32 minute read
Readings
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.
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.
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
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.
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. 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.
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 We encounter many individual and group histories throughout the book – cooks, gold diggers, artists, sailors, teachers and diplomats
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)
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
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
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. 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. 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.
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
Phillip Parker King, View of Mermaid Strait from Enderby Island (Rocky Head), State Library of New South Wales FL1032660
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. 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.
Aboriginal people were skilled language interpreters, food suppliers and negotiators, as well as guides
01
02
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.
Image Polly Marsden and Chris Nixon The book’s best part is the diversity of information it provides, which may lead readers on many weaving tangents throughout the pages
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 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.
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
Reviewer Cay-Leigh Bartnicke is the museum’s Assistant Curator – Special Projects.
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 Future of the Museum: 28 dialogues András Szántó Berlin: Hatje/Cantz, 2020 ISBN 9783775748278 Call number 069.1 SZA
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 The Culture of Ships and Maritime Narratives Chryssanthi Papadopoulou (editor) London: Routledge, 2020. ISBN 9780367662721 Call number 387.503 PAP
The Digital Future of Museums: Conversations and provocations Keir Winesmith and Suse Anderson London: Routledge, 2020. ISBN 9781138589544 Call number 069 WIN
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 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”’!
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
Feed your imagination and explore Australia’s stories of the sea by becoming a museum Member. Options for individuals, families and people who live interstate or overseas offer a great range of benefits, including unlimited entry to our museum, vessels and exhibitions, as well as special discounts.
Visit sea.museum/members 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. Foundation sponsor ANZ
Major sponsors Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation Guilty Port Authority of New South Wales Sponsors Australian Maritime Museums Council Challis & Company Colin Biggers & Paisley Gage Roads Brewing Co Nova Systems Panasonic Schmidt Ocean Institute Smit Lamnalco Tomra
Supporters Australian Antarctic Division Australian Government Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Faroe Marine Research Institute Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Royal Wolf Settlement Services International Silentworld Foundation Sydney by Sail The Ocean Cleanup Tyrrell’s Vineyards
@seamuseum_
/sea.museum
#seamuseum
sea.museum/blog
Nova Systems
Experience Knowledge Independence
Summer in store
Open 7 days a week Email us at thestore@sea.museum Shop online sea.museum/shop Follow us on Instagram instagram.com/ seamuseum_shop
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.
Special discount $20
Assorted gift items
Specially selected items include nautical, Australiana, Indigenous and exhibition-inspired. There’s something to delight every taste and budget. Members receive 10% discount on full price items
Jewellery
Ocean inspired jewellery – select from rings, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, liquid crystal, and rare NZ paua shell. Up to 40% discount
on selected items Watches
Limit Watches offer classic, modern and sports designs with digital or analogue quartz movements. All Limit watches reduced by 55%. Limited stock online; full range in store. Now $45.00
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!
Recycled sailcloth handbags
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
Kids Create activity kit – limited edition!
Hours of creative fun for kids 6–12 years – they can enjoy making paper model boats, snow domes, clay critters, sea monster puppets, wild hats and periscopes. $69.95 / Members $62.95
Indigenous design tea towels
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
Sea monsters t-shirts
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
Presented in partnership with
