamated Wireless (Australia) Ltd. It was generously donated to the museum collection by his son, John Hooke CBE. The Antarctic collection has grown since John Hooke’s death, with his widow, Maria Teresa Hooke AO, and family donating Sir Lionel’s photograph album, Antarctic medals and important telegrams he sent to make contact after the stricken Aurora broke free from the ice during Shackleton’s Ross Sea supply party voyage in 1916. This collection joins other important material given by generous benefactors, such as a walking stick made by a dockworker from Aurora’s planks during a refit for Sir Douglas Mawson, and an oil painting of the ship as a sealer in 1884, when commanded by Captain Fairweather – a gift supported by his descendants Charlotte and Wendy Fairweather.

The Pearl Trail is just one of the interpretive, storytelling and recognition programs linked to the museum’s new NEMO (National Encyclopedia of Maritime Objects) strategy

You will see these stories and more as the Pearl Trail is rolled out across the museum next year. Each ‘pearl’ will also have digital interpretation. Remarkable stories of some of the objects will feature in Signals over the coming year.

The Pearl Trail is just one of the interpretive, storytelling and recognition programs linked to the museum’s new NEMO (National Encyclopedia of Maritime Objects) strategy. As it develops, the NEMO project will incorporate a discrete web program showcasing the layered histories of objects assessed to be of high significance to the history of Australia, from both private and public collections.

As the program matures we hope to invite owners who hold important historic material, in Australia and around the world, to collaborate with us to include their objects and tell their stories.

If you are a member of the museum’s community, then the Pearl Trail gives you just a taste of the excitement of the years ahead. Your involvement is the key. If you have intriguing or significant artefacts, or important ocean or water stories in your family or network, we’d love to hear from you. We encourage you to get involved and also to donate, if you can, to help build the museum’s collections.

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

If you would like more information about the Pearl Trail or NEMO, please email daina.fletcher@sea.museum.

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Behind its closed doors, this home had been dedicated to all that was beautiful, marvellous and exotic

Textiles, rugs, paintings, carvings, statues, masks, ceramics, chests, basketry: the variety is repeated in every corner of the Kok home.

All images ANMM/Andrew Frolows unless otherwise stated 32

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The most astonishing private collection of ethnographic art and artefacts filled literally every living space

A suburban treasure house The Willem Kok Collection

Why do people collect? And what do those objects mean to them? This is a story about the overwhelming passion of one family to create a collection of their own. By Jeffrey Mellefont, Honorary Research Associate.

Regardless of their orphan status, these objects come from a time and place … They are carriers of their own histories, even without their human relatives to speak for them.

WHEN I READ THESE WORDS by Dr Christine Hansen of Tasmania’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, I couldn’t help thinking of a modest suburban bungalow that I had recently visited, in which the most astonishing private collection of ethnographic art and artefacts filled literally every living space.

It was the home of a former fellow staff member of the Australian National Maritime Museum. But not once in the 15 years that we had been part of the same organisation did I realise that my courteous and quietly spoken colleague lived in his family’s own ‘museum’, surrounded by an assemblage of extraordinary diversity that his late father, his mother and he had spent much of their lifetimes putting together.

Erwin Kok was one of the museum’s front-of-house staff. He worked in the foyer, welcoming visitors as they arrived, dispensing tickets and information, and stowing coats and bags in the cloakroom. It was a role at which Erwin excelled: unfailingly genial, welcoming and helpful to visitors and staff alike. But only after I had retired from the museum did I realise that we had some quite deeply shared interests, when Erwin invited me to attend a Sydney Oceanic Art Fair that he was helping to organise for the Oceanic Art Society. This association’s focus on the artworks of traditional societies distributed around several oceans overlapped with my own interests in the maritime traditions of our Asia–Pacific region.

Erwin and his mother, Henriette Kok, were among the stall-holders exhibiting ethnographic material.

I left the fair with an ornate canoe bailer from the Solomon Islands, and an invitation to visit their home and view their collection.

I had no idea what was in store until Erwin opened his front door to greet me, in their tidy suburban street of pleasant, century-old brick bungalows. It was jawdropping. Every space, every wall, every shelf, sill and drawer, every nook and cranny, was crowded with the artistry and artefacts of countless different cultures.

The diversity was simply mesmerising as I navigated the rooms of this not overly large cottage. I was voyaging around the world once more – or, I should say, the developing or non-Western world.

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Here were works of artisans and artists of the Pacific and Indian oceans, of eastern, southern and Southeast Asia, of Indigenous Australia, of Africa. A little, even, from the Mediterranean and the Americas. Everything was wrought by human hands: in wood and clay; iron and steel; stone, bone, tusk, tooth and horn; shells, fibres and textiles.

I think it’s reasonable to say that most museum visitors and staff have an above-average susceptibility to the history and human experiences or stories that can permeate objects, and imbue them with a significance that transcends their material forms. Even so, it’s hard to convey the impact that this secret treasure-house of objects had on me. After all, we modern museum workers and visitors are used to a certain minimalism in carefully curated displays calculated to channel our attention.

Here in the Koks’ home, the cultural riches of the world were on display seemingly, at first glance, in no particular order and overwhelming in their demands for attention.

Where to look first? Items that were rare or exceptional sat alongside curios or tourist souvenirs. But as I lingered longer, I began to see the considered choices that underlay the placement and groupings of objects. A window recess was turned into a showcase of striking, anthropomorphic terracotta sago pots from Papua New Guinea. A tiered corner table was devoted to dozens of polished stone adzes – the fundamental boatbuilding tool that enabled humans to spread through Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.

There was much more to delight a maritime enthusiast: precious, sacred tabua sperm whale tooth pendants from Fiji; exquisitely decorated paddles of the Trobriand Islands, Sepik River and Bougainville; a drawer full of the wonderful, lustrous mairineer marine-shell necklaces of coastal palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) women. A canoe bailer was intricately carved from the famously suggestive female form of the coco der mer coconut that’s endemic to the Seychelles.

Evident everywhere was a high degree of ingenuity and stylishness in housing or hanging such a multitude of artefacts in simple domestic settings – with no access to the sophisticated and often expensive museum display technologies we’ve become accustomed to. And with the additional major challenge that, in a rented home like this, tenants aren’t allowed to drill holes in the walls for hooks and hangers.

But this was no museum, nor even a house museum.

It was a home that, behind its closed doors, had been dedicated to all that was beautiful, marvellous and exotic.

To me it had another dimension, though. It was a kind of monument enshrining the collecting impulse.

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As I lingered longer, I began to see the considered choices that underlay the placements and groupings of objects

Erwin and Henriette Kok (with a photo of Willem Kok between them) surrounded by some of their collection.

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01

02

To Erwin and his mother, Henriette, it was the Willem Kok Collection, in memory of its founder, the husband and father who had passed away in 2016. The collection’s origins preceded this Dutch family’s arrival as migrants, and in some respects could be traced back to Willem Kok’s childhood under German occupation during World War II.

‘As the war was ending my father, now about 12, would venture into abandoned bunkers and collect all sorts of things the Germans left behind,’ continued Erwin.

‘Helmets, badges, webbing, shoes, tins of food. Even weapons, like a German officer’s Luger pistol. He traded them with the liberating troops – English, Canadian, Americans – for food and basic needs. They prized things like a German badge or jacket as souvenirs, and a bar of their chocolate could keep you alive for a couple of days.’

‘My father was seven years old when the Germans invaded,’ Erwin explained. ‘During those difficult years when there were shortages of food and necessities like firewood, Willem gained the skills of foraging for survival. My grandfather had a bicycle and general trade store; Willem rode out on a rickety bicycle that his dad had made to look too old and dilapidated for the Germans to commandeer. Grandfather suspected from the previous war that many goods would become scarce, so he managed to accumulate some supplies for trading with people who’d bring in items to exchange.

My father could take such things to trade for vegetables and sometimes even a little meat if the farmers had any surplus.’

Another task, far more dangerous, was taking things to help a group of Jewish refugees hiding out nearby.

The consequences for everybody, if caught, were dire.

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Henriette was the daughter of a teacher. She remembers the school being occupied by German troops, and her parents forced to billet two officers in their home.

Henriette met her future husband Willem in The Hague where he was working as a salesman in a department store. In the 1960s the couple migrated to Australia with their infant son, Erwin. Henriette describes the Italian migrant transport Aurelia as a ‘horrible little ship’.

The men were segregated from the women and they hardly saw each other for the whole six-week voyage.

‘My husband went ashore in Egypt, really excited to see the pyramids and a museum,’ recalled Henriette.

‘I stayed on board with our toddler … they said it was dangerous ashore! Willem bought some little statues and scarab beetles in the market. Besides that, in our luggage were a few small things that Willem had from

Everything was wrought by human hands: in wood and clay; iron and steel; stone, bone, tusk, tooth and horn; shells, fibres and textiles

01 Papua New Guinea Chambri Lakes damarau sago flour pot of narrow necked bulbous form.

Single face decoration.

02 Papua New Guinea Sepik figure.

Woven grass male with clay scalp inset with human hair remnants, with shell-decorated hat.

03 Kalimantan Dayak baby carrier.

Woven rattan with wooden base and beadwork exterior, decorated with demon head, bells and teeth.

the Netherlands, a traditional Indonesian knife and a West African figure.’ It was the beginning of their collection.

It would grow, spurred perhaps by Willem’s war-born instincts to gather objects of intrinsic interest.

The family settled in Sydney, living in a small section of a large house in Double Bay, where Henriette worked as housekeeper while Willem was employed in the maintenance departments of Sydney hospitals.

As they managed to put some money by, they collected.

They liked to visit Paddy’s Markets, where some of the stalls sold exotic things.

One day Willem, walking across the city from work, happened on someone dressed in New Guinea tribal regalia handing out leaflets advertising a small nearby gallery selling carvings. The couple began patronising the very small number of galleries that sold ethnographic material at that time. One was on Elizabeth Street, selling tribal art collected by missionaries of the Paulian Association.

‘On holidays, when I was a child, an aunt always took me to the Tropen Museum,’ recalled Henriette, referring to Amsterdam’s famous ethnological museum.

‘When I married Willem we visited other museums in Europe. I loved it but I never had an inkling you could buy anything like that for yourself.’

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The collection grew slowly if they had a bit of money to spare. Sometimes they would put down a deposit and pay it off on lay-by. Sometimes something they liked better would arrive before they had finished paying the instalments, and they might switch their lay-by to the new object. Then the family discovered auctions, which were advertised in the Saturday paper.

‘My parents would always strive to learn more about these things and where they originated,’ Erwin told me.

‘They sought out art books, first from libraries and then occasionally they might see something in a book shop.

Bit by bit we accumulated a lot of books. My father was a voracious reader. When he went through a period of being interested in Japanese swords he sourced books about that extremely specialised topic and became very knowledgeable.’

As time went on and their interest and knowledge grew, the family participated in collectible fairs in Sydney.

One was a periodic antique arms fair, since their own collection included many different cultures’ bladed tools and weapons, spears and arrows. ‘But profit was not the main motive,’ Erwin added. ‘We never collected as investment. We sold items to make room or to get a bit of cash for something else.’

Australian National Maritime Museum

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01 Tasmanian Aboriginal women’s necklaces of iridised mairineer shells collected from rocky east-coast and Bass Strait island shorelines; mid-20th century.

Image Jeffrey Mellefont 02 A sitting room with scarcely room to sit amid art works and artefacts from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and the Mediterranean.

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Asked why his family collected, Erwin explained it to me this way, while Henriette nodded in agreement: ‘The main reason that my parents bought something was because they liked the look of it, because it was decorative. Or because it was an interesting item, historically or ethnically, something exotic from another country, another culture. Or because of what people used the implement for, whether it was a bridal veil or an item that people would swap for a pig, because that’s the way their culture operated. Or if it was just nicely carved or decorated or painted or woven.’

Every space, every wall, every shelf, sill and drawer, every nook and cranny, was crowded with the artistry and artefacts of countless different cultures

I have always admired passion in people. I don’t mean the romantic kind of passion – that’s relatively easy to understand compared to the mysterious urge to immerse and surrender oneself to an activity, a pursuit, a theme, a subject. And if passion tips over into obsession … well, that can be quite useful as a tool for heightened engagement.

It was easy to admire the Kok family’s passion as we sat surrounded by it in a living room where armchairs were squeezed into the few spaces that remained between artefacts. It seemed to me there was a certain uncomplicated honesty about their love of these pieces.

They had never been office-holders of the Oceanic Art Society, to which they had belonged for decades, nor did they style themselves as eminent collectors. They had been members for a while of the Australian Museum, Sydney’s greatest collection of their sort of ethnographic material, but they had no specialist relationships with its curators. Indeed, it seems their extensive collection remained under the radar to most of the professionals in the field.

Passion often extracts a price. Erwin described the disruption when their previous home of many years was sold by the landlord. Dismantling, packaging and moving their immense collection, and reinstalling it in their next rented home, was a drama from which they were still recovering. I greatly valued my invitation to view it since access was rarely granted.

Of course many of us acquire items of cultural and aesthetic appeal during our travels, and keep them as mementos. For this unassuming family of modest means who, it seems, put most of their resources into collecting, that collection was their portal into worlds they weren’t able to visit themselves.

‘Collecting is both an act of reverence and of its opposite, possession,’ wrote Sydney architect Elizabeth Farrell in a recent article about the renaissance of public libraries – before concluding that ‘some things are beyond price’. That’s true of all kinds of collections, including books, which for some of us are also hugely collectible. But not uncommonly they are a source of angst as our books threaten to take over whole rooms, or even entire houses. That inevitably leads to dilemmas as we contemplate the need to declutter.

So it was for Erwin and Henriette Kok. They could see a time arriving when changing circumstances might require a move into a different type of accommodation.

It demanded that they reassess their custodianship of the extraordinary Willem Kok Collection. In what struck me as an almost unimaginable act of courage combined with anguish, Erwin and Henriette made the decision to dispose of the collection as the pandemic was unfolding.

Not long after my visit, in one single, intense, day-long session, they saw the vast majority of their beloved collection sold. Item by item, or in small groupings of related objects, 564 lots went under the auctioneer’s gavel to eager collectors either bidding in person at the auction house or on the internet.

Looking for positives in this, I like to think that among the many traders, investors and probably some museum and gallery curators who acquired items from the Willem Kok Collection, significant parts of it went into smaller private collections. Into the hands of people who, like Erwin, Henriette and Willem before them, will simply derive immense pleasure from their beauty, craftsmanship and the human purposes and meanings they embody.

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 Asian neighbours.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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A second transportation The early colony of Norfolk Island

A view of Sydney on Norfolk Island

by John Eyre, c 1805. The first settlement on Norfolk Island was named after its parent town in New South Wales. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

Call number V8/Norf I/1

Just three weeks after European colonists arrived in Port Jackson, New South Wales, a small group of convicts and officials underwent a second transportation – to uninhabited Norfolk Island, more than 1,600 kilometres away, where the endemic flora and fauna soon bore the brunt of this sudden human influx. The following extract is from the new book Australia & the Pacific: A history by Ian Hoskins.

THE PLACE THE TRANSPORTEES INHABITED was very different from the one they left. The soil covering the ancient sandstone of Port Jackson was barren compared to the ‘luxurious’ younger loam on Norfolk.

But where Sydney had a huge, safe waterway, the island offered only perilously exposed bays. The former was made over millennia as three waterways cut through the old stone and created a valley which filled with sea water after the last glacial melt. Norfolk Island was the peak of a volcanic mount. There were small coral reefs but the place was either too young or too far south for a protective ring of coral like those surrounding the Tahitian and other Pacific islands.

Norfolk supported a jungle of rainforest and pine, ‘choaked up with underwood’, and thickets of the flax that James Cook described. Islands are ideal incubators for species variation, as Charles Darwin later discovered on the Galapagos group. Consequently, the Norfolk Island pine was different from that which grew on other Pacific islands. The palm Rhopalostylis baueri occurred only there and on one of the Kermadec Islands. The flax plant, Phormium tenax, grew also in New Zealand but not in Australia. Botanists debate over whether or not it is native to Norfolk. It may have been delivered by birds or by the Polynesians who arrived hundreds of years earlier.

There was a sub-species of Boobook owl, related to that on New Zealand, and a petrel, possibly a sub-species of Pterodroma solandri. That bird, about the size of a large pigeon, came to nest in burrows on the island’s highest peak – which the colonists named Mount Pitt – each March. The petrels ranged across the entire north Pacific from Japan to the Aleutian Islands, tucking their webbed feet beneath their tails and soaring like Shearwaters just above the sea. They could alight on the waves, ‘pattering’ in a manner that gave them their name, petrel – after St Peter, the apostle who walked on water. Legs suited to ocean landings and take-offs were less useful on land, where the birds were barely able to support their own weight. So, the petrels of Norfolk crash-landed and did their best to crawl to a burrow, lay an egg and nurture their single chick. John Hunter described a mountain so riddled with holes that walking up it was difficult.

The petrels’ feeding range was great but they only bred on the safely uninhabited Norfolk and nearby Lord Howe islands. Consequently, they came in the hundreds of thousands to a sanctuary without predators except, perhaps, the Pacific rat.

The balanced cycle which had developed over millennia ended in 1789 when the breeding season coincided with the arrival of the colonists. The sudden presence of so many birds, vulnerable on their land legs and unused to predation, was a boon to settlers who had yet to harvest their first crops. The birds’ misfortune was the colonists’ good luck and the slaughter for food began almost immediately. Such was its rapacity that Ralph Clark, one of the officers, was moved to keep a tally in his daily journal. The numbers kept climbing in the journal’s margin. By mid-July 1790 Clark had counted 172,184 birds killed. The actual figure was undoubtedly much higher as not all kills were reported. Added to this was egg gathering and habitat destruction so that there was no chance of population renewal. The last Norfolk petrel was probably dead by 1800.

Just as they can nurture diversity by virtue of their isolation, island environments are quickly destroyed with sudden impacts such as the arrival of predators, both human and non-human. Then they turn from sanctuary to abattoir. The petrel may not have been the island’s first extinction. A ‘ground dove’, which John Hunter painted around 1790, was never recorded again.

This may have been the ‘pigeon’ which Hunter noted in 1788 was ‘so tame that we knocked them down with sticks’. On his second visit in 1791 Hunter found that the local cabbage palm had already been ‘almost destroyed’ by clearing, presumably with dire consequences for the parrots that depended upon its fruit. The last of a local species of kaka, related to two others in New Zealand, reportedly died in a cage in London in 1851. The great ornithologist and illustrator John Gould saw one of these parrots, tame and uncaged, hopping about a Sydney house in 1838. He did not draw or paint it so its features are known only through brief descriptions.

The colonists called the petrel the ‘Mount Pitt Bird’, after its breeding site, and the ‘Bird of Providence’ for the role it played in sustaining them. Given Norfolk’s important part in alleviating conditions in Sydney, both by lessening the burden and eventually providing food for the mainland, it might be argued that the petrel rescued the larger colony. It was perhaps the first of innumerable and terrible ecological costs paid so that Britain’s Pacific outpost might survive and prosper.

The seals of Bass Strait, the Pacific Ocean’s Southern Right and Sperm whales and Fiji’s sandalwood would all follow soon enough.

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Such was the wholesale destruction of birds and habitat that Major Ross introduced laws to prevent over-harvesting

Such was the wholesale destruction of birds and habitat that Major Ross [the Lieutenant-Governor of Norfolk Island] introduced laws to prevent over-harvesting.

Ross’s impulse was to both preserve a valuable resource and prevent unnecessary cruelty. Live birds were being eviscerated to extract their single egg, which some Islanders enjoyed more than their flesh, then left to die.

Upon discovering this, Ross amended the law to forbid killing birds ‘Cruely and Wantenly’.

His sentiment, shared by other officers, reflected the rise in empathy for living things which, in 18th-century Britain, paralleled that for fellow human beings. In the mid-1700s poets and philosophers began challenging the long-held disregard for animal suffering – the ‘cruelty of indifference’ as described in Keith Thomas’s pioneering study. This was one of the lessons of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which the pointless slaying of an albatross leads to the becalming of a ship in the Pacific and the subsequent loss of the entire company bar the mariner.

That Coleridge had earlier addressed an ass as his ‘brother’ in verse is further evidence of the changing mindset. Laws would follow poetic revelations more gradually in the 19th century. But, as the historian Tim Bonyhady has argued, Ross’s legal moves against indifferent cruelty on Norfolk predated legal measures in England, which itself led Europe in animal welfare.

On that small Pacific island, where the environmental impacts of humans were immediately obvious, the connection between ‘man and the natural world’ – again a quote from Thomas – was clear enough to warrant codifying a conservation and humanitarian ethic.

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Just as they can nurture diversity by virtue of their isolation, island environments are quickly destroyed with sudden impacts such as the arrival of predators, both human and non-human

01 Cordyline obtecta, commonly known as the Norfolk Island cabbage tree, from Flora of Norfolk Island, 1790s, attributed to John Doody. This plant, native to the island, was almost wiped out by clearing in the first few years of settlement. Dixson Library, State Library of New State Wales. Call number SAFE/ DL PXX 1 02 This painting of the Norfolk Island ground dove by John Hunter is the only known image of the species.

From an album of watercolour drawings of Australian natural history, owned by Robert Anderson Seton, c 1800. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Call number SAFE/ PXA 914

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Islands are ideal incubators for species variation, as Charles Darwin later discovered on the Galapagos group

Phormium tanax [tenax], from Flora of Norfolk Island, 1790s, attributed to John Doody. Dixson Library, State Library of New State Wales. Call number SAFE/ DL PXX 1

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The fate of the Norfolk petrel, however, suggests Ross’s regulation was largely ignored. That in itself is interesting, for this was a penal colony – part of Robert Hughes’s dreadful gulag. One might assume a lieutenant governor’s will was easily enforced by the threat and delivery of punishment. Clearly there were many transgressions; convicts were hunting birds and collecting eggs to easily fill an empty stomach or simply because they preferred the taste of the tender fishflavoured flesh and yolk to other meals on offer.

The comparison with the bleak reality of salt pork rations in Port Jackson could not be starker.

Ross’s island regime was noteworthy for other reasons.

He represented, in the words of Alan Atkinson, ‘the other way for European Australia, the alternative to Phillip’s way’. At Port Jackson the governor had instituted a strict, though not arbitrary or simply sadistic, hierarchy. He was a benign despot who took seriously the instructions that stipulated everything produced by convict labour was to be considered public property. Phillip was sparing in his allocation of land. He did not make the first grants until February 1792, just months before he left. Confronted immediately by an unsuitable site at Botany Bay, and an ongoing food crisis at Port Jackson, Phillip’s priority was survival. The governor did not act beyond the authority granted him but Ralph Clark, the man who later tallied the bird kill on Norfolk, was surprised when the commission was read out before everyone at Sydney Cove: ‘I never herd of any one Single Person having So great a Power in Vested in him as the Governor …’

That private remark is a glimpse into the popular understanding of power and authority and the willingness to question it. It was a faint echo perhaps of the debates that had led to the American colonists parting company with the ‘tyrannical’ King George, who they felt had trampled their established rights and freedoms 14 years earlier.

Robert Ross governed differently. Though often portrayed as a difficult man, Clark described him warmly and in terms of a friend. Ross certainly accommodated the frailties of his junior officer, both before and during their shared experience on Norfolk Island. In his close reading of the colonial power plays, Atkinson has called Ross a ‘talker’ rather than an administrator, someone who sought personal confidence and returned good will and obedience with trust. But his was a personal exercise of power so that perceptions of betrayal were also taken badly.

The different approach to governing was displayed as soon as the company of colonists landed on Norfolk, after HMS Sirius had been wrecked delivering them to the rocky wave-swept coast there. Amidst this catastrophe Ross declared martial law. Knowing this exceeded his powers, he sought the compliance of both free people and convicts with ‘voluntary oaths’ of obedience beneath the king’s colours. As Atkinson has noted, it was the only time that an ‘entire community’ in Australia would take part in ‘a fundamental act of government’ before the passage of universal suffrage in the colony of South Australia more than a century later.

The paradox of martial law introduced by consensus has perhaps served to disguise the novelty of the action. Ross followed this by allocating land to groups of convicts to farm as if it were their own. The intent was to instil a sense that all had a stake in the success of the venture – to ‘cultivate’, in his own words, ‘a desire of settling for life’. The echoes here of Robinson Crusoe and his successor on that fictional Pacific island are clear.

The experiment came to an end in November 1791 when Ross was relieved of his command by the man he had replaced, Philip Gidley King – returned to Norfolk as lieutenant governor, having spent three months in England. A ‘prot.g.’ [protegée] of Phillip, King was an administrator of lists and central control.

In Atkinson’s words, he had ‘aimed to prune’ the ‘spirit of commonwealth’ seeded by Ross. On Norfolk he closed a newly opened theatre because of an incident of violence. He reduced the membership of the Settlers and Landholders Society, which the Islanders themselves had established in 1793 with a view to regulating prices and providing mutual benefit.

King found the levelling spirit of the age ‘insidious’.

Yet faced with a population that was growing naturally and through migration from the mainland, the lieutenant governor also encouraged individual self-reliance by allocating land to convicts to work in their own time.

They built schools, and by 1796, 75 children were in attendance. The younger ones knew only the island as their home.

Dr Ian Hoskins has worked as an academic, public historian and museum curator in Sydney for 25 years. Since 2003 he has been the North Sydney Council Historian.

For reasons of space, footnotes have been omitted from this extract.

The images used here do not feature in the book.

A review of this book appears on pages 85–87.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Antipodean passages Joseph Conrad in Australia

As a teenager, Joseph Conrad began a seafaring career that lasted two decades, took him around the globe and inspired the books that confirmed him as one of the great maritime writers.

Ian Burnet looks at Conrad’s trips to Australia.

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‘From the heart of the fair city, could be seen the woolclippers lying at Circular Quay … part of one of the finest, most beautiful, vast, and safe bays the sun ever shone upon’

Duke of Sutherland at Circular Quay, Sydney. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

Public domain

JÓZEF TEODOR KONRAD KORZENIOWSKI left Poland at the age of 16 for the port of Marseille in France, where he obtained work on ships and eventually joined a British ship which landed him at Lowestoft in England. A period of working on colliers followed until he was ready to sail the world’s oceans.

A London shipping agent was able to find him a berth on the Duke of Sutherland, a wool clipper bound for Sydney, Australia.

With his limited British sailing experience and limited English language, Konrad could not have signed on as an able seaman and his position was as an apprentice at nominal pay.

Like all the young men, he was required to climb the rigging and set or furl the sails, depending on the wind conditions, while balancing 100 feet (30 metres) above a pitching ship on a small foot-rope. Clearly, it was not a job for the weak or the faint-hearted. Life at sea was always dangerous and Conrad wrote in An Outcast of the Islands: Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smile, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible, a thing of love, a thing of fear.

It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith, then with quick and causeless anger it killed … strong men with childlike hearts were faithful to it, were content to live by its grace – to die by its will.

Heavy gales and unfavourable winds slowed their progress and Konrad suffered from ‘imperfect oilskins which let water in at every seam’. So, it was a relief when the Duke of Sutherland finally reached Sydney on 31 January 1879. After unloading, the ship docked on the west side of Circular Quay which provided easy access to the crowded streets, markets, pubs and brothels in the area known as The Rocks. With no money and no friends in Sydney, Konrad chose to remain on board ship and earn his keep in return for sitting at the gang plank all night as night watchman. The tinkle of pianos and the chorus of a song from the many pubs floated through the clear night air. From his position dockside he could see the seamier side of the port and he wrote in Mirror of the Sea: I do not regret the experience. The night humours of the town descended from the street to the waterside in the still watches of the night: larrikins rushing down in bands to settle some quarrel by a stand-up fight, away from the police, in an indistinct ring half hidden by piles of cargo, with the sound of blows, a groan now and then.

He described how ‘From the heart of the fair city, could be seen the wool-clippers lying at Circular Quay … a dock that was an integral part of one of the finest, most beautiful, vast, and safe bays the sun ever shone upon’. A plaque with this description has been placed at the same position on the dockside where he spent his time in Sydney. The Duke of Sutherland had a prolonged stay of five months in Sydney before departing on 6 July 1879 for a voyage around Cape Horn with bales of wool and hides and other assorted cargo, which allowed the young Konrad to complete his first circumnavigation of the world.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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On his return to London he was sufficiently confident of his seamanship and his knowledge of the English language to sit the examination for his second mate’s certificate in June 1880. At this time the British Merchant Navy was the most powerful commercial entity in the world and British ship-owners controlled about 70 per cent of world trade. Konrad had now earned the right to serve as an officer and, importantly, he completed his examination in the English language and henceforth he would use it with increasing assurance. He would now sail as a British merchant seaman under the Red Ensign and he wrote in A Personal Record: ‘The Red Ensign – the symbolic, protecting, warm bit of bunting flung wide upon the seas, and destined for so many years to be the only roof over my head’.

In August 1880 he joined the Loch Etive, a smart clipper but with rather fuller lines, which permitted the stowage of bulkier cargo on its ‘general out, wool home’ voyages to Australia. Its captain promoted his third mate to second mate and made Konrad his new third mate.

This position was as a spare watch-keeper, but during the voyage the second mate fell ill and Konrad was promoted to ‘officer of the watch’, which would have been good experience for him in his first voyage as a junior officer on a British ship. The Loch Etive’s outward voyage lasted 94 days. It arrived in Sydney without incident. After loading with wool and following a stormy voyage home Konrad was back in London by April 1881.

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Konrad gained his first mate’s certificate in December 1884 and after further service gained his master’s certificate in 1886. Although this did not guarantee him an immediate command, he had served the necessary sea time and it was prudent to prepare for command as this could be sprung upon him at any time.

This occurred in January 1888 after the captain of the Otago died at sea during a voyage to Bangkok to load a full cargo of teak logs for Sydney. Konrad happened to be in Singapore waiting for a voyage back to England and was suddenly offered his first command. After departing Bangkok and taking on medicine and some new crew in Singapore, the Otago sailed down the Indian Ocean and around Cape Leeuwin. To sail the ‘Roaring Forties’ was a challenging and invigorating experience and Conrad describes crossing the Great Australian Bight in The Mirror of the Sea: It was a hard, long gale, grey clouds and green sea, heavy weather undoubtedly, but still what a sailor would call manageable. Under two lower topsails and a reefed foresail the barque seemed to race with a long steady sea that did not becalm her in the troughs. The solemn thundering combers caught up with her from astern, passed with a fierce boiling up of foam level with the bulwarks, swept on ahead with a swish and a roar; and the little vessel, dipping her jib-boom into the tumbling froth, would go running in a smooth glassy hollow, a deep valley between two ridges of sea, hiding the horizon ahead and astern.

‘The solemn thundering combers caught up with her from astern, passed with a fierce boiling up of foam level with the bulwarks, swept on ahead with a swish and a roar’

01 Otago at sea. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.

Public domain 02 A plaque to Conrad on the Sydney Writers’ Walk. Image Ian Burnet

The Otago discharged part of its cargo of logs in Sydney and the remainder in Melbourne, where it then loaded 2,750 bags of wheat before returning to Sydney.

The Otago was then chartered to sail to Mauritius for a cargo of sugar and Konrad sought the permission of the owners to take the more difficult, but more direct route to Mauritius by sailing north through the Torres Strait, rather than trying to sail the Southern Ocean against the prevailing westerlies. The Otago entered the Torres Strait through the Bligh Passage at the northernmost edge of the Great Barrier Reef and, after stopping at Thursday Island to await a favourable tide, exited through the Prince of Wales Channel. The Otago returned from Mauritius around Cape Leeuwin to Melbourne and Sydney with its cargo of sugar, and a few short trips from Sydney to Adelaide to load wheat followed.

Knowing Konrad’s love of tall ships and oceans it seems inconceivable that he would volunteer to take command of a river boat in the Upper Congo in 1890. But, after his Congo misadventures, service on the Torrens restored his health and he served on two round voyages to Australia from 1891 until 1893. The Torrens was a magnificent clipper of about 1,200 tons, a fully rigged ship with good lines that sailed well. Built for the Australian wool trade, it was one of the best and fastest sailing ships ever built and set an unbroken record by sailing from Plymouth to Adelaide in 64 days. To serve in such a ship, even as Chief Officer, was a great opportunity.

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Once the ship arrived in Adelaide it was all about wool.

Everywhere there were huge bales of wool, brought down from the back blocks and piled in great stacks in the warehouses before they could be transferred to the Torrens for the return voyage.

The clipper’s master, Captain Cope, was considering transferring to steam and there seemed a chance that Konrad might succeed him as captain of the Torrens.

It was a position he would have welcomed, but in the end it did not happen. On 15 October 1893 he disembarked at New South Dock in London and while walking down the quay he turned back to take a long look at the Torrens, unaware that it would be the last sailing ship on which he was to serve and this his last voyage to Australia. At the age of 35 he could now concentrate on his writing, and Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski’s first book, Almayer’s Folly, was published in April 1895 under the name of Joseph Conrad.

Ian Burnet has spent 30 years living, working and travelling in Indonesia and is fascinated by the diverse history and culture of the archipelago. This is reflected in his books Spice Islands; East Indies; Archipelago – A Journey Across Indonesia; Where Australia Collides with Asia and The Tasman Map. His newest work, Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages, was reviewed in Signals 136 (September 2021).

Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages is available for purchase from the museum’s Store and for research in the Vaughan Evans Library.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Containerisation A sailor’s lament

Half a century ago, the maritime world changed forever with the introduction of the now-ubiquitous 20-foot container, recalls Peter Hay.

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Author Peter Hay spent three happy years crewing aboard Australian Venture, seen here entering Sydney Harbour.

Image J Y Freeman – R A Priest/ NAA Collection

When I signed up, travel was one of the main incentives to go to sea

IN 1969, AT LUNCHTIME on a lovely spring day, I was in the garden of the Watson’s Bay Hotel, overlooking Sydney Harbour. A new ship came around South Head, and it looked a picture. It was one of the first Overseas Container Line ships – Endeavour Bay, I think. The accommodation and funnel still had a few curves, and the containers were only stacked four high, which give it a balanced look. Its green hull really set off the ship’s good lines. It was discussed for a couple of minutes and then the conversation reverted to the forthcoming cricket season.

The Americans had invented shipping containers and Australia launched the world’s first purpose-built cellular container ship, Kooringa, in 1965. However, the concept really took off once overseas vessels began carrying the now-ubiquitous 20-foot (6-metre) containers.

Containerisation arguably marks the biggest shift in capital and labour since the industrial revolution nearly three centuries ago. Until containers arrived in Australia, comparatively small bulk carriers brought iron ore from the west and south coasts to the steel mills on the east coast. We made our own steel and then built our own ships, rolling stock and most of our heavy industrial equipment. Likewise, we made most of our consumer goods, cars, whitegoods and clothes.

Since Australian tankers also brought Australian oil to and from Australian refineries, the nation was largely self-sufficient – only luxury goods or specialised equipment were imported.

These days, thanks to the cost efficiencies of containerisation, it is cheaper to ship all the raw materials overseas to where the labour costs are lowest, then bring the finished goods back in containers.

The fact that this process is not good for the environment is only just beginning to be recognised.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Containerisation arguably marks the biggest shift in capital and labour since the industrial revolution nearly three centuries ago

01 Loading cargo ‘BC’ (Before Containers): Wharfies positioning wool bales in the cargo hold of the Magdalene Vinnen, Samuel J Hood Studio, 1933. ANMM Collection 00035586 02 Loading cargo ‘AD’ (After Derricks): The first container ship to visit Australia was Encounter Bay, which arrived at Fremantle, WA, on 28 March 1969. Image courtesy Fremantle Port Authority

Containers have also reshaped the geography of our cities. With the highly artificial exception of Canberra, all our major cities were built around ports.

The wharves came first and the towns radiated outwards. With the large areas and extra depth needed for container terminals, the older wharves became too small. Many of the terminals have moved to ‘greenfield’ sites, sometimes on reclaimed land outside the city.

The once-numerous wharfies have now been largely replaced by mechanisation. Their harbourside cottages and terraces have been snapped up as waterfront homes, while the derelict city wharves became prime real estate.

The rollicking, roistering dockside boozers have now been sterilised, sanitised and gentrified. The Rock and Roll Hotel in Woolloomooloo (now the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel) and Monty’s in Pyrmont (now the Pyrmont Bridge Hotel, close to the museum) are not what they used to be. At least they are still going – Covid-19 restrictions notwithstanding. Jim Buckley’s Newcastle Hotel, among others which I used to visit, has long since gone. It should have earned a heritage listing on account of the people who drank there – among them Arthur Streeton, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Norman Lindsay, Richard Walsh and Richard Neville.

Perhaps I rubbed shoulders with them – I may even have spilled beer over their shoes!

Back at sea, in 1959 my first circumnavigation in the Saxon Star took eight months. Even though it made only 11 knots, it still gave us many happy weeks in ports on four continents. When every crate or bale had to be manually handled into the centre of a hatch, then hooked onto a wire which was hoisted by the derricks, it proved to be a lengthy process. In some countries the work ethic of the wharfies greatly lengthened the process. Fast forward 20 years and my next circumnavigation was on a ‘box’ boat, the Australian Venture. It took only 86 days. Even at nearly 23 knots, we still spent the majority of time at sea. We did 15 ports, and a second night in any city was a rarity.

With a schedule like that, the ‘young bloods’ on board never had a chance to sample local harbourside ‘culture’.

At about the same time as 20-foot containers started going round the world, the first Boeing 707 – followed soon after by the first 747 – trundled down the runway in Seattle. Until then, air transport was very expensive and most business passengers and immigrants went by sea in passenger liners. With the growing economies of scale, it became cheaper to fly for business and increasingly for pleasure. The last Ashes team to travel to England by ship was captained by Richie Benaud – in 1961. To stay in business, the passenger liners had to become cruise liners.

When I signed up, travel was one of the main incentives to go to sea. There was very little overseas tourism and apart from other sailors, we enjoyed many ports largely to ourselves. You had to learn to speak a bit of the local language, because not many of the residents spoke English. You had to eat their food and drink their grog because that’s all there was. ‘Abroad’ used to be different; now it just seems to be the next suburb in the Global Village. I would love to go back to the Antarctic, but I wonder about the changes. Port Lockroy, an old British base, has been restored as a museum. Great idea, but with two tourist ships a day at the height of the season – plus a souvenir shop – it will not be the same.

It’s not often that a seemingly insignificant fact can mark a turning point in your life. That green-hulled ship in 1969 certainly signalled a new era of seafaring. In my time at sea, the first 13 years BC (Before Containers) turned out to be much more interesting and varied than my subsequent 41 years AD (After Derricks).

Still, I count myself lucky that I had that baker’s dozen of adventurous years.

Peter Hay is a retired merchant mariner and pilot.

The original version of this article was published in The Log, quarterly magazine of the Nautical Association of Australia, Volume 50, Number 3 (2017).

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From ship to shore Pilot Vessel Mavis III

The Australian National Maritime Museum’s grant and internship program, the Maritime Museums of Australia Project Support Scheme (MMAPSS), offers funding and assistance to regional museums and organisations. Last year the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum in Victoria received support to develop a Vessel Management Plan for its recently acquired pilot boat, Mavis III. By Carolyn McKinnon.

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PV Mavis III arrives, 19 March 2020.

All images courtesy Queenscliffe Maritime Museum

Australian National Maritime Museum

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The character of Queenscliff is shaped by its early-19th-century maritime connections and its location near the entrance to Port Phillip from Bass Strait

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01 Queenscliffe Maritime Museum’s Administration Manager John Sisley (left) and John Micalleff, volunteer Collection Manager (right), during a visit from Jeff Hodgson (centre) of the Australian National Maritime Museum.

02 PV Mavis III with (left to right) Queenscliffe Maritime Museum members Captain Dean Zanoni, Jack Beazley and Daniel Cayzer.

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For more information about the Maritime Museums of Australia Project Support Scheme (MMAPSS), or to apply for a grant or internship, see sea.museum/grants, phone the coordinator on 02 9298 3743 or email mmapss@sea.museum

QUEENSCLIFF IS A SMALL VICTORIAN coastal town popular as a holiday hotspot, but it is also a town whose community is proud of its vital contribution to the safety of Victoria’s maritime industry for more than 180 years.

Queenscliffe Maritime Museum Inc has been helping to preserve this legacy and history since 1986, and last year its Committee of Management welcomed to its collection the pilot vessel Mavis III, which was donated by the Port Phillip Sea Pilots service.1 The history of the pilot service is a key platform of the museum’s collection. Conserving the vessel for display is a new challenge for the maritime museum volunteers, and one that is being supported with expert advice from the Australian National Maritime Museum to develop a Vessel Management Plan (VMP).

Three days after PV Mavis III was craned onto the site in March 2020, Australia and our museums went into the first Covid-19 lockdown. When borders opened between Victoria and New South Wales in May this year, Jeff Hodgson, Assistant Fleet Manager from the Australian National Maritime Museum, was finally able to make a site visit to assess the vessel and begin the plan. This will provide the blueprint to guide the volunteers in their vision for conserving Mavis III. In a town with long maritime traditions, the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum is lucky to have among its members its vice-president, Captain Dean Zanoni, a current sea pilot descended from a Queenscliff fishing family, who is passionate about introducing children to the pilot vessel and his maritime heritage. Jack Beazley, a life member of the museum, was shipwright for the Port Phillip Sea Pilots for 50 years, and Daniel Cayzer, from Cayzer Boats, is a fourth-generation Queenscliff boatbuilder. Their advice and assistance on the project will help to continue Queenscliff’s maritime traditions.

The character of Queenscliff is shaped by its early-19thcentury maritime connections and its location near the entrance to Port Phillip from Bass Strait. Migration and the gold rush increased shipping to Victoria’s ports of Melbourne and Geelong during the 1840s and 50s.

The dangers of entering the bay, and navigating the ‘Rip’ into Port Phillip, grew. In response, the first pilot service began with George Tobin in 1839, launching whaleboats from Queenscliff’s shore. Lighthouses were built to provide safe navigation lines and tide information, and the pilots and local fishermen manned the first lifeboat rescue service in the town.

Today, two pilot services operate 24-hour pilotage through the Heads, bringing some of the largest container ships into Melbourne. A vessel traffic service continues to watch from Point Lonsdale lighthouse; vehicle and passenger ferries link Sorrento and Queenscliff across the bay; and boatbuilding and maintenance continue at Queenscliff Harbour.

The Port Phillip Sea Pilots operate their pilot station from the same beach as the first pilot did 182 years ago.

The Port Phillip Sea Pilots are the longest continuous sea pilot service in Victoria and when they retired the cruising pilot station Wyuna in the 1970s, a new shoreto-ship service began with fast launches, reducing pilot transfer times. PV Mavis III was built in 1994 and served 26 years at the Heads. The bare hull, built by Chivers Marine in Western Australia, was completely fitted out in the Queenscliff workshops of the pilot service to customise it to the conditions of the Rip and Bass Strait.

The Queenscliffe Maritime Museum displays artefacts from the pilot services, including the Wyuna wooden workboat, an extract of the logbook of the Mavis (1875) sailing pilot vessel, a model of The Rip pilot vessel, and video and oral histories from pilots and launch masters.

With PV Mavis III joining the collection, the volunteers and staff are keen to interpret the ‘ride through the Rip’ experience of pilots transferring through the Heads to the ships, with visitors boarding the vessel and enjoying audio-visual presentations.

Carolyn McKinnon is the secretary of the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum.

For more information, please contact maritimequeenscliffe.org.au/ The Queenscliffe Maritime Museum was previously profiled in Signals No 106 (March 2014).

1 There are two correct spellings: Queenscliff (the town) and Queenscliffe (the borough).

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Museum events

Summer at the museum

Members event: Speakers talk

Sleuthing fun

Sail into a world where imagination meets the sea at the Maritime Museum this summer, with exhibitions, vessels, creative workshops, performances, tours, trails and more. It’s a whole lot of fun for all members of the family!

William Dawes – marine, astronomer, engineer

Murder mystery at sea

2–3.30 pm Friday 17 December The voyage of the First Fleet from England to Botany Bay was more than a convenient way to rid Britain of its convicts. Join Richard de Grijs on the trail of William Dawes, astronomer, engineer, surveyor and ordnance officer – from his arrival in 1788 to beyond his death and up to the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932.

6 pm and 8 pm Fridays and Saturdays 14 January–5 February Be part of an immersive experience on board the navy destroyer HMAS Vampire.

A mysterious SOS: the captain and officers are dead – an encrypted message is sent.

Intrigued? Join a crack team in the middle of the Pacific Ocean during the Cold War to help solve this murder mystery at sea. sea.museum/murder-mystery

Free for Members and one guest.

Bookings essential; see opposite

Ginspiration

Harbour cruises

Musical cruise

Ladies with spirit

Sail on Duyfken

Acoustic life of boatsheds

6 pm and 8 pm Fridays 17 December and 14, 21, 28 January

Visit website for sailing dates

20–23 January

Experience one of the rarest ships in the world while soaking up the sunset and sails on Sydney Harbour. Cruise past Barangaroo, Circular Quay, the Opera House, Garden Island and other famous sites around the harbour as you relax and enjoy a gourmet snack box and drinks while feeling the sea breeze, hearing stories of life on the ocean and watching the crew replicate 17th-century sailing.

The waterways west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge provide the backdrop for a unique maritime experience.

Board one of Sydney’s historic Rosman ferries – along with a company of musicians, sound artists, shipwrights and deckhands – and embark on a sonic expedition to the unsung places of our iconic working harbour. During a series of original performances inspired by its boatsheds, workshops and waterways, you’ll sink into the varying soundscapes of places shaped by time, tide and trade.

Are you a passionate consumer of craft spirits or want a ‘gintastic’ start to your weekend? Then enter the world of Ladies of Spirit to explore the talented women producing amazing gins across New South Wales.

Historically, women were skilled in botany, fermenting and distilling for medicinal purposes and, without a doubt, for drinking too. So join us on board the docked Edwardian steam yacht Ena for a fabulous and fascinating delve into the world of gin!

sea.museum/sail-duyfken ANMM image

sea.museum/boatsheds Image courtesy Acoustic Boatsheds

Museum events

Members event: Speakers talk

Members event: Speakers talk

Bass and Flinders

Melbourne and Voyager anniversary event

2–3.30 pm Friday 28 January Find out about the backgrounds and legacy of these two famous Australian maritime explorers, their fates and their voyages of exploration in small boats around the coasts of New South Wales, Tasmania and Terra Australis.

Museum speaker Ron Ray will be your presenter.

Free for Members and one guest.

Bookings essential; see right

2–3.30 pm Thursday 10 February In February 1964 a collision between the Daring class destroyer HMAS Voyager and the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne resulted in the loss of 82 lives. How and why did the tragedy occur? Could it have been avoided and what happened to the people involved? Join us on the anniversary of the event to hear Gillian Lewis, from the museums Speakers Group, explain all.

To book Member events, you can either email memberevents@sea.museum and tell us which event you wish to attend, and who is coming. Alternatively, you can phone 02 9297 3777.

For all other events, please see our website for further details and how to book.

Free for Members and one guest.

Bookings essential; see right HMAS Melbourne’s damaged bow.

Image Australian War Memorial NAVY15880

Live performances

Members event: Author talk

New beginnings – Freedom sessions

Christine Helliwell in conversation with Brendon Nelson

21 January

2–3.30 pm Friday 18 February

Freedom Sessions feature performers from refugee, migrant and First Nations backgrounds. Each session comprises a live performance plus interviews and discussion led by Shyamla Eswaran.

Semut – The untold story of a secret Australian operation in WWII Borneo is the new book by Christine Helliwell, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University. It examines Z Special Unit’s Operation Semut, conducted in the final months of World War II. In this event, Christine will be in conversation with Brendan Nelson, former director of the Australian War Memorial.

Featured artists include DJ Ayebatonye Abrakasa (Irregular Fit), hip-hop artist Barkaa and musician Bukhu. sea.museum/freedom-sessions Image courtesy Luke Currie-Richardson

Free for Members and one guest.

Bookings essential; see right

All events are subject to NSW Covid-19 public health orders. For updates, please check our website sea.museum.

Museum events

Kids and family programs

For carers with children 0–18 months

Family workshops

Summer school holiday fun

Seaside Strollers

Underwater drones

20 December–27 January

Monthly sessions

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.

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

11.30 am and 2.30 pm Wednesdays and Sundays 5–23 January (30-minute sessions)

For ages 2–5 years and carers

Access program

Youth workshop

Mini Mariners

Sensory-friendly Sundays

Claymation creations

Tuesdays during term and one Saturday a month

Monthly sessions

12 and 13 January

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.

Discover how to produce your own stop-motion digital and clay animations inspired by our exhibitions in this fun-filled one-day workshop.

Explore summer exhibitions including Sea of Light and Wildlife Photographer of the Year for inspiration, and learn techniques in building fun and engaging visual narratives frame by frame.

A new theme every month.

Theatrical tours, creative free play, craft and story time in our themed activity area.

Group booking options available

Explore below the surface of the harbour with our underwater drones. Have fun testing your gaming skills by challenging family and friends to see who’s the best U-drone pilot. Underwater drone sessions include a private workshop with our ocean-science educators and access to amazing underwater footage highlights to keep and share.

Finished works will also be showcased on our YouTube channel.

For ages 5–12 and carers

Immersive adventure

Youth workshop

Kids on Deck

Sea of Light

Photo pros

Sundays during term and daily during school holidays

Multiple sessions daily 26 December–30 January

19 and 20 January

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

This illuminating interactive installation from Patch Theatre brings together magic and light with a gentle soundscape to create a unique sea adventure for the whole family. Draw and stencil your own voyage in light as you traverse the sea with a UV torch as your paintbrush. Steer ships that leave glowing paths of light in their wake as you sail them across the sea floor.

Then dive through bubbles below the surface to uncover glowing inflatables in hidden reef worlds.

Visit sea.museum/kids for further details on all our family events and activities over summer.

Take your photography skills to the next level in this one-day intensive course.

Be inspired by the museum’s scenic surrounds as you go on outdoor photo shoots and master the art of shooting dark indoor spaces, moving subjects, macro photography and more.

Learn to use manual modes on a digital SLR camera as well as photo editing skills.

Have your finished work displayed in a special exhibition at the museum.

sea.museum/sea-of-light

Image courtesy Nat Rogers 60

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Exhibitions

Ocean Wonders From 1 December

Over the past two years, Schmidt Ocean Institute has collaborated with research institutions from across Australia and the globe. Their mission: to explore the deepest and most remote parts of selected Australian and Pacific marine environments.

A glass octopus captured in the lights of remotely operated vehicle SuBastian.

Image courtesy Schmidt Ocean Institute

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THIS FREE OUTDOOR EXHIBITION showcases amazing discoveries found during these voyages. Stunning largeformat photographs take you into the abyss to see rare corals, whale falls, unusual creatures and new reefs.

Enjoy glimpses of submerged worlds courtesy of a high-resolution 4K camera system mounted on a deep-sea robot.

Ocean Wonders can be viewed day and night at the museum’s Wharf 7 forecourt.

It aligns with the exhibition One Ocean – Our Future.

Ocean Wonders is delivered in partnership with Schmidt Ocean Institute. sea.museum/ocean-wonders

Exhibitions

One Ocean – Our Future Until March 2022 Marvel at the wonders of the ocean and the diversity of Australia’s marine life revealed by Schmidt Ocean Institute’s 2020 circumnavigation of Australia aboard their research vessel Falkor.

Discover, manipulate and inspect 3D visualisations of five extraordinary deep-sea specimens, ponder the climate record contained in a real Antarctic ice core, hear about the impacts of a changing planet and oceans from witnesses, and learn how two centuries of analysing and examining the ocean have given us the knowledge to change things for the better. sea.museum/one-ocean

Mariw Minaral (Spiritual Patterns) 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.

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

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 56

Haenyeo: the sea women of Jeju Island

Until March 2022

Until March 2022

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.

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.

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

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

sea.museum/wildlife The Current of Life. Laurent Ballesta/ Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Sanyo Maru: A shipwreck off Arnhem Land Until 30 January 2022 In the 1930s, Japanese pearlers dived offshore and traded with Aboriginal peoples in Arnhem Land. What can we learn from the wreck of one of their largest vessels, Sanyo Maru, off the Northern Territory coast?

This project was assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program. sea.museum/sanyo-maru Image Northern Territory Heritage Branch

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

Exhibitions

Travelling Exhibitions

Remarkable – stories of Australians and their boats Age of Fishes Museum, Canowindra, NSW Until 23 December Geelong Library and Heritage Centre, VIC January 2022 Esperance Museum, WA Until February 2022 Kingston National Trust, SA Until 14 February 2022 Museum of Tasmania, Hobart Until 20 March 2022 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 across 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.

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

Brickwrecks – sunken ships in LEGO® bricks

Through a Different Lens – Cazneaux by the water

Western Australian Maritime Museum, Fremantle, WA Until 30 January 2022

Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo, NSW Dates to be confirmed

Featuring large-scale LEGO® models, real shipwreck objects, interactives and audiovisuals, Brickwrecks explores the history and archaeology of some of the world’s most famous shipwrecks including Batavia, Titanic, Vasa, Terror and Erebus.

For more than 50 years, Harold Cazneaux’s camera captured the romance and life of the world as it changed around him.

Water was the perfect medium for his experimentations with creating mood, atmosphere and impression on the picture plane. This exhibition features 42 original pieces of Cazneaux’s art.

The exhibition is developed and designed by the Western Australian Maritime Museum in partnership with the Australian National Maritime Museum and Ryan ‘The Brickman’ McNaught. sea.museum/brickwrecks

James Cameron – Challenging the deep

Sea Monsters – prehistoric ocean predators

Telus World of Science, Alberta, Canada 9 November 2021–3 April 2022

Otago Museum, New Zealand 11 December 2021–1 May 2022

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.

Created by the Australian National Maritime Museum’s USA Programs and supported by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund. Produced in association with Avatar Alliance Foundation and toured internationally by Flying Fish.

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

flyingfishexhibits.com/cameron

An exhibit in Brickwrecks showing Titanic’s bow plunging to the seabed.

Image Em Blamey 64

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Collections

Remembering Australia’s first submarine Collection objects commemorate AE1’s launch and loss

September 14 marked the 107th anniversary of the loss of Australia’s first naval submarine, AE1, and its 35 officers and crew. Dr James Hunter describes two of the museum’s unique mementos that commemorate the submarine and those who went down with it.

LAUNCHED AT THE SHIPYARD of Vickers Ltd in the English port of Barrow-in-Furness in May 1913, AE1 was commissioned at Portsmouth on 28 February the following year. Along with its sister-submarine, AE2, it made a record-breaking voyage to Australia and arrived in Sydney shortly before the outbreak of World War I. After hostilities began, both submarines joined a flotilla of Royal Australian Navy (RAN) vessels that comprised part of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force sent to capture German New Guinea (part of present-day Papua New Guinea). AE1 was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Thomas Besant RN and had a complement of 35 officers and ratings.

The town of Rabaul, on the island of New Britain, was captured on 13 September 1914. The following morning, AE1 departed Rabaul’s Blanche Bay with the Australian destroyer HMAS Parramatta (I) to patrol for German warships rumoured to be in the area.

After parting company with Parramatta in the afternoon, AE1 failed to return to Rabaul and was never seen again. The disappearance of the submarine and its crew constituted Australia’s first naval loss during wartime and had a devastating effect on the nation’s morale.

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AE2 went on to serve during the Gallipoli campaign and, after harassing Ottoman naval vessels and troop transports in the Dardanelles and Sea of Marmara, was fatally damaged by the torpedo boat Sultanhisar on 30 April 1915 (see Signals 113). All those aboard safely abandoned ship but scuttled the submarine to prevent its capture. AE2’s crew were subsequently incarcerated in Turkish prisoner-of-war camps, and four died in captivity.

AE2’s wreck site was discovered by Selçuk Kolay of Istanbul’s Rahmi M Koç Museum in June 1998. It has since undergone archaeological investigation and site preservation efforts by a collaborative team of Turkish and Australian researchers. In December 2017, a search for AE1 undertaken by another collaborative team successfully located and identified the submarine’s final resting place off Papua New Guinea’s Duke of York Islands (see Signals 122 and 124). In the months leading up to AE1’s discovery, two historically significant objects associated with the submarine were acquired by the museum and accepted into the National Maritime Collection. One is the commissioning axe used to launch AE1 and AE2 in 1913, and the other a set of service medals posthumously awarded to one of AE1’s crew.

Collections 01 AE1 Commissioning axe and plaque donated to the museum by Mr Tony Todd.

ANMM Collection 00055185 Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM 02 An unused postcard commemorating the loss of AE1. ANMM Collection 00055179

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Collections

01 The inscription on the commissioning axe.

ANMM Collection 00055185.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM 02 Service medals and AE1 sweetheart brooch belonging to Able Seaman James B Thomas RN. From left: 1914–15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal.

ANMM Collection 00055239.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

The AE1 sweetheart brooch attached to Thomas’ service medals is the only one of its kind in an Australian museum collection and may be the only surviving example in existence

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Collections

Medals awarded to AB James B Thomas RN

Shortly after learning of the commissioning axe, the museum was informed that a set of service medals belonging to an AE1 crewman was to be sold at auction in November 2017. The museum successfully bid on the medals and accepted them into the National Maritime Collection in February 2018 – only two months after AE1’s discovery. The medals were posthumously awarded to Able Seaman James Benjamin Thomas, who served as a torpedoman aboard the submarine at the time of its loss. The service medal set comprises the 1914–15 Star, British War Medal and Victory Medal. Often awarded together, the medals were known colloquially among Commonwealth servicemen as ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’.

Commissioning axe

In June 2017, the commissioning axe was kindly offered as a donation to the museum by Tony Todd, a British citizen whose mother-in-law, Winifred Knowles, bequeathed it to him on her death. A commissioning axe is an axe or hatchet used to ceremonially sever the line that holds a ship within the ways where it is constructed.

The donated example is a wooden-handled hatchet, the steel head of which has been engraved as follows: ‘WITH THIS AXE Mr H. Warton Successfully Launched Submarines AE1 & AE2 from the Works of Vickers Ltd, Barrow 22/5 & 18/6 1913’. The notation is surrounded by scrollwork and topped by an engraved scene featuring a stylised submarine upper pressure hull and fin exposed above the waterline. Flanking the submarine is a stylised maritime landscape featuring a lighthouse atop a sheer cliff at background right, and an opposing cliff face in the left background. Interestingly, the scene approximately resembles the entrance to Sydney Harbour, with the lighthouse at South Head and the promontory of North Head. A small flock of seabirds is depicted flying above the submarine.

Winifred Knowles was the daughter of Thomas Wharton (b 1892), who was employed as a saw doctor at the Vickers shipyard at Barrow-in-Furness. He was the nephew of Henry Wharton (b 1867), who was originally employed as a joiner at Vickers, but is believed to have been a charge hand by the time AE1 and AE2 were launched. As a charge hand, Henry Wharton would have been foreman for most – if not all – of the shipyard workers. This is probably why he was given the honour of symbolically launching both submarines.

Curiously, Henry Wharton’s last name is spelled erroneously (as Warton), but this is probably a transcription error that occurred when the axe head was inscribed.

Pinned to the ribbon of the British War Medal is a diamond-shaped ‘sweetheart brooch’ that belonged to Thomas’ wife, Emma. It features the name ‘AE1’ in large block letters within a central medallion, which is flanked on each side by two stylised submarine propellers.

Although sweetheart brooches bearing the names of RAN warships were common during the First World War, that attached to Thomas’ service medals is the only AE1 brooch in an Australian museum collection and may be the only surviving example in existence. Two additional objects sold with the medals included a replica copperalloy memorial plaque (or ‘death penny’) bearing James Thomas’ name and an unused archival postcard with a photograph of AE1 on its obverse side. The postcard must have been acquired after Thomas’ death, as it features the chilling notation ‘Submarine AE1 (now sunk)’.

Thomas, like many of AE1’s crew, was seconded to the RAN from the British Royal Navy. He was born at St Helen’s, Worcester, England, in May 1883 and commenced service in the RAN on 16 May 1913.

Within a year, he was training aboard submarines, and was assigned to HMAS Penguin (the base for AE1 and AE2) in May 1914. Thomas set up residence on Petersham Parade (present-day Petersham Road) in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville in preparation for the arrival of Emma and their two children, who followed him to Australia. Tragically, on the day the family disembarked at Sydney, they were met on the wharf

by Thomas’ Marrickville neighbour with a telegram advising he was missing. Although suddenly alone in a strange country with two small children, Emma Thomas remained in Australia and eventually received a war gratuity from the Commonwealth. She never remarried.

Additional members of the Thomas family emigrated to Australia from the United Kingdom in subsequent years.

Dr James Hunter is the museum’s Curator of Naval Heritage and Archaeology.

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Education

Digital days Online education during lockdown

The last two years have brought incredible change to museums across the globe.

Most have been closed for extended periods of time, with significant changes to planned events, reduced visitor numbers and most staff working from home.

Our museum, like many others, has been looking for new ways to overcome these obstacles and engage with our various audiences, writes Digital Education Project Officer Megan Baehnisch.

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Education

Gamified learning experiences have the power to capture students’ attention for extended periods of time as they learn about history

Cook’s Voyages, the second of the museum’s online educational games, highlights a First Nations perspective on Cook’s journey.

ANMM image

THE MUSEUM’S CLOSURE during lockdown has been a particularly challenging time for the Education team, as our mission to engage, educate and inspire students has been complicated by the reduced opportunities to welcome school groups onto the museum site. While nothing could totally replace the immersive experience of stepping on board the Endeavour replica, or looking closely at objects from our maritime past, we continue to engage students with our digital resources and programs. These have proven to be increasingly valuable as teachers look for content online. There is renewed interest in past projects, like the Virtual Endeavour tour, and the future will also see the team working on exciting and innovative products in the digital space.

Digital activities have quickly become a part of everyday learning, with teachers and students looking for new content while gaining confidence using online tools and programs. Perfect examples are our Virtual Excursion programs, where a museum educator engages students with museum stories and objects using video-conferencing technology. The museum has offered programs covering a variety of topics since 2013 and this recent increase in confidence has removed a substantial barrier for teachers, as they have a better understanding of the technology and are more willing to engage with virtual programs.

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Education

01 Education Officer Megan Baehnisch presents an online program. ANMM image 02 Characters such as Grognose Johnny, played by museum educator John Lamzies, enliven online educational presentations.

Image Andrew Frolows/ANMM

Our digital resources and programs have proven to be increasingly valuable as teachers look for content online

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Education

Feedback from teachers has confirmed that our presentations are engaging and interactive despite being online

The second half of 2021 provided us with unique challenges and opportunities, as many students across New South Wales and Victoria were forced into learning from home. In term three we saw unprecedented demand for our programs and we quickly adapted our delivery, allowing us to present them while we were away from the museum and to best cater for students who were also learning from home. We connected with hundreds of students for our popular history topics ‘Cook and Banks: Charting the Great Southern Land’ and ‘Through the Waves of Migration’, while our National Science Week webinars focused on ocean sciences, celebrating the amazing work the museum is doing as part of the United Nations Decade for Ocean Science and Sustainable Development. Feedback from teachers has confirmed that our presentations are engaging and interactive despite being online, and they have told us that participating in virtual excursions has helped re-motivate and engage students during the extended period of learning from home.

Online programs have always been a priority for our team as they allow us to reach students right across the country and even beyond our borders, such as our successful project delivering programs to students in the Republic of South Korea (see Signals 135, June 2021).

We also continue to trial new presentation styles for greater engagement and recently ran a successful pilot of trivia quizzes as a way to help students learn in a fun, appealing environment. This demonstrates our commitment to not just duplicate onsite programs, but to utilise new digital tools and programs to increase our online audience.

In addition to virtual excursions, video content and online resources, the museum has long been a leader in trying new ways to engage with our students online, such as immersive gamified learning experiences.

Our educational games are going from strength to strength, with the launch of Wreck Seeker in July, and Cook’s Voyages – The view from the shore winning a 2021 Museums & Galleries National Award for Interpretation, Learning & Audience Engagement.

Whether students are taking on the role of a modern maritime archaeologist or a surgeon superintendent aboard a convict vessel in 1830, these platforms have the power to capture their attention for extended periods of time as they learn about history. Cook’s Voyages also highlights a First Nations perspective of Cook’s journey, which is increasingly relevant to all Australians. These experiences continue to engage hundreds of thousands of players each year and allow us to spread stories of our maritime history.

As the education team heads into 2022, we are keen to welcome students back on site to participate in innovative and engaging programs that showcase our amazing collection and stories. At the same time, we can continue to expand our use of digital technologies to grow our online outreach, benefiting from teachers’ increased familiarity with digital technologies to reach students across Australia and the world. This dual focus will be a key element in our education strategy, and we look forward to fully exploring all the exciting opportunities now available to us thanks to digital technologies.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Social sailers and ocean racers From the humble Folkboat to a pioneering maxi yacht

The Australian Register of Historic Vessels (ARHV) continues to list interesting craft from around Australia and reveal their stories and significance to the country’s maritime heritage.

Curator for Historic Vessels David O’Sullivan profiles a diverse range of new vessels from waterways across the nation.

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Australian Register of Historic Vessels

The latest round of heritage listings also saw the launch of the register’s new classification category – ‘exemplary class vessels’

Built almost 60 years ago, Folkboat Vivienne Marie still races on Sydney Harbour. Image courtesy the boat’s owner

IN 1962 SIX DENTISTS, all members of the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, were seeking a social sailing vessel to take out on weekends. It would need to have a generous cockpit for group sailing and be of a manageable size and easy to handle for short or long distances. The answer came via Vivienne Marie and the Folkboat class.

Constructed by Danish shipwrights Hald & Johansen in Dee Why, Sydney, Vivienne Marie features a distinctive clinker-built hull, full-length keel and raised doghouse.

It was ideally suited to Sydney Harbour, and at 26 feet could be cruised or raced and taken as far as Pittwater or Botany Bay. Vivienne Marie, and similar craft such as Tup (HV000717), helped popularise the widely embraced Folkboat class, which later included the similar Stella class, represented on the ARHV by Alana (HV000650).

Vivienne Marie spent 15 years under its original shared ownership and still races today as part of the Sydney Amateur Sailing Club’s Sunday Classic.

Across the border in Queensland, Spray of the Coral Coast could be considered a slightly larger cruising alternative to Vivienne Marie. Built in 1925 in Melbourne as Spray II, the 35-foot gaff-rigged ketch was modelled on Joshua Slocum’s famous Spray, in which he became the first person to make a solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1895.

Spray of the Coral Coast underwent extensive maintenance during the 1950s, was relaunched in 1962 and remained in private ownership until the 1980s, when it began operating as a charter vessel on Victoria’s Gippsland Lakes. In 1996 it led a fleet of Spray replica vessels up Sydney Harbour to the Maritime Museum to commemorate the centenary of Joshua Slocum’s visit to Sydney. As of 2021, it operates as a charter vessel in Mooloolaba, Queensland, running education programs on the Kabi Kabi heritage of the region.

Metung is another vessel recently listed on the ARHV that has galvanised a local community into action.

In 2019 a not-for-profit group in Metung, Victoria, purchased the significant ocean racer and has been restoring it since for use as a shared community sailing vessel. Designed by Alan Payne, Metung marked the beginning of Payne’s heavy-displacement hull design style for his ocean-racing yachts. Metung competed in eight Sydney to Hobart races, four Melbourne to Hobarts and three Sydney to Suva races. It further completed a global circumnavigation in 1969.

Today, members from the Bull family that built Metung in 1956 are once more involved in the vessel’s restoration.

The latest round of heritage listings also saw the launch of the register’s new classification category – ‘exemplary class vessels’. This category sets no construction date cut-off for vessel nominations, and was established to recognise exceptional and pioneering achievements in vessel design and performance.

The first vessel to be inducted in this category is Brindabella. This highly successful 80-foot maxi ocean racing yacht was built in 1993 in Gosford, New South Wales, and became known as the ‘people’s maxi’.

It is constructed of laminated Kevlar and features a dual helm and 3.5-metre torpedo bulb at the base of its keel to improve upwind performance. Brindabella dominated the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race in the 1990s, and in 1999 set the race record for a conventionally ballasted yacht of one day 20 hours 46 minutes and 33 seconds.

It is considered a forerunner of the maxi class that came to dominate the Sydney to Hobart.

For more information on the ARHV exemplary class vessel category, visit arhv.sea.museum/en/nomination/form/1

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Australian Register of Historic Vessels

Brindabella is considered a forerunner of the maxi class that came to dominate the Sydney to Hobart Images 1–6 courtesy the vessels’ owners 01

03

05

02

04

06

This online, national heritage project, devised and coordinated by the Australian National Maritime Museum in association with Sydney Heritage Fleet, reaches across Australia to collect stories about the nation’s existing historic vessels and their designers and builders. Search the complete Australian Register of Historic Vessels at sea.museum/arhv

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Name

Type

Builder

Date

Number

01

Kon Tiki

Racing skiff

Robin Attrill

1953

HV000814

02

Spray of the Coral Coast

Ketch

J B Jones

1908

HV000815

03

Brindabella

Maxi race yacht

Boatspeed Australia

1993

HV000816

04

Kodama

Schooner

Ryan Brothers

1962

HV000817

05

Vivienne Marie

Folkboat

Hald & Johansen

1962

HV000818

06

Metung

Ocean race yacht

J C Bull

1956

HV000819

Signals 137 Summer 2021–22

Explore the mysteries and science of our seas in this immersive exhibition.

MAJOR SPONSOR

One Ocean – Our Future is funded by the USA Bicentennial Gift Fund. The exhibition is part of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030).

sea.museum/one-ocean

Sail Duyfken Join the captain and crew for a spectacular sail on Sydney Harbour.

Fri & Sat, 4 – 7pm sea.museum/sail-duyfken Duyfken was built by the Duyfken 1606 Replica Foundation jointly with the Maritime Museum of Western Australia and launched on 24 January 1999 in Fremantle.

Proudly sponsored by

Aged only 16, Hedayat left with just two mementoes of home – his mother’s ring and a traditional Hazara handkerchief made by one of his sisters

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National Monument to Migration

Hedayat Osyan photographed in 2012 with his sister’s handkerchief, which he has donated to the museum’s migration collection. When asked why he did so, Hedayat explained that he was in high school at the time.

Because he was moving around a lot, he was scared he might lose this precious memento. Hedayat felt that it would always be safe in the museum, where he could always access it.

Photograph Andrew Frolows/ANMM

‘The freedom to do things’ Constructing a new life with Hedayat Osyan

Survival in modern Afghanistan can be fragile, especially for the region’s Hazara minority.

Casandra Traucki shares a story of one young Hazari’s journey to Australia, and his contribution to building our nation.

HEDAYAT OSYAN WAS BORN IN A RURAL VILLAGE in Ghazni province in central Afghanistan. In 2006, Hedayat’s father, a high school teacher, was kidnapped by the Taliban Islamic fundamentalist movement and disappeared. As members of the Hazara ethnic minority group, the family risked persecution by both the Taliban and Mujahadeen guerrilla fighters.

When the Taliban attacked again in 2009, Hedayat’s mother urged him to leave Afghanistan. Even though he was just a teenager, Hedayat was the only surviving male in the family. Aged only 16, he left with just two mementos of home – his mother’s ring and a traditional Hazara handkerchief made by one of his sisters.

She gave it to him so that he would always have something to remind him of his family and his homeland.

Hedayat travelled first to the Afghan capital, Kabul, where he enlisted a people smuggler to obtain a false passport. In June 2009, he flew from Kabul to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. From there he travelled by boat to Medan, Indonesia, with a group of 15 asylum seekers.

On arrival, the group was arrested as they did not have the necessary documents to enter Indonesia. They were put in gaol for six months, but managed to escape and head for the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. Hedayat spent about six months there, but circumstances were harsh and it was uncertain whether he would be formally recognised as an asylum seeker. Although a friend had died trying to reach Australia by boat, Hedayat’s only hope was to risk the over-water journey.

In December 2009, having secured funds from Pakistan, he joined 44 other asylum seekers on a small, old boat crewed by two Indonesian fishermen. The organisers had promised food, water and a GPS, but when the asylum seekers reached the boat they found only water.

Increasingly unwelcome in Indonesia – and with all their funds gone – the group had no choice but to try to reach Australia.

It was a frightening and dangerous journey.

Afghanistan is a land-locked country, so most Afghani do not know how to swim. Hedayat recalls that they were scared, seasick and unable to move in the overcrowded boat. After seven days at sea, the boat’s engine failed and it began to sink in international waters.

The group was rescued by the Royal Australian Navy and taken to the Australian territory of Christmas Island for offshore processing.

Hedayat spent two months on Christmas Island while his refugee status was assessed by Australian authorities.

While others complained about the food and living conditions, Hedayat only felt gratitude. Once accepted as a refugee, he was sent to Melbourne, later moving to Sydney where he eventually received a permanent Australian visa.

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National Monument to Migration

Hedayat decided to postpone his PhD studies and set up a social enterprise to train and employ refugees

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Hedayat (Nick) Osyan (right) is the founder and managing director of CommUnity Construction. From left are former employee Hussain Jamshidi, who now runs his own tiling business; John Shadab, the company's co-founder and operations manager; and trainee Ali Ashrafi, who is studying IT at the University of Technology, Sydney. They are pictured on a work site at Chatswood, NSW, 2021. Image courtesy Hedayat Osyan

National Monument to Migration

The most important factor in ensuring that refugees integrate into society is finding employment. Yet a poor command of English and a lack of local work experience prevent many Afghanis from securing jobs. As a result, Hedayat decided to postpone his PhD studies and set up a social enterprise to train and employ refugees.

Reflecting on his difficult journey to Australia, Hedayat says: When I was in Afghanistan, I hadn’t this freedom and here I have everything. There’s massive opportunity for people, there’s equality, there’s freedom and the life is really easy here. I have lived in one of the most dangerous places in the world, persecuted and always being considered a second-class citizen so I’m really happy to be here. I really appreciate the Australian Government, the Australian people who saved my life and I’m always trying very hard to give something back to Australian people, that’s my responsibility because they saved my life.

Of course, his early years here were not easy.

When he first arrived as a 17-year-old, Hedayat was able to enrol in high school and receive English classes.

In 2013 he enrolled in a Bachelor of Politics and International Relations, and completed Honours in Arts and Design at the University of Canberra. It was hard to find work, and even when he could, it was difficult to manage. ‘When I was at university I struggled to get a job and relied on $250 of Centrelink, which left with me $50 to pay for everything else after rent.’ In vacations he worked in the construction industry and saw first-hand how some refugees and asylum seekers were exploited and underpaid. Many of his co-workers received only one month’s pay for two months’ work.

As he could speak and write in English, many Afghanis asked for Hedayat’s help. After he started working with the community, Hedayat kept hearing the same stories, the same worries and the same need for greater support. Common problems were unemployment, casual construction jobs and insufficient income to cover living expenses. At first he thought following a career in education or politics might be the best way of helping his people. However he soon realised that there was a need for more practical assistance.

Research showed that the construction industry was growing fast and was reporting labour shortages.

Yet within his community, there were many men who were skilled tilers. In 2017, with assistance from Settlement Services International’s Ignite Small Business program, Nick Tiling Services was established

by Hedayat and Johangir (John) Shadab, a tiler friend.

‘The word Nick, in my language, is very meaningful’, Hedayat explains. ‘It means something good, something beneficial to the community. This is why I chose it. It is also a slightly easier word for Australians to pronounce’. Thereafter, Hedayat became known as ‘Nick’ to his clients.

Hedayat’s mentorship provides refugees with local experience, award wages and benefits. The company also provides English lessons, helps workers with official correspondence and is akin to a family. All of his employees have grown in confidence, two have set up their own tiling companies and others have bought homes and commenced the process of bringing family members to Australia. In 2018, Nick Tiling broadened its services to include painting, waterproofing, air conditioning and cleaning, and was renamed CommUnity Construction. By 2021, it had employed 65 refugees, giving them and their families a fresh start.

Despite his achievements, Hedayat still misses his homeland, particularly the beauty of the countryside and the quiet village life. Fortunately, the Internet has enabled him to keep in close contact with loved ones in Kabul. In Australia, Hedayat really likes being in nature and going camping – with no internet! ‘Australia is a very different society’, he explains. ‘I come from a very connected society, where things are much more shared as a community. Here it is much more individualistic, but I have adapted. I like it here because it has allowed me the freedom to do things.’

Hedayat is proud to be the first Afghani added to the museum’s National Monument to Migration.

However, recent events in Afghanistan have left him very worried about his loved ones. The Taliban, who have now taken control over much of the country, have a history of persecuting the Hazara ethnic minority.

Now an Australian citizen, Hedayat is desperately seeking to obtain a humanitarian visa to bring a family member to Australia.

Casandra Traucki is a museum Volunteer.

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Settlement Services International

Assistance for a new start Evacuees from Afghanistan welcome settlement support

Settlement Services International is delivering critical assistance under the Australian Government’s Humanitarian Settlement Program. By Violet Roumeliotis.

SINCE KABUL FELL TO THE TALIBAN on 15 August 2021, Australians have rallied to support people living in Afghanistan who were abruptly plunged into a state of uncertainty and fear.

The situation in Afghanistan has been particularly distressing to those of us at Settlement Services International (SSI), as many of our staff, clients and volunteers have deep connections to the area.

We sprang into action, joining with other humanitarian organisations, human rights groups and Afghan communities in Australia. Together we have advocated on behalf of Afghan refugees fleeing the violence in their homeland. SSI focused especially on those who were most vulnerable to the Taliban’s strict regime: minority groups, women and girls.

SSI was then engaged to provide settlement services and case management support for Afghan arrivals in New South Wales. We worked with the refugees on arrival, then in hotel quarantine, and will continue to support them for up to 18 months in the local community.

These vital measures were delivered under the Australian Government’s Humanitarian Settlement Program.

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We began providing this support while Greater Sydney was under strict Covid-19 lockdown. Many of our clients were families who had fled Afghanistan with just the clothes on their back.

Our humanitarian team stepped up to support these families during hotel quarantine, by confirming their needs and establishing their preferred settlement location within Australia. SSI also provided clothing and necessities like mobile phones, while conducting daily wellbeing checks in the refugees’ own languages.

The outpouring of care and concern from our staff, the Australian community and our supporters was extraordinary. Donations ranged from culturally appropriate food and groceries, to gift cards and digital technology such as phones and laptops. All of these welcome resources went towards supporting the evacuees in transitioning toward life in Australia.

One recipient of generous support from the Australian community was Khorsand Yousofzai, former coach of an Afghan women’s football team, who made Newcastle his home. Mr Yousofzai evacuated Kabul airport with his team, arriving in Melbourne in September. While he was relieved to have escaped Kabul during the Taliban takeover, he was saddened to have had to leave behind his loved ones.

Settlement Services International

Khorsand Yousofzai, former coach of an Afghan women’s football team, escaped his homeland with his soccer team but is increasingly worried about his wife, who was prevented from leaving Afghanistan.

Image courtesy SSI

‘My wife came with me to Kabul airport, but unfortunately they didn’t let her enter with me,’ he said. ‘The team and the other players entered with me, but she wasn’t able to join us.’

Mr Yousofzai said that he contacts his wife back in Kabul every day, but her situation as a woman in Afghanistan is becoming increasingly dire.

The outpouring of care and concern from our staff, the Australian community and our supporters was extraordinary

‘She’s worried even to leave her place to go to work because, after six o’clock at night, women can’t go outside without a man, brother or husband’, he said.

Mr Yousofzai was overwhelmed by the welcome he received from the local community in Newcastle.

He is also grateful for the ongoing support that SSI has provided since he arrived.

The Newcastle community raised money for gift card donations, allowing new Afghan arrivals to shop at local supermarkets and retailers. This generosity is typical of the overwhelmingly positive response that SSI has received from the wider community.

Violet Roumeliotis is the CEO of Settlement Services International. The museum has partnered with SSI to highlight and improve the situation of refugees newly arrived in Australia.

Gift cards are still being accepted for Afghan evacuees.

If you would like to assist, please visit ssi.org.au or call 1800 916 857.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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Books for the brain Insightful holiday reading

This issue introduces an expanded book review section, focusing on titles new to our Vaughan Evans Research Library. These can be consulted by visiting the library (by appointment) or requested via an interlibrary loan. Further recent acquisitions are listed on page 98.

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Readings

Terrestrial hand globe by Newton and Son, 1850s.

ANMM Collection 00045821.

Image Jasmine Poole/ANMM

Australia & the Pacific: A history

By Ian Hoskins, published by NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2021. Paperback, 496 pages, index.

ISBN 9781742235691. RRP $40.00.

Vaughan Evans Library 994 HOS

Our continent in context How the Pacific shaped Australia and Australians FROM THE OPENING SENTENCE, you know that you’re in for a treat with Ian Hoskins’ latest maritime history.

‘The Pacific Ocean has washed, scoured and thumped Australia’s east coast for more than five million years’, he begins. Starting from that ancient epoch, as our continent eased toward its current location, Hoskins transports us across the millennia and into Australia’s present.

This is a major work. Having previously published books on Sydney Harbour, the New South Wales coast and Australia’s rivers, the author has again expanded his watery horizons. Both his ambition and his talents are vast. With Australia & the Pacific, Hoskins has earned a place beside Bernard Smith, Frank Broeze, Neville Meaney and John Bach. What these historians share is an extraordinary breadth of research, plus the intellectual and narrative prowess to shape that evidence into a new vision of Australia’s maritime identity.

In common with many of today’s histories, Australia & the Pacific commences with geological time and concludes in the Anthropocene. We learn about the southward drift of our land and the rise and fall of the ocean that became the Pacific. Waves of human venturers arrived and dispersed, before the encroaching seas cut the land links with New Guinea and Tasmania. Aboriginal lore features strongly here, encompassing both littoral cultures and the many nations that developed far from the coast.

‘Having occupied the continent’, Hoskins notes, ‘Aboriginal people went no further’. But this is not the end of their journey, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories ebb and flow throughout the book.

Rather than seeing the Pacific as a barrier, Hoskins treats it as a circuit board. His work repeatedly connects our massive continent with our many regional neighbours, including New Guinea, New Britain, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Nauru, Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands.

These links are highlighted through several enduring themes, including trade, labour, migration, religion, warfare and politics. Hoskins’ observations are enriched by his own visits to many of the locations evoked in the book. These details, in turn, enliven the human stories of voyagers, mariners, evangelists, entrepreneurs and beachcombers that populate each chapter.

What unites the book is difference. ‘The degree to which commonality has been accepted or denied is central … to understanding modern Australia’s ambiguous relationship to the Pacific’, Hoskins argues.

The European urge to catalogue and comprehend difference – a central drive of the Enlightenment – fuelled an armada of 17th- and 18th-century voyages to the Pacific. Hoskins tracks the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and British journeys that spanned this enormous ocean, occasionally charting or visiting Australia’s coastline. ‘The newcomers made speeches, planted flags and buried bottles like so many seeds on foreign shores in the hope that empires might grow there’, he proposes in typically inventive prose.

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Readings

Australia & the Pacific commences with geological time and concludes in the Anthropocene

Arrival of missionaries in Tahiti, coloured engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi based on an original oil painting by R Smirke, published 1803. Following the period of Pacific exploration in the late 18th century, the next great European impact on the people of the region was heralded by the arrival of missionaries of the London Missionary Society in Tahiti in 1796. ANMM Collection 00039676

Readings

The book’s first half is its real strength. Focused on the period prior to Federation in 1901, it explores the complexities and possibilities of colonisation in an evershrinking maritime world. In a fascinating counterpoint, Hoskins compares the straggling fortunes of Sydney’s first decade with the 1788 settlement on Norfolk Island.

This tiny outpost, he suggests, ‘accorded more with the reformative agricultural commonwealth first imagined in London than any of Australia’s early colonial settlements’ (see extract on pages 40–45).

As the 19th century opened, shifting ideas of responsibility and possibility created new tensions between British administration and colonial enterprise.

Hoskins contrasts the Indigenous cultures and European occupation of Australia and New Zealand, noting the growing reluctance of Britain to claim and maintain new territories. If Hawaii was where James Cook met his end, it was also a land too far for empire. New Caledonia was once encompassed by the jurisdiction of New South Wales, supporting a steady commercial relationship.

Yet in the 1840s, imperial oversight was set aside for a belated French stake in the region. Hoskins also reminds us of the begrudging British contest with Germany to bring Papua and New Guinea into their respective imperial orbits.

Throughout these early chapters, Australia & the Pacific takes us on sojourns to those places of encounter.

We read of the missionaries – male and female – who both documented Pacific cultures and challenged their customs, leaving a profound legacy of worship that endures into the present. Hoskins also interrogates the righteous merchants and nefarious chancers who sought profit in shifting produce and people around the Pacific. Blackbirding is explored deeply and thoughtfully.

Hoskins laments that thousands of Kanaka labourers were exploited in colonial Australia and then expelled after Federation. Yet, he adds, many South Sea Islander peoples also took advantage of these opportunities, including the establishment of an Australian community that thrives today.

The book’s pivot is 1901. The second half of the text focuses on Australia’s geostrategic and political integration into the wider Asia–Pacific region throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Although we meet many additional characters, from H V ‘Doc’ Evatt to Eddie Mabo, their stories largely lack the intimate connection with the seas that characterise the work’s first section.

The narrative, also, flows away from the coastline to consider social change, domestic politics and international diplomacy. The White Australia Policy hovers like a ghost over these developments, reflecting a specifically Australian concern with sameness and difference. ‘If Pacific security created the first fissure in the bedrock of shared Australian and British interest’, Hoskins proposes, ‘race created the second’.

The consequences of racism, industrialism and conservatism become increasingly prominent in the final sections of the book. Hoskins delves into the complex and incomplete relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea, including its World War II campaigns and the hasty push for independence.

Refugee and asylum seeker stories rise in the decades after the Vietnam War, while extractive industries and bulk transport are also linked with Australia’s regional environmental responsibilities.

Although important issues, these developments seem remote from the tightly oceanic focus of the work’s first section. Little is said about the commercial shipping giants such as Burns Philp and McIlwraith McEacharn, whose fleets vigorously networked Australia with markets throughout Polynesia and Micronesia.

The Royal Australian Navy also barely rates a mention, despite its potent contribution to maritime security during World War II and the Cold War. Nevertheless, Hoskins considers the 2003 intervention in the Solomon Islands – focused on shoring up regional security against extremism – as a revival of the ‘forward defence’ strategy that had dominated Australia’s 20th-century strategic thinking.

Closer to home, a neat twist is a reversal of the ethnographic view to survey our continent’s Pacific coastline. ‘The discovery of the beach was a cultural revolution worthy of any anthropological study’, Hoskins remarks wryly. ‘By the 1930s it had transformed Australia’s sense of itself.’ Yet in 1992 a much older tradition – one of cultivation and of creation stories on Mer in the Torres Strait – effectively overturned the Enlightenment’s problematic legacy of terra nullius.

Launched from this tiny Pacific island, the High Court’s Mabo decision continues to reshape Australian ideas of justice, reconciliation and belonging.

Australia & the Pacific is a delight to read, to think through and to talk about. As we emerge from pandemic isolation, Ian Hoskins challenges us all to reconsider who we are, where we belong and how we might face our regional future together.

Reviewer Dr Peter Hobbins is the museum’s Head of Knowledge.

Images accompanying this review do not appear in the book.

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Readings

Ambition and alienation The French in Australia ‘PEOPLE’S IDEAS ABOUT FRANCE and French culture are diverse and sometimes contradictory,’ observes Alexis Bergantz, lecturer at RMIT University at Melbourne and historian of Australia’s relationship with France and the French Pacific, in his introduction to French Connection: Australia’s cosmopolitan ambitions.

These complex concepts and viewpoints exist not only in Australian attitudes towards France and the French, but within the French community itself. Focusing on mid-19th-century Australian colonial life through to Federation and the eve of World War I, Bergantz has a twofold approach, examining both the concept of French culture as it filtered through the British imagination and was disseminated through the Empire’s colonies, including Australia, and the experiences of French migrants as they navigated their new lives in a British colonial society.

The French have been a part of the Australian story since European colonisation began, with diverse stories recognisable in a range of migrant cultures. We encounter many of these individual and group histories throughout the book – cooks, gold diggers, artists, sailors, teachers and diplomats. In a chapter centred on French migration, Bergantz relates the stories of hopeful immigrants, seeking prosperity, working manual labour or finding skilled occupational niches and filling recognisable roles conforming with the supposed ‘good migrant’ archetype, or those seeking to escape to a clean slate and a new beginning. Also unearthed through the French consular archives are the stories of thwarted hopes and ambitions, and the alienation and disappointment that accompanied many migrant experiences.

Contradictory ideas of France permeating the colonial Anglo-sphere thread through the book. Consumption of French culture conferred social distinction and prestige and could enforce social boundaries and status, as we see in a chapter detailing the struggle between the French Consul and Melbourne society women for control of the local chapter of Alliance Française. In luxury goods, ‘French’ conveyed a sense of superior taste and refinement, and in colonial society could be a social delineator, a concept that still lingers today in areas such as fashion and epicurean tastes.

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In a nation moving towards Federation and asserting a new national identity, individuals reaching outside Britain to explore the artistic and political scene of France gave rise to a Francophilic subculture.

Visiting Paris – thought to encompass the quintessential essence of Frenchness – Australian artists, writers and intellectuals such as Henry Mackenzie Green and Norman Lindsay dabbled in a political, artistic and aesthetic milieu that was seen as distinct from Britishness but still markedly European. In a particularly intriguing passage we learn about the Francophilia of the founder of the archly nationalistic magazine The Bulletin, J F Archibald. Born as John Feltham Archibald, he was to reinvent himself as Jules François, and go so far as to falsely claim to have a French–Jewish mother.

But France was also perceived as a threat to the Australian colonies, both moral – with France gendered as ‘female’ and emotional, irrational, impulsive and effete – and also in conflict with Britain’s colonial expansionism through the Pacific. The 1853 French annexation and use of New Caledonia as a penal colony reawakened the spectre of convict transportation, so recently abolished in most Australian colonies (and still to be officially abolished in Western Australia), a penal past the colonies wished to put firmly behind them. It was also perceived as a challenge to Britain’s hegemony in the Pacific, and contributed to the development of Australia’s restrictive immigration practices.

A beautifully referenced work, with a dense and layered narrative richly illustrated with the evocative stories of individuals and of groups, Bergantz’s depiction of Australia’s French connection is nuanced and complex.

While the French as a migrant group did not have the coherency of other groups such as the Greeks, Chinese and Italians, nor were they numerically as significant (peaking, for the period covered, at 4,500 arrivals in 1891), they had a significant role in Australia’s developing sense of identity.

In migrant contributions, and in a reaction to France and French culture that was sometimes aspirational and other times adversarial, the French connection has contributed to the creation of modern Australia.

Reviewer Inger Sheil is an Assistant Curator at the museum.

Readings

We encounter many individual and group histories throughout the book – cooks, gold diggers, artists, sailors, teachers and diplomats

French Connection: Australia’s cosmopolitan ambitions

By Alexis Bergantz, published by NewSouth Books, Sydney, 2021.

Softcover, illustrations, 208 pages.

ISBN 9781742237091. RRP $35.00.

Vaughan Evans Library 306.0994 BER

George Street, Sydney, Alfred Tischbauer, 1883. This street-level view shows the clock adorning the shop of the Delarue family below the much more imposing GPO clock. The Delarues are a FrancoAustralian family who settled in Sydney in the 1850s, lived for a while in the ‘French village’ that was Hunters Hill, and retained a connection to France for several generations. Oil on canvas, Dixson Galleries, SLNSW (DG 210)

Readings

Janke’s work has advanced our national conversation towards a deeper recognition of Indigenous sea rights and marine knowledges

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Mokuy spirit carvings from Arnhem Land, NT (name of artist omitted due to cultural protocols) featured in the exhibition Gapu-Mon_ uk Saltwater – Journey to Sea Country. Image Janine Flew/ ANMM

Readings The author cites the Yolŋu saltwater barks in her 2017 report for the Australian Museums and Gallery Association, First Peoples: a Roadmap for Enhancing Indigenous Engagement in Museums and Galleries.

These paintings, she observes, can be seen as starting points for future consultations and policy designed to respect and safeguard underwater Indigenous archaeological discoveries.

True Tracks: Respecting Indigenous knowledge and culture

By Terri Janke, published by NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2021. Softcover, 432 pages.

ISBN 9781742236810. RRP $45.00.

Vaughan Evans Library 305.89915 JAN

Revitalising knowledge An accessible outline of Indigenous cultural knowledge TRUE TRACKS IS AN IMPORTANT COMPENDIUM of how recovery and revitalisation of Indigenous knowledges are reshaping Australia’s cultural landscapes for the better. It spans Terri Janke’s vast contributions towards securing artists’ rights, designing frameworks for the protection of secret and sacred knowledge, and navigating the fiercely competitive commercial application of Indigenous cultural and intellectual property.

These themes are critically important to the museum, given our custodianship of the Yolŋu peoples’ sea rights bark paintings. Featured in our award-winning exhibition Gapu-Mon_uk Saltwater: Journey to Sea Country, the Yolŋu saltwater bark paintings stand as legal documents in reclaiming Indigenous sea rights.

In 1967, a previous generation of Yolŋu artists presented bark petitions to Federal Parliament, forming the groundwork of the Aboriginal land rights movement.

The more recent saltwater bark paintings have likewise become important conversation starters for the longoverdue recognition and restitution of intergenerational knowledge about the seas and coastlines of Australia.

Janke’s own work has advanced our national conversation towards a deeper recognition of Indigenous sea rights and marine knowledges. In September 2021, she posted a beautiful tribute to a remarkable community member represented in the museum’s saltwater collection.

Janke credits this Yolŋu leader with inspiring and encouraging her to persevere with Australia’s legal system, despite questioning her own abilities in her first year of practice.

Although its content is serious, the book presents an accessible, personal and often enjoyably candid perspective. Even those familiar with Indigenous arts and cultural industries will find it a valuable tool to update their knowledge of engaging with and working alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island community members.

It is not often that Australian intellectual property and copyright law has been presented in such an accessible and informative manner. Janke offers a reassuring glimpse of what it takes – in a legal sense – to create an equal playing field for many Indigenous peoples who have safeguarded significant ecological and culturally specific information. Generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had to simultaneously implement the cultural protocols necessary for knowledge dissemination in commercial and educational contexts.

Reflecting on her ground-breaking 1998 book, Our Culture: Our Future, Janke describes a fear that her research was ‘just going to be used by government officers to adjust the height of their computer monitors’.

But in a refreshingly conversational and personal tone, this new book outlines numerous examples of how vital it is to ensure ethical uses of Indigenous cultural knowledge.

Her aim – which she encourages all Australians to share – is to empower Indigenous voices in the media, arts and broader cultural industries.

Some of the key fields that have become enriched through the legacy of Janke’s remarkable career are language revitalisation, architecture, music, academic research, education, fashion, visual and performing arts, science and tourism. With each chapter of True Tracks, Janke deepens our understanding of how remarkable people have transformed their cultural knowledge into tools that empower Australia’s future.

Reviewer Matt Poll recently joined the museum as Manager, Indigenous Programs.

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Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal encounters in the Archipelago

By Tiffany Shellam, published by University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 2021. Softcover, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index, 304 pages.

ISBN 9781760801137. RRP $30.00.

Vaughan Evans Library 994.02 SHE

Entangled histories Indigenous intermediaries on maritime expeditions in the west coast of Australia ALL ALONG AUSTRALIA’S COASTS AND RIVERS, the first Europeans to visit these places rarely did so alone. From as early as December 1788, when Governor Phillip captured a Sydney man named Arabanoo, colonial surveyors, botanists, squatters, soldiers, officials and travellers relied heavily on Aboriginal men, and sometimes women, to travel into unknown country. Some were captives; others chose to assist the colonisers. Some were paid in rations or goods, some were rewarded with firearms and others could almost have been thought of as regularly ‘employed’.

For the early colonisers, travelling into new areas was rarely a simple affair of walking, sailing or riding along, heavily armed and supplied, and seeking out new grazing lands, rivers and harbours. We may often think of small groups of white men in armed parties as bravely entering unknown lands and facing unpredictable situations. Generally, as they had learned very quickly, this was a dangerous task and a lot easier and safer to do with at least one Aboriginal guide.

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Phillip Parker King, View of Mermaid Strait from Enderby Island (Rocky Head), State Library of New South Wales FL1032660

These people – such as the well-known Bennelong – were much more than guides who showed colonisers the best routes to grass and water. They were also skilled language interpreters, food suppliers and negotiators, able to follow the protocols of entering strange lands owned by different nations.

Historians now often use the term ‘Indigenous intermediaries’ to describe these people. They adeptly managed encounters between people who had never before seen Europeans, or their boats, horses and firearms.

While the term ‘Indigenous intermediary’ certainly captures many of the skills and roles of people who were generally at the time simply called ‘guides’, it certainly is a mouthful for the ordinary reader. I for one am not convinced the term will prove to be a useful one in the long run. While academic historians might be enamoured of such terms as ‘intermediaries’ and ‘entangled histories’ that attempt to reflect the complexities of Australia’s colonisation, I think they sell short the base power relations between coloniser and anti-colonial resistance.

Meeting the Waylo focuses on three Aboriginal men – Migeo, Boongaree and Bundle – who were recruited by various expeditions that went to ‘the Archipelago’ on the northwest coast of Australia in the early 19th century.

Between 1817 and 1822, Lieutenant Phillip Parker King, commanding HMC Mermaid, was instructed to ‘fill in the missing parts’ of Matthew Flinders’ 1801 survey.

King was also instructed to search for any useful rivers and his expeditions were part of belated efforts to focus on the vast expanse of the northwest just in case there were any ambitions from other colonial powers in the area.

The second expedition in the book involves various visits of the famous HMS Beagle to the same region between 1838 and 1843 on another series of ‘hydrographic expeditions’ that had, as all colonial expeditions did, scientific aims as well.

Tiffany Shellam revisits the logs, letters, journals and illustrations made by the officers, scientists and others during these expeditions with an eye to uncovering the role of the three men ‘recruited’ to assist in negotiating the colonial presence in the west. Shellam focuses on the nitty gritty of the three men, the ships and crews and of course the Waylo people they met.

One section that certainly sparked my interest was Shellam’s description of how a canoe from the Yaburara people of the Dampier Archipelago, drawn and described by Lieutenant King, had been later recorded

as an unidentified object and then seen as a digging stick, rather than what King had seen it as – a unique watercraft. The utility of such watercraft for their local environments was very often lost on European observers. This diversity of watercraft around Australia inspired the Nawi conferences and symposia held in 2012 and 2017 at this museum.

Unfortunately, where Shellam briefly provides the backstories to Bungaree and Bundle – both from the Sydney area – the sources cited are limited and outdated. While perhaps not critical to the analysis of the encounters, it is a missed opportunity to have brought these two men further to life. Indeed, this reliance on old histories almost replicates Shellam’s own critiques of archives and histories. On top of this, there seems to me some confusion around an intermediary moving back and forth between colonial society and traditional society, and Aboriginal people working for the colonists and resisting them.

Shellam is on much firmer footing teasing apart the archival material of the encounter moments on the Western Australian coast – though this often appears through the lens of the legendary Pacific scholar Greg Dening more than any particularly fresh approach.

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Aboriginal people were skilled language interpreters, food suppliers and negotiators, as well as guides

01

02

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Tiffany Shellam revisits the logs, letters, journals and illustrations made by the officers, scientists and others during these expeditions

01 Native of Dampiers Archipelago, on his floating log, Phillip Parker King, 1818. State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia 02 Weapons, &c, of the Natives of Hanover Bay, State Library of New South Wales C 966

It is important that historians who come across titbits of information on First Nations people otherwise silenced in the historical record do piece together the actions and often highly significant roles these people, once confined to live in the shadows of great explorers and navigators, actually had. But I believe it is also important not to overly speculate on their agency – their reasons for joining expeditions, for working with white men.

Historians seem to me, at least of late, to be trying to make up for past silences. Such honourable intentions of finding historical agency can have fraught consequences, ending up putting speculative words and thoughts in the mouths and minds of Aboriginal people of the past.

Meeting the Waylo borders on this at times, but overall, does shed light on the missing side of the story of white men on expeditions around Australia. Shellam makes an excellent point that in a great swing of the pendulum, historians now often tend to dismiss historical archives as inauthentic and heavily mediated, if not fabricated, accounts of Aboriginal voices. Shellam finds there is still merit in investigating such mediated accounts.

Did I feel closer to understanding these so-called ‘intermediaries’ and the traditional owners they met?

I certainly felt closer to understanding more of the process involved in the historical erasure of their presence in ships’ logs, diaries and other records.

Shellam clearly shows how, in documenting European encounters with Aboriginal people, the initial accounts that were at times sympathetic and offering some insight were shifted, reshaped and retuned to sit more firmly with the long-held and deeply racialised European view of all First Nations people, including the First Australians.

While I found Meeting the Waylo did not break much new ground in ways of understanding or interpreting sketchy, missing or plain racist historical archives, it certainly brings people such as Migeo, Bundle and Boongaree closer to a rightful, if still complicated, place in the histories of Australian colonisation and usurpation of Aboriginal country by the strategic deployment of guides or ‘intermediaries’.

Meeting the Waylo won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History and, while it is not for the general reader of history, it will stand as an important reference for the histories of these particular expeditions. Shellam is alive to the idea that ‘history-making’ in the 1830s was being conducted by Aboriginal people alongside the European scientists and others documenting voyages and expeditions.

Meeting the Waylo will also stand as part of the journey that historians continue to undertake in making sense of cross-cultural encounters through the lens of one very white side of the archives.

Reviewer Dr Stephen Gapps is the museum’s Senior Curator Voyaging and Early Colonial Maritime History and the author of The Sydney Wars (2018) and Gudyarra (2021), both published by NewSouth Books.

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Image Polly Marsden and Chris Nixon

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The book’s best part is the diversity of information it provides, which may lead readers on many weaving tangents throughout the pages

Readings

Be aware and prepare A kids’ climate-change primer ‘This book is about balance. Can you balance?’

THE OPENING LINES ABOVE set the tone for this picture book, which presents information about one of our world’s most pressing issues. Climate change is part of the story of balance in our lives – and in the natural world.

Author Polly Marsden has come together with illustrator Chris Nixon to provide this non-fictional resource. It is the second collaboration from the pair, who also released The Bushfire Book – How to Be Aware and Prepare in 2020. This new picture book ends with a range of actions that can be implemented by children. The illustrated actions are also printed on a bonus pull-out poster.

Based on our continent, The Australian Climate Change Book outlines the issues, sources and impacts of climate change. It is written with a developed vocabulary to usher forward children’s understanding of the topic, proving that you’re never too young to learn words like ‘renewables’ or ‘ecosystem’. It introduces many other terms that may not be suitable for readers under eight years of age, although it lays the foundations for thinking about many areas.

The full-colour, large-spread illustrations are created in a collage style, set amid the prose. They depict two charming figures observing our natural world and its human-made developments.

Teaching children about climate change does not have to be anxiety-inducing for the child or the narrator.

It is an opportunity to connect to the physical world and show children the cycles that make our world go around.

Just as we teach eating our greens so that we can have dessert, or getting enough sleep so that we can work and play, we can also explain the give-and-take required to maintain our environment.

The Australian Climate Change Book: Be informed and make a difference Written by Polly Marsden, illustrated by Chris Nixon Published by Lothian Children’s Books and Hachette Australia, 2021.

Hardback, colour illustrations, 32 pages. ISBN 9780734420831.

RRP $25.00. Vaughan Evans Library 363.738 MAR

The book’s best part is the diversity of information it provides, which may lead readers on many weaving tangents throughout the pages. Readers should be prepared to take this opportunity to explain many other concepts, perhaps revisiting material in more than one sitting.

Marsden’s book addresses a niche in children’s literature, by raising sensitive issues through the softer medium of a picture book. Children have different levels of interest, curiosity or anxiety about climate change.

This book can be used as a tool when the time is right for these conversations. The Australian Climate Change Book would be best suited for the extra-curious and questioning child, as it provides an aesthetic and detailed coverage of climate change.

Reviewer Cay-Leigh Bartnicke is the museum’s Assistant Curator – Special Projects.

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Readings New books in the Vaughan Evans Library

The following titles have recently been added to the museum’s Vaughan Evans Library. Members and casual visitors are always welcome to visit the library by appointment. Most books in our collection can also be ordered via interlibrary loan, which you can arrange with your local library.

Unsettled: An Australian Museum exhibition May 2021 Laura McBride and Mariko Smith Sydney: Australian Museum Trust, 2021 ISBN 9780646836751 Call number 709.94 MCB

The Culture of Ships and Maritime Narratives Chryssanthi Papadopoulou (editor) London: Routledge, 2020.

ISBN 9780367662721 Call number 387.503 PAP

The Future of the Museum: 28 dialogues András Szántó Berlin: Hatje/Cantz, 2020 ISBN 9783775748278 Call number 069.1 SZA

The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and provocations Keir Winesmith and Suse Anderson London: Routledge, 2020.

ISBN 9781138589544 Call number 069 WIN

Aboriginal Maritime Landscapes in South Australia: The balance ground Madeline E Fowler Abingdon: Routledge, 2020 ISBN 9780815373285 Call number 994.23 FOW The Battle of the Bismarck Sea: The forgotten battle that saved the Pacific Michael Veitch Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2021 ISBN 9780733645891 Call number 940.5426 VEI Smuggled: An illegal history of journeys to Australia Ruth Balint and Julie Kalman Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2021 ISBN 9781742236896 Call number 364.1372 BAL The Archaeology of Movement Oscar Aldred Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2021 ISBN 9780367195397 Call number 304.8072 ALD Waiting for the Ferry Bill Allen and John Mathieson Canterbury, VIC: Transit Australia Publishing, [2017] ISBN 9780909459338 Call number 386.6099441 ALL Australia & the Pacific: A history Ian Hoskins Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2021 ISBN 9781742235691 Call number 994 HOS 98

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Oceanic Histories David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram (editors) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018 ISBN 9781108423182 Call number 910.404 OCE The Australian Climate Change Book: Be informed and make a difference Polly Marsden, illustrated by Chris Nixon Sydney: A Lothian Children’s Book and Hachette Australia, 2021 ISBN 9780734420831 Call number 363.738 MAR French Connection: Australia’s cosmopolitan ambitions Alexis Bergantz Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2021.

ISBN 9781742237091 Call number 306.0994 BER True Tracks: Respecting Indigenous knowledge and culture Terri Janke Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2021 ISBN 9781742236810 Call number 305.89915 JAN Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal encounters in the Archipelago Tiffany Shellam Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2021.

ISBN 978-1-76080-113-7 Call number 994.02 SHE

Men and Ships at War series All titles by Allan A Murray The Family Murray Trust, 2016 HMS Arawa: The dramatic war service of an unglamorous armed merchant cruiser 2016, ISBN 9781519027436 Call number 940.545994 MUR Get the Oars Out: When I-24 sank the Iron Chieftain 2016, ISBN 9781519027405 Call number 940.545994 MUR Down 700 Metres: The story of the SS Iron Crown 2019, ISBN 9781075672712 Call number 940.545994 MUR HMAS Nepal: The chameleon, 1939–43 2017, ISBN 9781521904572 Call number 940.545994 MUR Sunk in 2 Minutes: The fatal encounter between I-21, HMAS Mildura and the Iron Knight 2017, ISBN 9781973117001 Call number 940.545994 MUR HMAS Australia: Last of her luck 2018, ISBN 9781973123545 Call number 940.545994 MUR Leapin Lena: A small ship at war 1942–45 2021, ISBN 9798519954099 Call number 940.545994 MUR HMAS Nepal: To Tokyo, 1943–45 2019, ISBN 9781678705831 Call number 940.545994 MUR

All titles can be found at sea.museum/collections/library

Acknowledgments 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 AM Ambassadors Norman Banham Christine Sadler David and Jennie Sutherland Major Donors – SY Ena Conservation Fund David and Jennie Sutherland Foundation Honorary Research Associates Rear Admiral Peter Briggs AO John Dikkenberg Dr Nigel Erskine Paul Hundley Dr Ian MacLeod Jeffrey Mellefont David Payne Lindsey Shaw Honorary Life Members Yvonne Abadee Dr Kathy Abbass Robert Albert AO RFD RD Bob Allan Vivian Balmer Vice Admiral Tim Barrett AO CSC Lyndl Beard Maria Bentley Mark Bethwaite AM Paul Binsted Marcus Blackmore AM David Blackley John Blanchfield Alexander Books Ian Bowie Colin Boyd Ron Brown OAM Paul Bruce Anthony Buckley Richard Bunting Capt Richard Burgess AM Kevin Byrne Sue Calwell RADM David Campbell AM Marion Carter Victor Chiang Robert Clifford AO Helen Clift Hon Peter Collins AM QC Kay Cottee AO Helen Coulson OAM Vice Admiral Russell Crane AO CSM Stephen Crane

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 John Gibbins Anthony Gibbs RADM Stephen Gilmore AM CSC RAN Paul Gorrick Lee Graham Macklan Gridley Sir James Hardy KBE OBE RADM Simon Harrington AM Jane Harris 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 Richard Keyes Kris Klugman OAM Judy Lee Matt Lee David Leigh Keith Leleu OAM Andrew Lishmund James Litten Hugo Llorens Tim Lloyd Ian Mackinder Stephen Martin Will Mather Stuart Mayer Bruce McDonald AM Lyn McHale VADM Jonathan Mead AO 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 Ken Sherwell 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)

The winner of the Signals 135 caption contest is Lawrence Green, for this entry: ‘Let me hear the music – I am ready to “Shake, Rattle and Roll”’!

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Signals ISSN 1033-4688 Editor Janine Flew Staff Photographer Elizabeth Maloney 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 thestore@sea.museum Australian National Maritime Museum Our opening hours are 10.30 am–4 pm, 1–24 December 9.30 am–6 pm, 26 December to 31 January 2022 2 Murray Street Sydney NSW 2000 Australia. Phone 02 9298 3777 The Australian National Maritime Museum is a statutory authority of the Australian Government

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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 Ex officio Chair Mr John Mullen AM Ex officio Director Mr Kevin Sumption PSM Mr David Blackley Mr Simon Chan Mr Peter Dexter AM Mr David Mathlin Mr Tom O’Donnell Dr Jeanne-Claude Strong Ms Arlene Tansey American Friends of the Australian National Maritime Museum Ms Sharon Hudson-Dean Mr Robert Moore II Mr John Mullen AM Mr Kevin Sumption PSM Signals is printed in Australia on Hannoart Plus Silk 250 gsm (cover) and Hannoart Plus Silk 115 gsm (text) using vegetablebased inks.

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Eco drink bottles Stay sustainable with your drinks on the go! Check out our full range of thermal drink bottles to keep your fluids cool for up to 24 hours or hot for up to 12 hours.

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All Limit watches reduced by 55%.

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For wildlife lovers Explore our official range of books, stationery, homewares and gifts from our Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, plus hand-selected products relating to all things wild!

Brighten up your kitchen with these beautiful tea towels, each design inspired by an Indigenous artist’s life experiences. 100% cotton.

See full range online. All discounted until end 2021

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Ocean inspired jewellery – select from rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, liquid crystal, and rare NZ paua shell. Up to 40% discount on selected items

Add some nautical chic to your wardrobe this summer with a stylish French handbag made from the recycled sails from Atlantic racing yachts! Special discount $180

These hugely discounted tees are a fun reminder of our Sea Monsters exhibition and all things lurking below the water! Kids now $12 sizes 4–10 Adults now $15 sizes S–XXL

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