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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. 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? 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. 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. 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.
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
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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. 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.
Lina Cesarin’s wedding dress. ANMM Collection 00004697 Gift from Lena Cesarin
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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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 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
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. 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.
