Signals, Issue 103

SIGNALS quarterly

EAST OF INDIA

Forgotten trade with Australia TEA BY THE SEA

The first global mass commodity MOUNTAINS TO SEA Ansel Adams epic landscapes

Bearings

FROM THE DIRECTOR

WITH A SUCCESSION OF WORLD WAR 1 centenaries rapidly approaching – including the big one that’s already getting lots of news coverage, the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli in April 1915 – there’s a related centenary that’s upon us already, as you receive this issue of Signals. On 18 June this year, it’s 100 years since the launch of AE2, the Royal Australian Navy submarine that played a heroic role in the campaign to capture the Dardanelle Straits, to knock Germany’s ally Turkey out of the war and secure supply lines to Britain’s ally Russia.

As we all know, the Gallipoli campaign failed. Until recently, however, very few Australians knew of AE2 ’s daring exploits in that campaign. Nor that she sits to this day on the floor of the Sea of Marmara, relatively intact and in good condition. She is one of the few, and certainly the largest, relic remaining from that campaign that forged our nation. AE2 has rightly been termed ‘The Silent ANZAC’.

That raises some big and very interesting questions, and I believe it is the role of this national museum to stimulate a conversation about them.

The first question is, when does a historic vessel take on the mantle of national significance? When it does, what should the nation do about it? AE2 ’s situation opens up fascinating possibilities.

The 750-ton, 181-foot (55-metre) AE2, built by Vickers Armstrong in England for £105,000, made the longest voyage undertaken by a submarine to reach Australia with her sister boat AE1 Returning to the northern hemisphere, in April 1915 she was the first Allied submarine to penetrate the Dardanelles narrows as the Gallipoli landings took

place, and drove off a Turkish battleship bombarding Allied forces. Commander Henry Stoker RN scuttled AE2 after an engagement with the Turkish torpedo boat Sultanhisar. He and his crew of Australians and Britons became POWs.

A Turkish dive team found AE2 in 1997, sitting upright in 73 metres of water, and in 1998 an Australian expedition ‘Project AE2 ’, led by Dr Mark Spencer and maritime archaeologist Tim Smith, undertook site analysis. The AE2 Commemorative Foundation, chaired by Rear Admiral Peter Briggs ao csc ran (retired), was formed and has worked with the Australian Government and Turkish authorities to plan for the submarine’s future. A 2008 Turkish–Australian workshop recommended preservation and protection where the boat rests, and public education about it. The aim is to make the story of AE2 at Gallipoli as well-known as Simpson and his donkey. The Australian Government has pledged Anzac Centenary Fund backing.

However, ship recovery projects elsewhere in the world that have galvanised national interest and pride, such as Mary Rose in the UK and Vasa in Sweden, surely make the possibility of raising AE2 one that can be revisited. The raising in 2000 and long-term conservation of the US Civil War ironhulled monitor, the Confederate Hunley, demonstrates the technological feasibility. Two major considerations in AE2 ’s case are an unexploded torpedo that remains in the hull, and the 15-year treatment in a laboratory tank that would be required to stabilise the metal once it returned to the atmosphere. And with Turkey having an equal stake in the vessel’s history and significance, any final disposition would certainly be a collaborative matter.

Whatever the complexities, as the centenary of the Gallipoli landings approaches, it is certainly the time for a wider conversation about ‘The Silent ANZAC’. Kevin Sumption

India was vital to the infant Australian colonies, say the exhibition curators

The

Archaeology program investigates ships of the India trade wrecked in the Coral Sea

Tea, the first global commodity for the masses, impacted on worldwide trade and culture

Water

Introduction to this Sydney Harbour heritage site by a museum conservator

2013 Phil Renouf Memorial Lecture by John Young of the Wooden Boat Centre, Tasmania

Your calendar of activities, tours, lectures and excursions

The

Queensland’s maritime history is being preserved on Brisbane’s South Bank

Two fine yachts, power and sail, are among the new additions to this vital national database

By schooner from the Isle of Man to the Victorian

The

The Australian Wooden Boat Festival 2013

cover: Lord Wellesley’s boatman, from a publication showing the privileged life enjoyed by some Europeans living in India in the early 1800s. Hand-coloured engraving by Charles Doyley, Plate 12 from The European in India by Captain Thomas Williamson, published London 1813 by Edward Orme. ANMM Collection

East of India

FORGOTTEN TRADE WITH AUSTRALIA

Australian links with India go back to the earliest years of our European settlement when the infant colony, struggling to survive, desperately needed supply lines far closer than Britain. Our newest exhibition outlines the place of India in a world of global commerce, long before the currently heralded ‘Asian century’, the rise and fall of England’s East India Company and its impact on Australia. By senior curator Dr Nigel Erskine

02

01 Previous pages: East India Company ships were among the largest wooden merchant vessels built, this one over 1,300 tons. Launch of the Honourable East India Company’s ship Edinburgh, watercolour by William John Huggins about 1825. Lent by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich UK. Green Blackwall Collection

02 Crew abandoning HMS Guardian after being wrecked on an iceberg on 25 December 1789 on a voyage to deliver supplies to Botany Bay. Handcoloured engraving by Robert Dodd, published by J & J Boydell, Pall Mall London 1790. ANMM Collection

03 The Mint, Calcutta, from the sketchbook of William Prinsep, an artist who lived in Calcutta from 1817 until 1842 and worked with the export firm Palmer and Company, which sent many vessels to Australia. Pencil and ink on paper c 1830. Lent by Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. Caroline Simpson Collection

FOR SYDNEYSIDERS CIRCULAR QUAY

is a bustling hub, a place of buskers, cafes and crowds. But before all that it was Sydney Cove, a snug anchorage with a creek of fresh water at its head, chosen by Arthur Phillip as the site of the first European settlement in Australia. Today in our world of global connections it is almost impossible to appreciate the isolation of those early settlers sent half-way around the world to start a new colony – ‘... distance from great Britan 13,106 miles …’, as convicted forger Thomas Barrett engraved in a spidery script on an improvised medallion when his ship, the transport Charlotte, finally arrived.

The voyage had gone remarkably well, but the real test lay ahead. When most of the 11 ships of the First Fleet had sailed for home, leaving behind just over a thousand convicts, marines, officers and settlers at Sydney Cove, their task was enormous. Stores were limited, few of the settlers had any farming skills and the land was far from fertile. The first years of the settlement were marked by uncertainty and privation. Just nine months after arriving, Governor Phillip was forced to send one of his two remaining

ships, HMS Sirius, around the world to fetch supplies from Cape Town. Its return eight months later brought temporary relief, but the situation continued to deteriorate.

Marine Captain Watkin Tench captured the general air of pessimism hanging over the settlement early in 1790: ‘… thirty-two months from England … From intelligence of our friends and connections we had been entirely cut off, no communication whatever having passed with our native country since the 13th of May, 1787 … Famine besides was approaching with gigantic strides, and gloom and dejection overspread every countenance.’

Governor Phillip decided to send half the population to Norfolk Island, where a small settlement established in early 1788 was flourishing. Unhappily, the plan went disastrously wrong when HMS Sirius, which had sailed to Norfolk with Supply in March 1790, ran onto rocks at the southern end of the island, became a total loss and most of the supplies intended to support the new arrivals were damaged or lost. With the population spread between two settlements 1,600 kilometres apart, Governor Phillip

dispatched the single remaining vessel Supply to the Dutch settlement of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) to purchase emergency relief supplies.

Surely the situation could not get any worse and the long-awaited store ship from England must soon arrive?

In truth it got worse. The store ship Guardian had sailed from England six months earlier, ahead of the Second Fleet and loaded with supplies, and should have arrived in Sydney Cove in 1790. But two weeks after leaving Cape Town the ship had struck an iceberg, in the early hours of Christmas Eve. Half of those aboard took to the boats, most never to be seen again, leaving Captain Edward Riou and about 60 men to nurse the waterlogged ship back to the Cape – an incredible feat that they achieved after two months.

While the Second Fleet finally arrived in mid-1790, carrying stores but bringing even more convict mouths to be fed, the Guardian disaster highlighted the risk of relying totally on a supply line stretching half-way round the world. It brought about

a change to government policy with regard to supplying the colony from India.

For almost two centuries India had been a bastion of England’s East India Company, whose monopoly on all English shipping east of the Cape of Good Hope gave it privileged access to the enormous wealth of Asia. Since a vessel sailing from Sydney Cove could reach Calcutta in less than two months, it might be expected that trade between the colony of New South Wales and the East India Company’s trading centres in India would have been encouraged from the start. In fact, however, Governor Phillip’s instructions ordered him to prevent every sort of contact between the new colony and the East India Company settlements by every possible means. This was probably intended to prevent convicts escaping.

News of the Guardian disaster influenced attitudes in Britain and a new policy direction from Home Secretary Lord Grenville to Governor Phillip arrived with the ships of the Third Fleet in August 1791. It read, in part: ‘I had suggested to Lord Cornwallis [Commander-in-Chief of HM forces in India] the idea of supplying the

settlement under your command either wholly, or at least to a very great extent, from Calcutta ... or some other of the Company’s settlements in India.’

Acting on this, Governor Phillip contracted one of the Third Fleet ships, Atlantic, to sail to Calcutta to buy supplies for New South Wales. When it returned to Sydney the following year with rice, flour and a variety of livestock, it marked the beginning of a trading relationship between Australia and India that grew in importance throughout the 19th century. The story of this early relationship with India is the focus of the museum’s exhibition East of India - Forgotten trade with Australia, featuring a wealth of items from the museum’s collection and borrowed from leading collections in Britain and India.

How did India became a centre of British power in Asia – one that would come to be called the jewel in the Imperial crown? Europe had long been an eager market for valuable Asian products. From around the 2nd century BCE luxury goods such as silk, jade, ivory and spices were carried overland

Surely the situation could not get any worse and the long-awaited store ship from England must soon arrive?

to Rome along the Silk Route and, by the start of the Christian era, Roman traders had established direct links with western India, shipping cargoes through the Arabian and Red Seas. The rise of Islam from the seventh century CE, culminating in the fall of Constantinople in 1453, put control of these routes in the hands of Christian Europe’s chief rivals. It was this that led the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama to pioneer a new sea route around southern Africa to India in 1498. His voyage opened a gateway to the wealth of Asia, and for the next century, Portugal took over the monopoly of Asian trade to Europe.

By the end of the 16th century, however, powerful merchant companies from England and the Netherlands were challenging Portuguese trade. The East India Company was granted a monopoly of English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope by Queen Elizabeth 1 in 1600. Initially it tried to compete with the Dutch East India Company in the spice islands of South-East Asia (today’s Indonesia) but was gradually forced out, establishing trading centres on the Indian coast. By the end of the 17th century the company had built fortified trading bases at Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta and, with its regularly renewed monopoly of all English trade between the Cape of Good Hope and the Magellan Strait, was well on its way to becoming a corporate

giant with some similarities to modern conglomerates such as Microsoft, General Electric or McDonalds.

From 1657 the company organised its finances as a joint stock company, facilitating long-term investment in infrastructure and trade. It was closely associated with London and its investors included members of the city’s financial and political elite. But unlike modern corporations, its charter privileged it to mint coins, administer justice including the powers of life and death, and to wage war in its overseas territories. The backbone of the company – which came to be known as the Honourable East India Company, and colloquially as ‘John Company’ – was its fleet of armed East Indiamen.

The predominant power the British encountered was the Islamic Mughal empire, which controlled many of the fragmented states of India and was at a peak in the 17th century under Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal. By the middle of the 18th century it was in decline, producing instability and tensions that threatened the company’s bases and forced it to increase its garrisons. During the Seven Years War (1754–63), when Britain and France were once again in conflict, the company continued to build its land forces as it successfully countered threats from both French and Indian sources. It was during this period that forces commanded by

Around 100 ships arrived from India between 1813 and 1833 while over 250 ships left for India from Sydney or Hobart

01 J G Hughes opened his grocery store in 1834, promoting teas and coffee shipped directly from India and China. Engraving by William Moffitt, reproduced courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

02 India House in London was one of the great centres of British commerce. Statues of distinguished East India Company servants gaze down like Roman heroes. India House, The Sale Room, aquatint by Joseph Stadler after Thomas Rowlandson, published London 1808. Lent by The British Library

Colonel Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’) won a pivotal battle against the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey, a triumph that transformed the company.

Following this victory, the treaty of Allahabad granted the East India Company the right to tax some 20 million people of the Indian states of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This right, known as diwani, provided an enormous source of wealth, although many observers were outraged by the idea that a company whose primary responsibility was to make a profit for its shareholders should be administering large parts of India.

Senior company officials in India were accused of corruption and mismanagement resulting in severe famines in Bengal, which killed around five million people. The company also became embroiled in unsuccessful and expensive military campaigns that forced it to seek financial assistance from the British government. As a result, in 1784 Parliament passed the India Act appointing a Board of Control to oversee company activities in India. This shift in power was further highlighted by the appointment two years later of

a Governor General and Commander in Chief of British Army forces in India – Lord Cornwallis, whom we met earlier, permitting Governor Phillip to buy supplies from India.

It was anticipated that these appointments would end costly military adventures, but this proved wrong.

With declining Mughal power, several native Indian rulers attempted to expand their influence. The most successful of these was Tipu Sultan in the rich southern state of Mysore. Opposed to British power in India, he fought a number of successful wars against them until he was killed at the battle of Seringapatam in 1799. In the years that followed, while the colony of New South Wales was developing, British power expanded across most of India through conquest, annexation or alliance.

At the height of its powers and monopolies the company’s interests included textiles and tea, sold in great quantities to home markets in Britain, but also a huge and damaging trade of Indian opium into China. In 1813 the East India Company’s monopoly of Indian trade was finally dissolved but its monopoly on China trade was renewed for a further 20 years.

01 When the son of General Sir Hector Munro was killed by a tiger in Bengal, his enemy Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, felt no sympathy. Tipu, who styled himself the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, commissioned a lifesize, mechanical automaton that re-enacted the fatal attack. The tableau was copied in this glazed earthenware figure, Munro killed by a tiger, Staffordshire c 1830. Lent by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Robert Breckman bequest

02 Grand vase bearing the East India Company coat of arms, granted by Queen Elizabeth I as a symbol of her confidence and royal patronage. Porcelain, Barr, Flight & Barr, Worcester England 1830. Lent by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Bequeathed by Herbert Allen

03 Portable drop-front cabinets were made by Indian craftsmen for Europeans travelling in Asia; valued for ornate decoration, they were traded in India and Europe. Mughal design elements, 17th century. Lent by Victoria & Albert Museum, London

04 Voyages between England and India could take six months and, despite social hierarchies, often brought people together in unexpected ways. Caricature by George Cruikshank depicts the grand cabin on board an East India Company ship. Publisher G Humphry, London 1818. ANMM Collection

01 Philip Gidley and Anna Josepha King, and their children Elizabeth, Anna Maria and Phillip Parker. Watercolour portrait by Robert Dighton. Reproduced courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

02 Evening dress of fine white Bengal muslin, decorated with silver-plate embroidery in a sprig-and-spot pattern, is believed to have belonged to Anna King, the wife of Governor King (pictured top of page). It demonstrates the simplicity of the Empire style with high waist, narrow bodice back and short, puffed sleeves. Dating from 1805, and probably made by a colonial seamstress from imported Indian fabric, this is one of the oldest surviving examples of clothing worn in the colony. Lent by National Trust of Australia (NSW).

03 Indian gold coin, ‘Star pagoda’, about 1790–1807. Collection Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Photographer Penelope Clay

Goods imported from India

included candles, soap, sugar, rice, tea, Chinese ceramics, shoes, rum, cotton textiles, clothing, tobacco, leather, canvas, rope, iron and general household goods

In Australia, the period following the opening of India to new English traders saw a surge in ships arriving from and leaving for Indian ports. Some of these, such as the Eliza, which we see in the exhibition, brought rice, sugar, tea and other sundries from Bengal. Others like the Britannia brought new convicts – 10 imprisoned British soldiers from Calcutta.

Around 100 ships arrived from India between 1813 and 1833 bringing goods including candles, soap, sugar, rice, tea, Chinese ceramics, shoes, rum, cotton textiles, clothing, tobacco, leather, canvas, rope, iron and general household goods. But in the same period over 250 ships left for India from Sydney or Hobart, reflecting the common practice of many convict transports and other ships arriving from Europe, of continuing to India after unloading their cargo in Australia. In many cases the real profit of the voyage was made from the Indian cargo that was carried back to Britain.

While Australia was a ready market for Indian goods, it was more difficult to find suitable Australian exports for India. These included timber, skins, coal, sandalwood, and later a live trade in horses for military and other purposes. Some ships such as the Royal Charlotte, which arrived in Sydney in 1825, were chartered to carry British troops from Australia to Calcutta or Madras at the end of their deployment in Australia. In fact, most of the British Army regiments that served in Australia during the first half of the 19th century were sent on to India.

And like Royal Charlotte, not all the ships bound to India from the Australian colony made it there safely.

The route from Sydney to India depended on the season. In the southern summer the preferred route was westwards across

the Great Australian Bight and then north into the Bay of Bengal, but during winter strong westerly winds often made this route unviable. The preferred winter route was north through the Coral Sea or inside the Great Barrier Reef, then west through Torres Strait and on to the Bay of Bengal sailing south of Java. This route meant sailing through the hazardous reef systems of north-eastern Australia.

The charting of safe shipping routes, a priority for colonial development, was initiated by Matthew Flinders, and was carried forward between 1817 and 1822 by Phillip Parker King. The vessel he used for most of his survey work was an 84-ton cutter, Mermaid, that was built in Calcutta. King’s detailed mapping made much of the Australian coast safer for shipping, but areas such as the Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea and Torres Strait continued to claim sailing ships throughout the 19th century. In recent years the museum’s maritime archaeology team has located and surveyed a number of these wrecks in collaboration with the Silentworld Foundation and Sydney University through an Australian Research Council grant. They include Royal Charlotte and Mermaid. The latest such expedition appears on page 18.

People as well as trade goods were moving between India and Australia. Tasmania was highly regarded by Europeans in India as a healthy environment in which to recuperate or retire, particularly after the publication of Augustus Prinsep’s Journal of a Voyage from Calcutta to Van Diemen’s Land in 1833, which praised its ‘beauties and interests’, including its business opportunities. Rather ironically, his journal was published posthumously by his wife, since he did not survive long after his voyage to Tasmania.

Faring better was Captain Andrew Barclay who, after serving the East India Company during a lifetime at sea, settled

in Tasmania and became a wealthy farmer. In 1811 Barclay had commanded the ship Providence carrying 180 convicts and a detachment of Governor Macquarie’s 73rd Regiment to Sydney. As well as the 23 European crew, the ship carried 70 Indian sailors, who were among very large numbers of Indian seamen who passed through Australian ports in this period. An article following this one expands on the topic of the Indian seafarers known as lascars.

From about 1815 the European population of Australia grew rapidly and by 1850 was 405,356. as settlements expanded and the colonial economy developed around wool and other rural commodities. The settlement of Albany (1826) and the Swan River (Perth) three years later signalled British claims to the entire continent. For some Europeans living in India the establishment of closer new settlements in Australia offered obvious benefits. One of them wrote: ‘As Calcutta, Madras and Bombay are only six weeks sail from Port Adelaide, it is conceived that many children of Anglo-Indian parents, instead of being separated from home for years, would be sent to school in the colony, if an establishment sufficiently wellconducted were founded.’

The opportunities in Australia also attracted British investors, resulting in the establishment of large pastoral consortiums such as the Australian Agricultural Company in 1824, among whose many well-heeled investors were the chairman, deputychairman and five directors of the East India Company.

The discovery of gold in the Port Phillip district in 1851 and the subsequent influx of new settlers to the region marked a radical shift in colonial dynamics. Victoria became the first Australian colony to achieve self-government (1855), followed by Tasmania, South Australia, New South

Wales and Queensland. In 1858 the European population of Australia reached over one million, amid the general euphoria and optimism as the country celebrated 70 years since the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove in 1788.

Looking into the future, this exhibition reminds us that the roots of our trade with India run deep

In India the situation of the East India Company during the same period was one of decline, culminating in the revolt of sections of the Bengal Army in 1857. Following a tumultuous and bloody year reasserting British dominance, responsibility for administering East India Company territories in India was taken over in 1858 by the British Government. In a final symbol of its dramatic fall from power, the company’s magnificent London headquarters, East India House, was demolished in 1861.

For many Indians, the events of 1857 that the British call the Indian Mutiny represent a turning point in the nation’s history and the first revolutionary step towards independence. The scale of the uprising underlined a widespread desire for change that the East India Company was ultimately

unable to suppress. Its long innings had finally come to an end and while a further 90 years would pass before India finally gained its independence from Britain, the nation’s tenacious spirit had been revealed. In the 21st century that same tenacity is on display as India assumes an increasingly significant political and economic role on the world’s stage. India is now one of the world’s third-largest economies with one of the fastest-growing middle classes in Asia. This growth is providing new opportunities for Australian trade, and India is now our eighth-largest trading partner. In 2012, Australia was India’s largest supplier of coal, while India was the second-largest source of international students studying in Australia. India is the third-largest source of immigrants to Australia, adding to an existing Indian community of around 450,000.

The Australian Government’s recently released White Paper Australia in the Asian Century highlights the resurgence of Asia as the world’s economic powerhouse and the opportunities for Australia. These are undoubtedly exciting times, but in looking into the future, the museum’s exhibition East of India - Forgotten trade with Australia reminds us that the roots of our trade with India run deep.

This article employs the Anglicised spellings of Indian place names commonly used in the period under discussion, and familiar to most readers. Post-independence forms include Chennai, Kochi, Kolkata and Mumbai.

01 During the 90-day siege of Lucknow, part of the rebellion that the British called the Indian Mutiny, a soldier’s wife dreams of hearing the bagpipes of Scottish troops coming to her rescue. The Relief of Lucknow [Jessie’s Dream] by Frederick Goodall, 1858. Reproduced courtesy Museums Sheffield/ Bridgman Art Library

02 Celebrated warrior queen, the Rani of Jhansi Lakshmi Bhai, killed in 1857 fighting the British for the restoration of her kingdom. Chromolithograph print, Chitrashala Press, Poona, late 19th–early 20th century.

Lent by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gift of Jim Masselos 2011

Exhibition forges links with India

IN FEBRUARY THIS YEAR THREE MUSEUM staff members travelled to India funded by a grant from the Australia-India Council, as part of a continuing dialogue between the Australian National Maritime Museum and Indian cultural institutions, in major port cities that are key locations of maritime trade and have their origins in colonial and earlier periods. The visit reflects the sort of peopleto-people engagement so important for the development of productive and long-term relationships between the museum and key counterparts in India. It consolidated a number of links with institutions forged during the period researching the exhibition and negotiating loans for it from Indian collections.

Assistant director Michael Crayford, senior curator Dr Nigel Erskine and design manager Johanna Nettleton gave presentations on current developments at ANMM, during professional development workshops in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and Kochi (formerly Cochin, in Kerala State). These included sessions on the Indian focus of the museum’s recent maritime archaeology program, and on the design of exhibitions. Other presenters included AusHeritage chairman Vinod Daniel and architect

Steve King speaking about conservation and the principles for establishing sustainable museum environments. AusHeritage is a network of Australian cultural heritage management organisations, established by the Australian Government in 1996 to facilitate the engagement of organisations for the Australian heritage industry in the overseas arena.

In Mumbai the forum was hosted by Chathrapathi Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya museum (CSMVS) and brought together museum professionals from across India. Participants in Kochi included archaeologists from the Muziris Heritage Project and students from the Centre for Heritage Studies at the Hill Palace Museum, specialising in museum studies. Muziris is the name of an ancient Indian trading port located 40 kilometers north of the modern port of Kochi. The Kochi workshops were held in collaboration with the Vasant J Seth Memorial Foundation, established in memory of the founder of the Great Eastern Shipping Company, now one of the largest in India. The foundation supports initiatives highlighting and preserving India’s maritime heritage.

01 Johanna Nettleton, manager of ANMM design, in Kochi with students from the Centre for Heritage Studies, Hill Palace Museum.

02 Author of this article, senior curator Dr Nigel Erskine, at the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata

Lascars – seamen from the Indian subcontinent – constituted a major seafaring subculture over several centuries, speaking a patois incorporating Arabic, several Asian and European languages. ‘Klassee’ meant an ordinary sailor. © The British Library Board WD314no.50

Forgotten lives

INDIAN WORKERS IN 19TH-CENTURY AUSTRALIA

Researching the exhibition East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia has provided fascinating glimpses of unknown Indians who were part of our colonial tapestry. Contemporary Indian-Australian perspectives were also gathered for the exhibition’s short film Indian Aussies: terms and conditions, writes curator Michelle Linder

I was so insufficiently fed, that I was obliged to purchase a bag of rice at my own expense, on which I lived for a whole month. I made my complaint to Mrs Browne; she said she would not redress me. I said I would go to the governor. She said can the governor pull the hair off my head; he is only the keeper of thieves and cannot interfere with me. I know nothing of the agreement I entered into, or the particulars of it. I was turned on board ship without going to the police office. I desired to be returned to my own country. I have been so ill used by Mr Browne I will remain no longer with him; if he would give the best dish I could eat, I would not stop with him. This country does not suit me; I was coaxed to come here being told that I should have all the privileges I have in my own country.

THE MOST FASCINATING ASPECT OF the connections between India and Australia that emerged during my research for our exhibition East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia were the experiences of Indian-born workers in the colony. While few in number, local newspapers reported on issues involving their conduct, their employers and allegations of mistreatment against them. Workers from India were largely sailors (known as lascars), domestic servants and agricultural labourers. The testimony above was given by Meer Juan, an Indian servant who worked in Australia from 1816 until 1819. He was sent back to India along with 34 other Indian-born employees on the orders of Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1819. A few settlers arriving in the Australian colonies from India brought domestic servants with them, usually one or two, although the practice was discouraged by authorities. Mr and Mrs Browne imported numerous servants from India in 1816 to supplement the convict labourers assigned to them to work on their farm at Abbotsbury near Prospect. Mr Browne was later granted land at Camden and in the Illawarra region. The servants caused Mr Browne

some trouble, with complaints made in 1817 about them trespassing on the government Domain, and in 1818 for washing in the ‘public tanks’ [a practice that would have been universal in their communities in India].

Indian servants were promised a decent wage, adequate food and clothing, payment for their remaining family members in India and a return passage home

In June 1819 a number of servants made serious allegations of mistreatment to Governor Macquarie and he ordered a special inquiry to investigate. Numerous servants gave testimony, with a servant who worked for another employer translating.

There were accounts of being underfed or starved, beaten and whipped. Some revealed

Excerpt of testimony given by a native servant Meer Juan (sworn on the Koran) before Special Bench of Magistrates, Sydney 10 July 1819

that their families in India had not received promised payments; female servant Buck Tien stated she had never received any pay and was treated as a slave. Woodchub complains he was forced to eat with the ‘mahomatens’ (presumably Muslim lascar sailors) aboard ship, and thereby lost his caste. Their complaints were upheld and the colonial government took 24 male and 11 female Indians from the custody of Mr and Mrs Browne and shipped them back to India on the Mary, departing Sydney for Calcutta on 22 July 1819. Mr Browne was sent a bill for the cost of shipping, which he refused to pay. He argued the servants had come to the country legally and voluntarily. The colonial government failed in the Supreme Court to recoup the costs from him. Letters from Mr Browne held in the Colonial Secretary’s records refute some of the servants’ allegations and agree to ship back those whose term of agreement had expired.

The case of Mr and Mrs Browne and their Indian servants may have been an isolated one, yet when you read the servants’ testimonies, you think about the experiences of people who were persuaded to travel far from their homes to work in a distant colony. They were promised a decent wage, adequate food and clothing, payment for their remaining family members in India

and a return passage home after their time of agreement had expired. It appears nearly all of them were severely let down by Mr Browne. Yet there’s more to the story of Mr Browne and his Indian servants.

In 1824 Mr Browne sent a letter to Governor Brisbane requesting that land to work cattle be granted to Ramdial, a Hindu Indian agricultural worker whom he recommended as an efficient and hard worker who had been in the colony for six years and in his employ for 20 years. It is unclear if Ramdial received the grant though he did continue to work for Mr Browne. The census records for 1828 record the sole ‘Hindoo’ residing in NSW as an Indian stockman named Ramdial living on the Browne’s family farm. Did Ramdial have a much better experience working for Mr Browne in Australia than the servants shipped back to India, or was he also a victim of cruel treatment? I guess the answer will remain unknown.

For our exhibition, actors from two Sydneybased Indian theatre companies, Abhinay and Nautanki, have recorded a selection of the servant testimonies. The official records pertaining to the servants were sent to government authorities in India and were later considered in a wide-ranging inquiry focused on slavery in India. All 35 testimonies can be found in the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers

Online in the paper titled Slavery in India – Return to an address of the Honourable House of Commons, dated 13 April 1826

The seamen, known as lascars, who worked on the ships that sailed to Australia were by far the largest group of Indian workers that locals in Sydney may have encountered. Most ships transporting cargo and troops from India to Australia had lascar crews, yet there is little information available about their time in port beyond a few scant reports in the colony’s first newspaper the Sydney Gazette, published from 1803 until 1842.

Lascars (from the Persian, meaning a troop) were seafarers from the Indian subcontinent, including today’s Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and were employed by the East India Company to meet its shipping needs. They were a feature of British and other European nations’ merchant fleets for centuries, forming a distinct seafaring subculture despite their varied ethnic origins. In the colonial period a ship’s captain usually negotiated with a broker in Calcutta (Kolkata) or other ports to recruit crew for six to 12 months. The lascars were poorly paid, receiving less than a sixth of the wage of their European counterparts. Many lascars lost their lives at sea, and the prevailing attitudes are reflected in a report of a storm encountered by the ship Lady Barlow in 1804: ‘Happily only one of her

The seamen, known as lascars, who worked on the ships that sailed to Australia were by far the largest group of Indian workers that locals in Sydney may have encountered

Lascars ferry horses, exported from New South Wales and known as ‘walers’, ashore at the exposed and dangerous open-roadstead anchorage of Madras on the Bay of Bengal. All cargo and passengers had to be transferred in these locally built and crewed lighters called masula. Watercolour attributed to J B East, c 1834. Reproduced courtesy Dixson Collection State Library of New South Wales.

people, a lascar, was lost.’ The number of lascars was sometimes recorded on the ship’s manifest, yet their names were rarely listed. Sydney Cove, shipwrecked in Bass Strait in 1797 carrying much-needed stores from Bengal to the colony of New South Wales, had a crew of 44 lascars. Its master Captain Hamilton recorded that the lascars were issued with extra blankets and warm clothing to cope with the cool temperatures in the southern oceans.

The Sydney Gazette provides a glimpse of the time that lascars spent in port before their ship left with a cargo of export goods or passengers bound for China, India or the United Kingdom. A religious procession of Bengali seamen celebrating the Islamic procession of ‘Hassan’ was reported in March 1806, in the back streets of the area we now know as The Rocks in Sydney. The Gazette wrote that the participants had demonstrated ingenuity in constructing a temple composed of cane-work and beautifully decorated paper. The article’s focus is on the oddity of the event, the music and the effort involved in holding it. It mentions that spectators had seen similar festivals in Asia. The account is quite positive, with no ridicule or denigration of the seamen’s’ beliefs and practices.

On 17 March 1810 the Gazette reported that several lascars had absented themselves

from Sydney and had been employed by an unknown person. Captain Earl, for whom they were originally engaged, states that if the lascars are not returned to him, he will not be responsible for their maintenance in the colony.

Yet these brief reports lead to further questions. Was this the first non-Christian religious procession seen in the streets of Sydney? Were there other processions that were not reported in the press? Did many lascars try to find alternative employment, and settle in the colony?

A selection of newspaper articles mentioning Indian workers, the trade in horses from New South Wales (known as ‘walers’), shipwrecks and the importation of Indian goods have been highlighted by our exhibition designers in the exhibition. Access to thousands of Australian newspapers dating from 1803 that have been digitised for the National Library of Australia’s website Trove (which you can visit at www.trove.nla.gov.au) has been invaluable during the development of East of India – Forgotten Trade with Australia The articles do not provide answers to all my questions, yet combining these articles with shipping records, government archives and journals of seafarers certainly allows a more complete picture of the forgotten histories of Indian workers in Australia to be gleaned.

Indian Aussies

A short film titled Indian Aussies: Terms and conditions apply will be a major feature of the East of India exhibition, commissioned by the museum from Anupam Sharma of Sydney-based Film and Casting Temple Pty Ltd. Anupam is creator of the Australian Film Festival in India and was a 2013 Australia Day Ambassador. His experience working on Bollywood productions and knowledge of the Indian Australian community will be reflected in an insightful, colourful film revealing the influences and ties that bind our two nations. His team have been busy capturing cultural events on film and interviewing a diverse range of Indian Australians from Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. They reflect on and highlight their experiences, both good and bad, in Australia. The stories include those of the first Indian female train driver in NSW, a shipping executive, small business owners, students, artists, business professionals, doctors and children. We look forward to audience feedback on the film via email web@anmm.gov.au, Twitter@ ANMMuseum#eastofindia or our Facebook page www.facebook.com/anmmuseum.

Director Anupam Sharma and Dop Caz Dickson producing the exhibition film, featuring new Indian-Australian radio host and commentator Shailja Chandra (top picture) . Photographer Karan Mandhian Films and Casting Temple

Shipwrecks east of India

THE FERGUSON REEF PROjECT 2013

The hidden reefs of the Coral Sea snared many ships plying the vital supply route between the Australian colonies and India. The Australian National Maritime Museum and the Silentworld Foundation’s maritime archaeology team continues its work locating and recording these historic wrecks, writes curator of archaeology Kieran Hosty, in a collaborative project with the University of Sydney and the Australian Research Council.

ON 7 APRIL 1841 THE INDIAN-BUILT, 555-ton, armed three-masted ship Fergusson was wrecked on a reef in the Coral Sea, en route from Port Jackson to the Bay of Bengal. On board were 170 rank and file of the 50th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Foot, who had sailed for the Australian colonies as convict escorts and now were bound for Madras on India’s Coromandel Coast. There they were expected to fight for king, country and the East India Company in some of the many struggles being waged to secure India as the jewel in Britannia’s imperial crown.

Fortunately they were sailing in convoy with the Orient and Marquis of Hastings and, along with the crew of Fergusson, were rescued by the accompanying vessels and taken on to India, where death and glory awaited. There the 50th would fight with distinction (and considerable losses of officers and men) in the Gwalior campaign of 1843 and the Anglo-Sikh Wars of 1845–46. The remains of the teak-built Fergusson were subsequently auctioned but only limited salvage work was ever carried out. Remnants were visible on the reef top for a number of years, acting as an informal beacon for those navigating this particularly hazardous section of the route to India.

The ship would bequeath its name to the reef – although somewhere along the way the reef came to have one less ‘s’ than the

ship, spelled Fergusson in its Indian Board of Trade registration papers.

Ferguson Reef lies on the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef, 1,040 nautical miles north of Brisbane and 50 nautical miles south of Raine Island, which marks an entrance to the labyrinth of reefs that are a feature of these tropical seas.

A major debate in Australian colonial history during the first half of the 19th century was about the safest and quickest shipping route between Sydney and India via Torres Strait. Some navigators, such as Phillip Parker King, favoured the inner route following the Australian coast inside the Great Barrier Reef, while other equally respected navigators, such as Matthew Flinders, recommended the outer route through the Coral Sea.

Both routes converged near the Raine Island Entrance, where ship captains had the choice to switch from one route to the other depending upon weather and other circumstances. The isolation of the area, the lack of fixed navigational marks (until construction of a beacon on Raine Island in 1844), and the complex nature of the passages through the Great Barrier Reef resulted in the loss of more than 36 ships on Ferguson, Martha Ridgeway, Cockburn, Great Detached and Yules Detached Reefs between 1800 and 1850.

Although these isolated reefs have been visited by sports divers, archaeologists from the Queensland Museum and some commercial operators, the wrecks on them remain largely unknown to archaeologists and historians alike. The sites are a resource for the study of transport corridors to Asia, in particular India, and their role in the development of colonial Australia; they encompass themes of exploration and survey, colonial industry and enterprise, emigration and settlement.

The work of the Australian National Maritime Museum’s maritime archaeology team locating and recording some of these historic wrecks, in a major collaboration with project sponsor and partner the Silentworld Foundation, has been reported in detail in previous editions of Signals Following the fourth expedition with Silentworld Foundation, locating the Indiatrade ship Royal Charlotte at Frederick Reef in January 2012 (Signals No 98 March–May 2012), the team assessed options to continue its work on early 19th century India–Australia trade and Indian shipbuilding. Based on a number of factors including the availability of safe anchorages, we decided to investigate Ferguson Reef and the Raine Island Entrance, the ocean junction of the Inner and Outer Shipping Routes.

The site had been located by well-known Queensland diving identity Ben Cropp

The sites are a resource for the study of transport corridors to Asia, in particular India, and their role in the development of colonial Australia

Author Kieran Hosty investigates the anchor of Fergusson located in a compact assemblage of artefacts including possible iron field ovens. All photographs by expedition photographer Xanthe Rivett, Silentworld Foundation

in the early 1970s and has been visited on a number of occasions since, but a number of questions remained about its extent and the possible presence of another shipwreck close to Fergusson Our investigations suffered several delays, due to two late-season cyclones pounding the Great Barrier Reef. One of the expedition vessels, Nimrod Explorer, was held up in the Solomon Islands, leaving a much-reduced project team embarking in Cairns on 20 March on Silentworld II and an alternative charter vessel Hellraiser 2 The team arrived at Ferguson Reef on 23 March and quickly settled down to work.

Thanks to information supplied by former State Maritime Archaeologist Ed Slaughter and Ben Cropp, the site of the Fergusson shipwreck was quickly located in between 2.5 and four metres of water approximately 25 metres west of the surf break on the eastern side of Ferguson Reef. Over the next six days the team surveyed the site, recording numerous iron knees, iron boxes (possibly field ovens or stoves for the troops), two large anchors lying flat

on the reef top, four carronades, numerous iron concretions, rudder fittings and a good scattering of artefacts including glass and ceramic fragments, iron fastenings, rigging and copper-alloy gun components. A large pile of concreted stud-link anchor chain marked the original position of the Fergusson chain locker.

Just 30 metres north and slightly inshore of the Ferguson site is another anchor complete with iron stock. Attached to it is a long run of stud-link chain stretching 208 metres across the reef top towards the northwest. Scattered along the run of chain are numerous bits of iron concretion, copper-alloy and iron fastenings and what appears to be several pieces of iron ballast. Although very close to the Fergusson wreck, several clues suggested that the anchor and chain are from another, as yet unidentified, wreck or stranding on this reef.

While at Ferguson Reef the team participated in a series of live webcasts into a number of regional NSW high schools. Hosted by ANMM education officers Jeff Fletcher and Anne Doran, the webcasts connected to

schools through DART (Distance & Rural Technologies – the Connected Classrooms arm of the Department of Education & Communities). Titled Archaeology in Action, the webcasts in the form of a video conference focused on the museum’s maritime archaeology collection, how and why archaeologists investigate wreck sites, what shipwrecks can teach us about the past, and the museum’s role as leaders in archaeological investigation. It connected with schools from Year 4 through to Year 12, from areas such as Armidale, Coffs Harbour, Queanbeyan, Ardlethan and Wee Waa. There were also studio audiences from Gorokan High School and Shoalhaven Anglican High.

Leaving Ferguson Reef the team next attempted to locate the wreck of the Indian-built opium trader Morning Star, lost in 1814 some 10 nautical miles inshore of Ferguson Reef, in the vicinity of Quoin Island, Fison and Eel Reefs.

The circumstances surrounding the wreck of the Morning Star are a real mystery. On 30 September 1814 the crew of the

colonial vessel Eliza, on a voyage from Sydney to Calcutta, observed a flag flying from a makeshift flagpole on Booby Island at the entrance to Torres Strait. There the crew of Eliza found five shipwreck survivors who reported that they were from the two-masted, copper-sheathed, 135-ton brig Morning Star which, after a very successful trading voyage to Sydney with tea, spices, alcohol, cotton and silk, was returning to Calcutta when it was wrecked three months earlier on a coral reef near Raine Island. They had, along with their captain Robert Smart and nine other surviving sailors, made for Booby Island in the ship’s longboat.

However, Captain Smart had departed Booby Island with the other survivors, bound for Timor, only a few days before the five castaways were picked up by Eliza Nothing was heard of Smart or the others for another four years when the three-masted ship Claudine anchored overnight off Murray Island in Torres Strait in September 1818 and picked up Shaik Djamal, a lascar or Indian sailor, from the wreck of the Morning Star. The longboat, Djamal related, had

capsized and he alone had managed to get ashore. No more was ever heard of Captain Smart and the other Morning Star survivors.

From 31 March to 3 April our team carried out extensive magnetometer and swimline surveys in the area around Quoin Island, Fison Reefs and Eel Reefs, and detected significant magnetic anomalies – possible evidence of ferrous masses such as cannons, anchors or chain – on the eastern side of Eel Reef in 10–12 metres of water. Additional metal detector and visual surveys of the area failed to locate the anomaly and no shipwreck material was located on the surface.

Given the soft, sedimentary nature of seafloor in those areas it is possible that the anomaly is heavily buried. An associate, Frits Breuseker of SeeSea Pty Ltd, has agreed to analyse the remote-sensing data and contour the information, which may allow us to more accurately pinpoint the anomaly and, if given the opportunity to re-visit the site at a later date, locate whatever lies beneath.

A major debate in Australian colonial history during the first half of the 19th century was about the safest and quickest shipping route between Sydney and India via Torres Strait

The Ferguson Reef Project 2013 was a collaborative project with the Silentworld Foundation, the University of Sydney and the Australian Research Council and was greatly assisted by Benn Cropp, Warren Delaney, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Peter Illidge, James Cook University, Maritime Archaeological Association of Queensland, Mundingburra Medical Centre Townsville, Oceania Maritime Pty Ltd, SeaSee Pty Ltd, Ed Slaughter, Queensland Department of Resource Management, Xanthe Rivett Photographic Services.

01 John Mullen, CEO, Silentworld Foundation, goes to work with a metal detector.

02 Anchor chain, possibly from an unknown shipwreck rather than Fergusson itself, laid out in a line across the shallow Ferguson Reef top, on a day of close to ideal conditions.

By the sea, drinking tea

THE GLOBAL INFLUENCE OF A BELOVED BREW

Tea was the first global commodity for mass consumption, influencing trade and culture around the world. Mariko Smith explores objects she discovered in the museum’s collection while working on a new display about colonial Australian regattas that reflect this favourite brew’s place in Anglo-Australian maritime heritage.

Merchant and fast clipper ships were vessels of change, bringing social, cultural, economic and political transformations to far-flung countries

TEA IS TRULY DIVERSE, BOTH IN flavour and in the many ways that it has shaped our daily lives. From the robust taste of the popular English Breakfast black tea, to the refreshing lightness of green tea varieties and the wine-like muscatel notes of Darjeeling blends, tea has provided a refreshing alternative to coffee for getting us through the day – but it has also played a significant role in modern world history, geography and maritime heritage.

Tea can be considered as the first global commodity for mass consumption, and the maritime industry was crucial to this achievement by transporting chests of tea between ports around the world. Key players in the supply and demand for tea included large multinational merchant companies in Europe, most notably the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) and Britain’s own East India Company, which dealt in important trade goods such as tea between the Far East and Europe from the 17th to 19th centuries. Readers can find out more about the activities of the East India Company in the museum’s new exhibition East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia (1 June–18 August 2013). These companies played important roles in exploration and discovery as well as commercial trade. Ships of exploration and commerce, the East Indiamen and the

later fast clipper ships that raced each other to bring home a season’s first cargo of tea, can be all considered as vessels of change: they brought significant social, cultural, economic and political transformations to nations such as Britain and Australia, simply through importing this fragrant cargo.

The beverage we know and love today as tea is said to have originated around the Yunnan province in China and to have been consumed in Asia since ancient times. There is no conclusive story of origin, but one popular Chinese legend has it that in 2737 BC some aromatic leaves from the tea plant Camellia sinensis fell into Chinese emperor Shen Nung’s bowl of freshly boiled water, producing a pleasant-tasting and restorative drink. A later tale from the 6th century AD runs along more mythical – and macabre – lines, detailing how tea bushes came into being when the founder of Chan Buddhism, a forerunner of Zen, accidentally fell asleep after a long period of meditation and was so disgusted by this momentary weakness that he cut off his own eyelids to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again. They fell to the ground and took root as tea plants, and tea was consequently promoted as a stimulant for students of Chan Buddhism to drink during meditation!

01 Previous pages: detail of a hand-coloured lithograph of a public picnic held at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair on Sydney Harbour in 1852. ANMM Collection. All photographs A Frolows/ANMM

02 Flying Cloud, by Frederick Schiller Cozzens 1909, watercolour ship portrait of the famous clipper ship built by Donald McKay in 1851, East Boston. In its later years the vessel transported tea from China to London, on one occasion making the journey in 123 days. ANMM Collection. Purchased with USA Bicentennial Gift funds

Infusing tea leaves in water developed into a time-honoured tradition in the East, and drinking tea eventually became a hit in Europe too, through Portuguese and Dutch trade connections with China. There it was initially enjoyed by the continental European aristocracy for its prestige and supposed medicinal properties; it was considered so valuable that it was kept under lock and key. By the mid-17th century, tea was widely consumed across Europe and had travelled to England through royal circles. The nature of the dried product made it suitable for longdistance, bulk transport and so both its popularity and affordability could increase together, creating profitable opportunities for international maritime trade.

According to BBC Radio 4’s In our time profile on tea in 2004, Britain’s trade in tea began with a modest official import of just two ounces (60 g) during the 1660s, and grew to an annual supply of some 24 million pounds (11 million kg) by 1801. By the turn of the 20th century it was one of the most widely consumed substances on Earth; rich and poor alike were sipping an average of two cups a day and every Briton was using on average six pounds (3 kg) of tea leaves per year. Tea’s ability to transcend class was not lost on commentators such as English merchant philanthropist Jonas

Hanway, who warned European society in an essay written in 1757 that ‘your servants’ servants, down to the very beggars, will not be satisfied unless they consume the produce of the remote country of China’.

It is fascinating that what was originally an exotic foreign luxury item would become Britain’s national drink, and in doing so help to define the essence of ‘Britishness’ and even symbolise the might of the British Empire. Imperialism ensured that the habit of tea-drinking was transferred from mother Britain to her colonies in America and Australia. The colonial context transformed tea into a political symbol and a tool of power, influence and control. The adoption of tea as the beverage of choice in the colonies was seen as a standard-marker of civilised conduct – despite the facts that it was often drunk sweetened with sugar from Caribbean slave plantations, and that Britain exported huge shipments of Indian opium to China during the 18th and 19th centuries to pay for all that tea.

Britain moved to produce its own tea in commercial plantations established in its imperial domains India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) during the early to mid1800s. This challenged the long-standing Chinese monopoly on tea production, and also confirmed Britain’s dominance as an influential economic and military

superpower. The importation of tea was also a very important source of tax revenue for Britain, and political decisions regarding this issue created waves for both the economy and society as a whole.

In 1773, the British Parliament passed the Tea Act, which gave the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade between the British colonies, with the government retaining a three-pence-perpound duty on tea for the privilege. It was a move to bail out the financially struggling company, whose profits suffered in part from widespread illegal smuggling and adulteration of tea cargo, although American colonists were quick to suspect it was yet another way for Britain to keep them on a short leash. In The Glorious Cause –The American Revolution, 1763–1789, Robert Middlekauff mentions a letter written by Abigail Adams – eventually the wife of the second American president and the mother of the sixth – to Mercy Warren on 5 December 1773 referring to tea as the ‘weed of [British] slavery’. Anyone who allowed tea to be brought into American ports by company ships risked landing themselves in hot water (so to speak) with the locals, being deemed an enemy of America. On 16 December 1773 the protest culminated in some 90,000 pounds (41,000 kg) of British East India Company tea,

valued at £10,000, being tossed by American patriots into Boston Harbor – a pivotal event in the American independence movement now known as the ‘Boston Tea Party’.

Tea seems to have had a more peaceful reception in the Antipodes. Beginning with its journey on the First Fleet in 1788, Australians developed a much-loved tradition of making a billy or a ‘cuppa’ in any season and for all sorts of occasions, very much in the attitude later embodied in the British wartime motto of ‘keep calm and carry on’. Australia’s love of tea – whether served hot with dainty scones baked by the Country Women’s Association, or refreshingly cold with ice and citrus slices at the beach, or inspiring many a nannaknitted tea-cosy – continues to demonstrate strong cultural connections with Britain. This is a theme I was keen to tease out and develop while planning an update for the museum’s Watermarks exhibition, in the context of colonial celebrations such as the Australian regatta scene.

Regattas presented ideal occasions for people to gather and socialise, often over refreshments brought from home. Enjoying a cup of tea with some homemade sweet and savoury delicacies during these events wasn’t just a matter of satisfying one’s appetite – it was also a chance to reflect on and reinforce Anglo-Australian identities.

01 Silver-plated trophy consisting of a tea kettle on a silver stand, awarded to the yacht Pleiades in January 1883. Made in Sheffield, England, by Martin Hall & Co, it may originally have had a burner placed underneath the stand to heat the kettle. ANMM Collection.

Gift from Dr David Lark 02 English-made Royal Doulton china teacup decorated with an oval-shaped brown, blue and cream transfer scene of the Hobart Regatta, and with a gilt rim and handle. ANMM Collection

With this in mind, I searched through the museum’s extensive database of objects that relate to travel, tourism, sport and leisure, and came across several interesting objects that provide a range of visual and contextual representations of tea in Anglo-Australian maritime heritage.

Most striking is a late-19th-century trophy in the form of an intricately detailed silverplated tea kettle with wicker-wrapped handle on a silver stand. It was awarded to the nine-ton cutter yacht Pleiades for second place in the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron’s Commodore’s Handicap race on 20 January 1883. The engraving on the front of the trophy also gives details about the other placegetters, Mabel, Ione and Doris Pleiades was designed and built by W Langford at Berry’s Bay in Sydney in 1874. Connections to trade and commerce are evident through its first owner E W Knox, son of the manager of Colonial Sugar Refining Co Ltd (CSR). In 1883 it was owned by Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron member F B Lark.

Another object visually connected to the theme of tea by the sea is a lovely Englishmade Royal Doulton china teacup. It features a coloured transfer depicting a scene from the 1909 Royal Hobart Regatta, including HMS Powerful, flagship of the Royal Navy’s Australia Station and also of that year’s regatta. Souvenirs such as this were produced in their thousands for spectators wishing to take home and enjoy a little slice of Australian maritime history. A major sporting and social event in Tasmania’s calendar year, the Royal Hobart Regatta began in 1838 and continues today as a series of aquatic competitions and social activities held on the Derwent River in Hobart.

A major motivation for proposing a display on tea by the sea was to incorporate more feminine and family-focused perspectives

and narratives in an area often dominated by male experiences. Tea’s associations with domesticity and respectability often led to brands being targeted specifically at women and families, and indeed the product was firmly entrenched in typically feminine rituals involving getting together and sharing news.

By the turn of the 20th century, tea was one of the most widely consumed substances on Earth; rich and poor alike were sipping an average of two cups a day and every Briton was using on average six pounds (3 kg) of tea leaves every year

Picnic held at Lady Macquarie’s Chair Sydney N S Wales in 1852 is a detailed hand-coloured lithograph print from the 1870s, attributed to artist J Henderson, depicting spectators at a public picnic held during a sailing regatta on Sydney Harbour in 1852. It is said to be based on a large oil painting by an unknown artist from about 1855 or 1856. The scene may be of an Anniversary Day Regatta, an annual holiday festivity held every year from 1836 to commemorate the establishment of the colony of New South Wales. Now known as the Australia Day Regatta, it is considered the oldest continuous sailing regatta in the world. The picturesque rocky headland

known as Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, located in today’s Domain, was a popular vantage point for crowds of all classes to enjoy picnics and watch regattas. This scene shows groups of men, women, children and even their pets enjoying a day by the sea, picnicking and cavorting in groups on the foreshore and clustering around tents set up for entertainment and refreshments that most certainly included tea.

An example of the feminine connections to tea in regatta celebrations is a notice regarding a planned afternoon tea at the Frankston Yacht Club Open Day in October 1966, which details the sorts of culinary delights enjoyed by attendees at sailing-related events. It also illustrates the traditional roles played by women on the social side of the Australian sailing scene leading up to the 21st century. For instance, the language used in the notice indicates the ancillary, behind-the-scenes role they played in sailing clubs and associations in making sure the official guests and members were provided with refreshments during the event.

These fascinating stories are ones that the Australian National Maritime Museum is dedicated to sharing with visitors, connecting them with not only the museum’s vast object collections but also the formation of our Anglo-Australian heritage.

Author Mariko Smith was an assistant curator in the museum’s Travel, Tourism, Sport and Leisure collecting area during 2012. Her research into an exhibition update – and her love of chai lattes and Lady Grey tea served black with no sugar – inspired her to write this article.

Ansel Adams

PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO THE SEA

The great American photographer Ansel Adams (1902–1984) is best known for his detailed black-and-white landscapes that capture the epic spaces of the US continent. The museum brings his spectacular work to Australian audiences, combining famous images with extraordinary lesser-known works that focus on the artist’s exploration of water in all its forms. The Americans curators of the Peabody Essex Museum explore the techniques of this brilliant pioneering modernist.

WATER WAS ONE OF ANSEL ADAMS’ favourite subjects. He photographed it consistently and repeatedly, from his first pictures in 1915 until his death in 1984. He found it in his beloved Yosemite Valley, in waterfalls, rivers and rapids, and in clouds, ice and snow. It was present on the coast, on the shores of his childhood home at Bakers Beach, San Francisco, in the shipwrecks he discovered on the Pacific headlands, and in crashing waves and seascapes. And water was evident in quiet places, too – in ponds, basins and spillways, eroded rocks and tidal pools. He carried this interest with him wherever he went, from the islands of Hawaii to the rocky shores of New England.

Adams’ interest in photography developed early. His parents bought him a Kodak Box Brownie camera in 1916, on the second day of a summer vacation trip to Yosemite, and he began making photographs. By his mid-teens, he was already an accomplished photographer, and the love affair with Yosemite that began on this trip would last his entire life.

When Adams began his career in the 1910s, photography was in turmoil. An old guard still clung to the idea, dating from the late 1800s, that only photographers who made pictures that looked like paintings or drawings could be considered true artists. These photographers, loosely called pictorialists, used soft focus, textured papers and coloured emulsions to give their pictures a handmade, personal look, often evoking stories from mythology or literature.

After the brutality of World War 1, many viewers came to see pictorialist photographs

as hopelessly sentimental and nostalgic. Gradually, harder-edged forms took hold. At first in Europe and New York, and later in California, artists sought to ‘let the camera speak’. They believed that photographers should embrace the mechanical qualities of camera and lens, making pictures that looked like no other art form. This new attitude, which paralleled developments in painting and literature, came to be known as photographic modernism.

Adams was one of the leading figures in this new movement. Using rapid exposure to freeze motion in time, photographing in sharp focus and presenting his pictures in sequence, Adams demonstrated how the camera could capture something as complex as a shifting tide, and as subtle as the bend in a river. Fluid and irregular, even the most tranquil body of water is in a constant state of flux. This makes it an attractive subject to photograph, because the camera can stop action that is happening faster than the human eye can see.

Photographing waterfalls, rapids and crashing waves, Adams froze motion in time, making pictures of things moving so quickly that not even he could predict exactly how they would look when the film was developed. Adams was also one of the first photographers to work in the large-scale mural format that has now become standard among contemporary artists.

In 1932, Adams and a small group of like-minded photographers, including his friends Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, founded the group ƒ/64. Although it did not last long, effectively disbanding three years later, its influence

was far reaching. The group took its name from ‘ƒ-stop’ 64, the smallest aperture, or lens opening, commonly found on lenses of the time. Photographs made at this setting are exceedingly sharp and have maximal range of focus from foreground to background, a quality that photographers call depth of field. Many of the photographs Adams made after 1932 maintain sharp focus across the entire picture. This unnatural effect was considered radical at the time. However, ƒ/64 artists did not want to represent the world the way the eye sees it; instead, they wanted to make pictures according to the unique capabilities of camera and lens.

In this exhibition, drawn from the Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, viewers have the opportunity to view a wide range of Adams’s work. Both grand and intimate at turns, these personal and sometimes experimental photos express his thoughts about the natural world, and often push the boundaries between realism and abstraction. From the tiny to the monumental, from the subtle to the dramatic, these images explore Adams’ enduring fascination with the mysterious, ephemeral and transitory nature of water as a photographic subject.

At the museum 4 July–8 December 2013. Organised by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. Support for the exhibition was provided by David H Arrington, and the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. Funded at ANMM by the USA Bicentennial Gift.

This article was edited by Janine Flew from material provided by the curators of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Adams demonstrated how the camera could capture something as complex as a shifting tide, and as subtle as the bend in a river

01 Ansel Adams and the American Clipper, Ross Landing California. Photograph by Alan Ross

02 The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942. Photograph by Ansel Adams, Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

01 Shipwreck Series, Lands End, San Francisco, c 1934. Photograph by Ansel Adams, Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

02 Waves, Dillon Beach, 1964. Photograph by Ansel Adams, Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

03 Waterfall, Northern Cascades, Washington, c 1960. Photograph by Ansel Adams, Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Conservation kayaking

AT THE ‘SEE-FAR’ ISLAND

One of the museum’s conservation team, Julie O’Connor, takes us kayaking to historic Me-Mel, or Goat Island, in Sydney Harbour, and describes how the roles of conservator and conservationist sometimes meet. If you’d like to explore the island for yourself, we’re offering a Members’ tour as part of our winter program this August; details page 46.

AS A CONSERVATOR AND MUSEUM professional, I am often asked to explain the difference between a conservator and a conservationist. From my perspective, conservators usually take care of material culture, and conservationists work to conserve living culture and the environment – but both value historic sites, their interpretation and how the environment contributes to our understanding of their cultural significance.

Centrally located in Sydney Harbour, Goat Island is managed by NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS).

As part of the recent Sydney Harbour National Parks Management Plan, NPWS plans to encourage greater use of the island.

NPWS officers are working with volunteer organisations such as the Willow Warriors and the Mud-crabs to preserve the botanical and biological environment surrounding the island’s buildings. The Willow Warriors are a group of conservation kayakers who navigate waterways to clear rivers of invasive willow trees. The Mud-crabs are mostly involved with clearing pollution, monitoring water quality and developing wetlands along the banks of the Cooks River.

During August, September and October 2012, I made three visits to historic Goat Island with a group of conservation kayakers from these organisations, which offered an insight into the island’s maritime history.

On each visit to the island, we launched our kayaks from Birchgrove Park, and then circumnavigated the island from east to west. Approaching from the south-east, we passed an Aboriginal shell midden, a pile of discarded shells on the shore.

This is the last dietary remnant of the Sydney Aboriginal people who used Goat Island before its colonial occupation from the 1820s. It later became a source of lime for mortar during the construction of buildings on the island.

The waters surrounding the island were a rich seasonal source of fish, including salmon, tailor and kingfish varieties, for Indigenous people. The rocky sandstone shorelines supported shoals of east-coast species of bream, mullet, whiting, luderick, flathead, groper, cod and leatherjacket, as well as other marine fauna and flora, including brown kelp, prawns and shellfish.

The partially submerged pylons of a disused finger wharf came into view as we paddled along the eastern shoreline. Further along the shore, more recent concrete slabs have been positioned among a tangle of disused communication cabling on the north-eastern shore to help slow erosion caused by weathering and the wash of passing vessels.

Rounding the northern tip of the island we paddled past the water police station, built in 1938 of grey sandstone quarried on the island, to a design prepared by renowned colonial architect Mortimer Lewis. From this vantage point, with its commanding view of the harbour, it is obvious why the water police were based here, and why Sydney Aboriginal people called the island ‘Me-Mel’, or ‘a place from which you can see far’.

On the western side of the island, we paddled around wharves constructed by the Sydney Harbour Trust in the 1940s and extended by its successor the Maritime

With its commanding view of the harbour, it is obvious why Sydney Aboriginal people called it a ‘place from which you can see far’

Services Board. We landed our canoes at Barney’s Cut, a quarried geological feature named after Captain George Barney of the Royal Engineers, which divided the water police station on the northern tip of the island from the potential danger of the gunpowder magazine and surrounding buildings on the southern tip of the island. Sandstone quarried from this area in the early 1830s was also used in some buildings in nearby Sydney Cove.

The main garden path from Barney’s Cut slopes gently up toward the harbourmaster’s residence, built around 1903. Situated in the centre of the island, it commands a 180-degree view of the harbour from the balcony and the ‘widow’s watch’ at the top of a replica cedar staircase that replaces the original, which was burnt during a period of disuse.

01 Previous pages: Goat Island, looking southwards to Simmons Point, Balmain. Mark Merton Photography

02 Cooperage (left) and gunpowder magazine buttress (rear). Photographer Robert Newton, Office of Environment and Heritage

03 Foreman’s quarters or barracks constructed c 1838

04 Conservation kayakers paddle from Birchgrove Park to Goat Island in Sydney Harbour. Photograph Jeff Cottrell, co-ordinator of Willow Warriors

The gardens surrounding the harbourmaster’s residence feature significant botanical species that are indigenous to Goat Island, including smooth-barked apple (Angophora costata), coastal banksias (Banksia integrifolia), wattle (Acacia longifolia, A. suaveolens, A. terminalis, A. binervia, A. ulicifolia), Port Jackson fig (Ficus rubiginosa), bangalay (Eucalyptus botryoides) and lomandra (Lomandra longifolia).

The original flora on the island supported several indigenous faunal species, including the eastern water rat (Hydromys chrysogaster), the nocturnal grey-headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus), and several insectivorous bat species, such as the eastern bent-wing bat (Miniopterus schreibersii oceanensis), the large forest bat (Vespadelus darlingtoni) and Gould’s wattled bat (Chalinolobus bouldii). Also found were two varieties of skink (Eulamprus tenuis and Lampropholis delicata), the striped marsh frog (Limnodynastes peronii), which has been recorded breeding in a garden pond, and a number of common birds, including five species that breed on the island. It has been suggested that goats were brought to Me-Mel in early colonial times because

it was a safe haven from hungry convicts. Since then, the island has been known as Goat Island.

The natural botanical features on the island were mostly cleared for building and observation and to reduce the risk of bushfires igniting the island’s gunpowder arsenal. This allowed introduced species such as African olive, asparagus fern and ‘mother of a million’ to thrive and invade the habitat of indigenous flora. Several botanical and man-made features created by the island’s various residents – existing sandstone dry walls and, anecdotally, a hedge trimmed to resemble the prow of a boat – are now obscured by invasive plants.

We continued our journey around the island on foot, along the garden path sloping south-east from the harbourmaster’s residence towards what is called the colonial precinct. The most significant buildings here were built between 1833 and 1837 and include the government magazine and associated cooperage built to safely store government gunpowder supplies.

The sandstone was quarried on site by convicts who lived in portable wooden bunkhouses that slept 20 men, five sideby-side on each of four shelves.

The gardens surrounding the harbourmaster’s residence feature significant botanical species that are indigenous to Goat Island

01 Botanical features on the island in about 1985 included Acacia longifolia (area 20), Banksia integrifolia (area 9), Angophora costata (area 8), Eucalyptus botryoides (area 14), Ficus rubiginosa (area 3) and Lomandra longifolia (area 18). From Goat Island … assessment of significance by James Semple Kerr, Maritime Services Board NSW 1985 Copyright 02 Harbour master’s residence 1901–03. Photographer Robert Newton, Office of Environment and Heritage

The magazine was environmentally controlled through its construction, with two-metre-thick walls, three-metrethick buttresses and ventilation holes along its length to minimise the risk of explosions. A second magazine (1850–1853), designed by colonial architect Edmund Blacket to separate merchant gunpowder stores from government stores, was constructed behind the cooperage. It proved inadequate for storing gunpowder safely, and so in the 1920s was converted into a timber workshop and sawmill. The colonial precinct also features a neo-Georgian-styled officers’ barracks roofed with Welsh Bangor slate carried in ships’ ballast.

After the departure of the NSW Maritime Services Board, which administered the island from 1936 to 1984, the buildings and environment of Goat Island fell into disrepair. However, some artefacts – including a diving suit, photographs, ship models, prows and paper documents that relate to the history of the island – survive in the temporary museum located in the old barracks building. As a conservator I can’t help but note that the more favourable environmental conditions in the gunpowder magazine

make it a more suitable museum than the barracks to house artefacts that communicate the history of Goat Island.

Not long after the arrival of the First Fleet, goats were brought to the island because it was a safe haven from hungry convicts

During a period of daily trips to Goat Island during 2012, kayaking conservation volunteers cleared many areas where invasive plants had overtaken the habitat of native botanical species, revealing such things as rocky platforms where local fishermen once fished. A walking track along the western shore has been cleared of asparagus fern and African olive and this now links with other tracks on the island.

Balancing public and commercial interests on Goat Island, while preserving the past, requires a sensitive response from heritage

architects, conservators, conservationists and maritime authorities. Conservators and conservationists may differ in their focus, but they share values and concern for our cultural heritage and the environment.

See page 46 for details of a Members tour to Goat Island on 15 August 2013.

The Willow Warriors (willowwarriors.org. au) are supported by the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change’s Environmental Trust, the National Heritage Trust through the Australian Government Envirofund, the National Parks and Wildlife Service with support from the Sydney Catchment Authority, the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment Management Authority, Australis Canoes, Be Natural, Paddle NSW, Penrith White Water Stadium and the River Canoe Club. The Mud-crabs (mudcrabs. cooksriver@gmail) are supported by the Cooks River Valley Association and various local councils.

Conservation volunteers help NPWS staff clear the island of overgrown vegetation and introduced species. Photograph Rosie Nicolai

APT’S NEWEST TRAVEL ADVENTURE!

New for 2013, APT is launching a whole new way to explore the world’s seldom-seen treasures. APT’s Small Ship Expedition Cruises offer itineraries for those with a real sense of adventure, while maintaining the incredible standards for which we’re famous.

✓ The most luxurious expedition vessels –the MS Caledonian Sky and the MS Island Sky

✓ State of the art facilities resembling those of a private yacht

✓ Intimate, small group discoveries with just 55 suites

✓ Exquisite dining experiences with a touch of local flavours

✓ Included wines, beers and soft drinks with lunch and dinner

✓ Fleet of 10 Zodiac landing craft for a true exploration

✓ Onboard expedition teams with naturalists, historians & ecologists

✓ Freedom of Choice Sightseeing Inclusions throughout holiday

Wooden boatbuilding

NOT A DYING ART – 2013 PHIL RENOUF MEMORIAL LECTURE

The Phil Renouf Memorial Lecture is held each year in association with Sydney Heritage Fleet, honouring its late, esteemed president who worked tirelessly to bring the two organisations closer. The full lecture by john Wood of Tasmania’s Wooden Boat Centre is at anmm.gov.au/talks

IN 2001 PHIL RENOUF MADE A nostalgic pilgrimage through Franklin, where I live, on Tasmania’s Huon River, and on to what he described as a ‘sacred site’, Recherche Bay in the far south of Tasmania. That’s where Sydney Heritage Fleet’s famous flagship, the 1874 barque James Craig, lay derelict until 1972 when Alan Edenborough decided that it would be possible to salvage her and triggered the long process that led to her total resurrection, 30 years later, over which Phil Renouf presided.

I began to think about the parallel history of two international social movements, the restoration of tall ships like James Craig, and the rebirth of wooden boatbuilding, and this led me to recognise Phil Renouf as a kindred spirit, because these movements have a lot in common. They grew up together, and both of them have helped to make the world a better place.

but it neatly summarised the dominant economic philosophy of the late 20th century. Credit cards, made of plastic, were the currency of an increasingly indebted society. And mass-produced boats, made of fibreglass, were popular consumer items.

Most people believed that wooden boats were things of the past. John Gardner himself, a leading champion of American wooden boats, declared in 1992 that ‘the custom-built yachts of a couple of generations ago are extinct’.

But while history has its mainstreams, it also has significant counter-currents that run in an opposite direction. Like underground creeks they surface unexpectedly at times because their sources have never been destroyed. They irrigate our minds with alternative possibilities. And they energise communities.

01 ‘At community level, wooden boatbuilding can be a catalyst for social transformation and a focus of pride and recovery of sense of place,’ says John Wood of his Franklin, Tasmania, heritage boat organisation. Photographer Diane Osmond/ANMM

02 The Wooden Boat Centre, Franklin, Tasmania, which is also home of the Living Boat Trust.

Let’s start with how things were towards the end of the last century. In 1987, Britain’s Prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was interviewed for Woman’s Own magazine. ‘There is no such thing as society!’ she famously declared. ‘There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ This was also the year of the film Wall Street, in which Gordon Gekko declared that ‘Greed is good’. That wasn’t really what Adam Smith meant,

Two years after the decision to restore James Craig was made in 1974, a young man called Jon Wilson sat down in his log cabin in the woods of Maine, USA, next to his telephone, which was nailed to a tree, and wrote the editorial for the first issue of WoodenBoat magazine: ‘For those doomsayers who might wonder just how long a magazine on wooden boats could possibly survive, it seems fitting to remind them that wood is, after all, our only renewable construction resource, a factor that’s of considerable importance at this time of diminishing supplies in other fields.’

Jon was right, but it was never that simple. The 1973 oil crisis didn’t turn out to be as terminal as many expected. Wars over the planet’s oil supplies lay in the future, but it remains as true now as it was then, that the resources on which fibreglass, steel, aluminium and epoxy depend are finite. Converting them into building materials requires huge amounts of energy and creates pollution. Wood is renewable. It cleans the air while it’s growing, and stores carbon even when it’s part of a boat.

Boatbuilders who use it can, if they choose, take their place in the queue of other creatures, from eagles to microbes, that participate in the natural forest process from mature tree to habitat for a range of animals, including humans, to soil, to new trees. Our modest intervention temporarily interrupts this process by slotting in a bit of boatbuilding, carbon storage, sailing and a huge amount of human well-being along the way. Using even the earth’s best and rarest timbers can be an ecologically sustainable activity if we are content to live off the interest of the forest without damaging the capital.

I think this was why those slightly folksy early issues of WoodenBoat are historically important. They document the mood of a generation that sensed, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, that all was not right with the ideologies of industrial society, and wanted something more emotionally

satisfying and philosophically re-assuring. Building wooden boats became a way of doing well by doing good. As Jon Wilson put it in each issue during the magazine’s early age of innocence: ‘Re-cycle WoodenBoat. If you don’t want to keep it, give it to a friend. If you can’t find a friend, we’ll find you one.’

More publications soon appeared that provide evidence of an expanding international industry catering for people of all income levels who want to build or own boats that express their own individuality. Classic Boat followed in Britain, then The Boatman and Watercraft, Chasse Marée in France, the Franco-American Maritime Traditions and our own Australian Amateur Boatbuilder, all of them dealing mainly with the craft and craftmanship of wood.

Wise people with adequate incomes created a market for a new generation of professionals, and new schools, as well as traditional apprenticeships, began to pass the trade on to a new generation of men and women. It’s also interesting to note the increasing level of sophistication with which the editors, contributors and readers of the new publications discuss the ethics of using wood, and their growing preference for their own local timbers or timber guaranteed to come from ecologically sustainable sources.

The wooden boatbuilding revival spread quickly to the shores of Australia, and it was boosted by the preparations that

Wood is, after all, our only renewable construction resource, a factor of considerable importance at this time of diminishing supplies

were made in every state for the various sesquicentenary celebrations of the 1980s, and the national bicentennial celebrations of 1988. The event was preceded and followed by a national flurry of wooden ship-building and restoration.

These projects defied conventional wisdom. Bureaucrats and politicians usually condemned them to begin with as unrealistic. They had come to believe by about 1980 that the skills required to build or restore large wooden vessels had been lost from the community, that the timber they needed could not be had, and people who started the projects had to get used to being patronised as ‘dreamers’.

This had an important effect on the nature of these social enterprises. To build a large steel, fibreglass or aluminium vessel, you need an industrial shipyard to even think about it. Wooden ships can start without a lot of money to begin with. They can be built on a beach if need be, as they often were in the past. They generate strong loyalties and become identified with local communities.

John Young’s lecture went on to review many such projects, and how they related to the foundation of the Wooden Boat Centre in Franklin, Tasmania, which has been a catalyst for a struggling rural community. The full transcript of John’s inspirational lecture can be read online at anmm.gov.au/talks.

New people new programs

MESSAGE TO MEMBERS

‘WELCOME ABOARD!’ to the record number of new Members who have just joined us. A big welcome to the new Members manager. And welcome to the winter program of Members’ events and activities. Winter is the perfect time to enjoy Sydney Harbour and we have a wide range of events exclusive to this museum.

Marching up the gangplank to the cheerful piping of the bosun’s whistle as we go to press is our new manager of both the museum’s Members and volunteers program, Kirra McNamara. Kirra has come from a position as the marketing and volunteer coordinator of a not-for-profit children’s disability service, and before that was managing member programs at Western Australia’s premier theme park. Please make Kirra welcome when you meet her at one of our upcoming events.

Among the many fascinating articles in this edition of Signals you will find a number relating to Members events past and present. For those who couldn’t attend John Young’s thought-provoking essay about communities and the joys of wooden boats at the Phil Renouf Memorial Lecture in March, we would have loved to publish it in full … but there wasn’t the space. Instead we’ve published an extract, on page 40, with a link to the whole lecture online at www.anmm.gov.au/talks.

This winter we will have the first meeting of the brand-new Members’ book club, which will be looking at the award-winning novel The Light Between Oceans set in

a Western Australian lighthouse, by the Perth-born novelist M L Stedman. To get your own thoughts about it started, see curator Dr Stephen Gapps’ review of this novel on page 63.

Another article, on page 66, relates to one of our Life Members, John Hannan, whose hospitality and generosity are well known to Members since he invited us to a private viewing of his superb maritime art collection, the largest in the country. And the article on Goat Island on page 32, by one of our talented conservation staff, Julie O’Connor, is there to whet your appetite for this season’s Meet the Neighbours program, which will be exploring this National Parks and Wildlife Service’s treasure trove of Sydney Harbour island history. That’s an event combining cruising, walking and a gourmet lunch.

This quarter we profile two visually enticing but very different new exhibitions. East of India – Forgotten trade with India is as magnificent and colourful as the subcontinent, and it’s all the work of our own curators Dr Nigel Erskine and Michelle Linder. You’ll have the opportunity to meet them and hear about it first-hand, and enjoy associated events including a MasterChefhosted Indian lunch and a Bollywood film afternoon with film maker Anupam Sharma.

In response to your requests for more on-the-harbour activities, we’re going whale watching, doing a NAIDOC week Sea Country cruise and the popular tall ship family Pirate cruise. New programs include Meet the Curator for a behind-the-scenes peek at the Vikings exhibition coming here from Sweden in the Spring, to discover just what it takes to put together a blockbuster exhibition. And there’s a lot more for Members on the following pages. The Members team is looking forward to seeing you soon!

Diane Osmond, acting Members manager

In April Members met award-winning photographer Michael Aw and his expeditioners, and heard him speak about the Antarctic adventure that is the subject of the current photographic exhibition Elysium Antarctic Visual Epic, on display until November in our South Gallery. Photographer on the night was Foo Pu Wen, courtesy of Michael Aw.

01 Michael Aw presents the exhibition book to museum director Kevin Sumption.

02 Expeditioners and supporters met our museum Members.

03 Expedition memorabilia on display in the gallery.

04 Museum chairman Peter Dexter (at right) with guests.

05 Expedition physician Dr Saw with John Swainston, CEO of photographic sponsor Lowepro.

06 Michael Aw with guest the Honourable Alexandra Shackleton, grand-daughter of the explorer.

Members events

WINTER 2013

j UNE

Curator talk & lunch

East of India & gourmet guests

11 am–2 pm Friday 21 June

Highlights of our new exhibition, meet Indian MasterChefs and enjoy exotic cuisine of the subcontinent

Family Fun Sunday Colours of India!

10 am–3 pm Sunday 23 June

Celebrate Indian culture in a day of family fun. Plus special Members Indian bazaar shopping day

On the water

Whale-watching cruise

9.30 am–1.30 pm Saturday 29 June

See the annual migration of the humpback and southern right whales, getting close to these amazing creatures

JULY

NAIDOC Week

Sea-Country tour & harbour cruise

1–3 pm Sunday 7 July

Learn of Sea Country culture with the Tribal Warrior Association, see our exhibition

Family harbour fun

Annual pirate cruise for young & old

10 am–12 pm Thursday 11 July

Join in the swashbuckling aboard the pirate ship Black Swan

Curator tour

East of India – stories from the exhibition

2–4 pm Sunday 14 July

Research journeys on land and sea to develop this rich, complex exhibition

Sunday at the movies

Bollywood film afternoon & discussion

2–5 pm Sunday 21 July

Enjoy an afternoon of Indian film with Bollywood-Aussie film maker Anupam Sharma

AUGUST

Register your interest

Visit HMAS Waterhen

August mid-week

Mine warfare & clearance-diving base

– very limited places, register now

On the water and ‘island’ tour

Garden Island naval heritage

10 am–2 pm Thursday 8 August

Tour of RAN heritage precinct, Sydney Harbour’s secret attraction

Exhibition tour with music

Ansel Adams photography

4–5.30 pm Sunday 11 August

Curator & Conservatorium musicians interpret the great US photographer’s work

On water: meet the neighbours

Goat Island tour & cruise

1–3.45 pm Thursday 15 August

Discover Goat Island with an island picnic, and a harbour history cruise

Bookings and enquiries

Booking form on reverse of mailing address sheet. Please note that booking is essential: online at anmm.gov.au/membersevents or phone (02) 9298 3646 (unless otherwise indicated) or email members@anmm.gov.au before sending form with payment. All details are correct at time of publication but subject to change.

Author talk with John Zubrzycki

The Last Nizam: An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback

3–5 pm Sunday 28 July

Wealthy heir to India’s greatest princely state buys a WA sheep station

Family fun Sundays

Lighthouse larks!

11 am–3 pm Sunday 18 August

Bring the kids to celebrate International Lighthouse Weekend

Inaugural Members book group

The Light Between Oceans

4–6 pm Sunday 18 August

Discuss maritime-themed novels

Curator talk

Meet Mariea Fisher

11 am–12.30 pm Wednesday 28 August

Manager of temporary & travelling exhibitions

01 Lunch hosts Kumar & Suba Mahadean

Photograph courtesy the subjects

02 Watch whales off Sydney. Photo courtesy Hull’s Complete Boating Services

03 Join the Black Swan buccaneers

Photograph by Sharon Babbage/ANMM

Curator talk & lunch

East of India & gourmet guests

11 am–2 pm Friday 21 June

Join curators Nigel Erskine and Michelle Linder for a tour of the exhibition East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia At a delicious Indian-themed lunch Kumar and Suba Mahadean, authors of the new cookbook and biography, Food, Family and Tradition, will speak about the regional flavours of India. These are the chefs behind the SMH Good Food guide’s one-hatted restaurant Akhi’s in Woolloomooloo; chef Kumar has twice featured on MasterChef Australia. Introduced by Mridula Chakraborty, UWS. Book signing by the authors.

Members $40 Guests $50. Price includes two-course lunch. Bookings essential

Family Fun Sunday

Colours of India!

10 am–3 pm Sunday 23 June

Celebrate Indian culture in a day of family fun inspired by our exhibition East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia Enjoy spectacular performances, storytelling, henna tattoo painting and garland making. Make your own Indianinspired block-printed calico bags or painted tiles in Kids on Deck. Special Members Indian Bazaar shopping day, and enjoy extra discounts on a range of books and decorative items. Free for Members. Seeanmm.gov.au/kids for more event details

On the water

Whale-watching cruise

9.30 am–1.30 pm Saturday 29 June

Every year, around 3,000 humpback and southern right whales migrate thousands of kilometres from the Antarctic to warmer northern waters to breed. Witness these majestic creatures in their natural environment as they pass Sydney Harbour. Expert commentary. Barbecue lunch on our return to the harbour.

Members $70 Member family $150 Guests $75 Guest family $180. Family ticket includes 2 adults and 2 children. Includes lunch, tea and coffee. Meet at the South Pontoon next to Vampire. Cruise subject to change depending on conditions. Guaranteed sightings or receive a free replacement cruise! Bookings essential

NAIDOC Week

Sea-Country tour & cruise

1–3pm Sunday 7 July

NAIDOC Week (July 7–14) is a national event celebrating Indigenous survival and culture. Curator Dr Stephen Gapps shows the important bark paintings selected for this occasion from our Saltwater Collection. They document the spiritual and legal basis of the Yolngu people’s ownership of saltwater country in north-east Arnhem Land. Then cruise Sydney Harbour aboard MV Mari Nawi with guides from the Tribal Warrior Association to learn of Sea Country culture, the Aboriginal names of significant Sydney landmarks, and tour Clark Island.

Members $45 Guests $50. Afternoon tea provided. Bookings essential

Family harbour fun

Annual pirate cruise

10 am–12 pm Thursday 11 July

Attention all scallywags and sea dogs. We’re on the lookout for recruits for Pirate School! Join in the swashbuckling fun with our motley crew of buccaneers aboard the pirate ship Black Swan. Weigh anchor, hoist the mizzen, splice the mainbrace, scrub the decks, learn pirate-speak and sing pirate songs … maybe we’ll even find doubloons! Come in your best pirate gear and don’t forget to wear an eye patch. Pirate food and drinks provided.

Members $50 Member families $120 Guests $60 Guest families $150. Family ticket includes 2 adults and 2 children. Includes refreshments. Bookings essential

Curator tour

East of India – stories from the exhibition

2–4 pm Sunday 14 July

East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia tells of discovering a seaway to India, the rise and fall of the East India Company, and colonial Australia’s close interaction with India. Dr Nigel Erskine takes us behind these scenes on the research journeys he took to develop this rich, complex exhibition … beneath the waters of the Great Barrier Reef searching for shipwrecks; in Powys Castle in Wales to view objects owned by Clive of India; through Calcutta’s 18th century European cemetery … and many more adventures.

Members $20 Guests $25. Includes refreshments. Bookings essential

Members events

WINTER 2013

2–5 pm Sunday 21 July

Enjoy an afternoon of Indian film with film maker Anupam Sharma, creator of the Australian Film Festival in India, whose latest Bollywood production was filmed in Australia. Sharma made the documentary accompanying our exhibition East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia (see article page 17). View a Bollywood epic and join in a discussion of the genre, tapping into his experience working on Bollywood productions and his knowledge of the Indian-Australian community.

Members$10 Guests $15. Includes chai and Indian sweets. Bookings essential

Author talk with John Zubrzycki

The Last Nizam: An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback

3–5 pm Sunday 28 July

In the early 1970s the last Nizam of Hyderabad, Mukarram Jah – the wealthy heir to India’s greatest princely state –gave up a life of oriental splendour and bought a half-million-acre sheep station on the banks of the Murchison River. John Zubrzycki brings to life one of the strangest chapters in the colourful history of Australia-Indian relations. Jah’s ‘dabar in the desert’, his eccentric and ultimately tragic life continues to be a part of Western Australian folklore.

Members $20 Guests $25. Includes refreshments. Bookings essential

Register your interest

Special visit to HMAS Waterhen

August mid-week

We are seeking expressions of interest from those interested in joining a very excusive tour to visit the HMAS Waterhen mine warfare and clearance diving base, and a Huon Class mine hunter, at Waverton, North Sydney. As this visit will be scheduled to coincide with ship availability at Waterhen, expected to be during a week in August, and because of security restrictions on this defence site, numbers will be strictly limited. So please register early if you would like to come along.

Bookings essential, only 10 places available. Call 9298 3646

On the water, ‘island’ tour Garden Island naval heritage

10 am–2 pm Thursday 8 August

Enjoy this popular behind-the-scenes guided tour of Garden Island heritage precinct with the Naval Historical Society of Australia. We tour the secure area unavailable to the public including the Chapel, view the Captain Cook Dock, Emden cannon and Kuttabul Memorial. After the tour we adjourn to Garden Island’s Salt Horse Café at its naval museum for lunch, prior to returning by ferry to Circular Quay. Moderate level of walking fitness required.

Members $30 and Guests $35.

Price includes lunch. Meet at Circular Quay, Wharf 4 to catch the 10.05 am ferry to Watsons Bay. Bookings essential

01 Book by John Zubrzycki

Courtesy the publisher

02 Members tour Garden Island

Photograph by Jeffrey Mellefont/ANMM

03 Ansel Adams and the American Clipper

Photograph by Alan Ross

Exhibition tour with music

Ansel Adams – Photography from the Mountains to the Sea

4–5.30 pm Sunday 11 August

Join a curator-led tour of Ansel Adams – Photography from the Mountains to the Sea, that focuses on the great American photographer’s exploration of water in all its forms, from the complexity of a shifting tide to the subtlety of the bend in a river. Then follow a musical tour of the exhibition by Conservatorium postgraduate students, Banks Duo, as they interpret selected examples of these remarkable images with classical guitar and banjo.

Members $40 Guests $45. Coral Sea Wines, refreshments. Bookings essential

On water: meet the neighbours Goat Island tour & ferry cruise

1–3.45 pm Thursday 15 August

Jump aboard historic ferry Wangi Queen for a picturesque cruise; enjoy a guided walking tour of heritage-laden Goat Island; savour a delicious buffet lunch and complimentary champagne in a tranquil island setting overlooking the Harbour Bridge; learn more about the icons of Sydney Harbour. Goat Island contains some of our most important and intact convict-built buildings. Preview on page 32.

Members $60 Guests $65. Includes lunch and afternoon tea. Meet at the South Pontoon at 12.45 pm for a 1 pm departure. Bookings essential

An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback

JOHN ZUBRZYCKI

04 CLS4 Carpentaria at ANMM

Photograph by Jeffrey Mellefont/ANMM

05 Temporary exhibitions explained

Photograph by Andrew Frolows/ANMM

06 Endeavour joins International Fleet Review

Photograph by Lee Schiller/ANMM

Family fun Sundays

Lighthouse larks!

11 am–3 pm Sunday 18 August

Celebrate International Lighthouse Weekend at the museum as we explore many themes related to the romantic world of lighthouses! Activities include storytelling sessions, family-friendly tours and film screenings. You can bring your youngsters along to enjoy Kids on Deck, with creative crafts inspired by the 1874 Cape Bowling Green Lighthouse standing on our North Wharf, and our own lightship CLS4 Carpentaria. And booklovers, don’t forget to leave time for the next event listed below – literary lighthouses!

See anmm.gov.au/kids for more event details

Inaugural Members book group M L Stedman: The Light Between Oceans

4–6 pm Sunday 18 August

Join us to discuss a variety of maritimethemed novels, with a selection of special guest speakers, in a relaxed atmosphere in the Members lounge over wine and cheese on a Sunday afternoon. We start with Perth writer M L Stedman’s 2013 award-winning debut novel, The Light Between Oceans Set after WW1 on a remote Australian lighthouse island, this is a story of right and wrong and how sometimes they look the same. Our first meeting is hosted by curator Dr Stephen Gapps. Book review page 63.

Members $5 Guests $10 Bookings essential for catering purposes

Curator talk

Meet curator Mariea Fisher

Wednesday 28 August 11 am–12.30 pm

Join us to gain an insight into the work and interests of one of our museum curators. Mariea Fisher is manager of temporary and travelling exhibitions and has been with the museum for 25 years. Over Devonshire tea in the Members lounge, learn about Mariea’s work as she shares with us what goes on behind the scenes to bring to us high-calibre attractions, such as the exhibition We call them Vikings coming to us in the Spring from Sweden. Share some of Mariea’s favourite shows from home and abroad.

Free for Members Guests $5. Bookings essential

Alert! Sail Endeavour for International Fleet Review

3–11 October

Over 50 nations have been invited to send a warship or a tall ship for the International Fleet Review, to commemorate the first entry of the Royal Austalian Navy fleet into Sydney. On 4 October 1913, flagship HMAS Australia led HMA Ships Melbourne, Sydney, Encounter, Warrego, Parramatta and Yarra into Sydney Harbour, as thousands of cheering citizens lined the foreshore. On 3 October this year the museum’s replica of Lt James Cook’s Endeavour will sail with the lead tall ships into Sydney Harbour to herald the 2013 International Fleet Review.

From 4–11 October HMB Endeavour will be the most prestigious berth on Sydney Harbour to view the 50-plus warships and 30 tall ships currently expected. Each day sail includes museum experts to answer all your questions about the past, present and future of the RAN. There will be entertainment and activities for all of the family, great food and great company as you become part of this historic Navy spectacular.

For prices and availability of places on these exclusive sailings contact our bookings officer by phone 9298 3777 or email bookings@anmm.gov.au .

East of India

FORGOTTEN TRADE WITH AUSTRALIA

1 June–18 August

The early Australian colonies, at the ‘ends of the earth’ from Europe, turned to nearby Asia for survival and growth. East of India – Forgotten trade with Australia tracks our colonial links with India, which became a lifeline for the struggling colonists. An essential part of the story reveals the power and monopoly of the Honourable East India Company, or ‘John Company’ as it came to be known, its rise and its inevitable decline. This is a tale of ships and shipwrecks, rice and rum, officers and officials, sailors, soldiers and servants. It takes us from the old allure and mystery of the East, to the modern-day ties between India and Australia in ‘the Asian century’. Entry free with Big Ticket, and for Members. Exhibition only: Adult $15 Child & Concession $10

anmm.gov.au/eastofindia #eastofindia

Seringapatam, aquatint by James Hunter, from Picturesque Scenery in the Kingdom of Mysore, publisher Edward Orme, 1804, ANMM Collection. The Mysore kingdom was ruled by the powerful leader Tipu Sultan who challenged the expansion of the East India Company and Britain until his defeat and death at the siege of Seringapatam (now Srirangapatna) in 1799. One British officer present at the siege would go on to have strong connections to the colony of New South Wales – Lachlan Macquarie. Today Tipu Sultan’s seat of power, Bangalore in Mysore state, is one of the fastest-growing cities on the subcontinent, known as the Silicon Valley of India.

01 The Tetons and Snake River Wyoming 1942.

Photograph by Ansel Adams. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

02 King penguin pair

Photo Steve Jones/ElysiumEpic.org

03 Yathikpa II (detail) by Bakulanay Marawili

1998 ANMM Collection.

Ansel

Adams – Photography from the Mountains to the Sea

4 July–8 December

Water was one of the favourite subjects of the great American photographer Ansel Adams (1902–84), best known for his detailed black-and-white landscapes that capture the epic spaces of the US continent. The museum brings the spectacular work of this brilliant pioneering modernist to Australian audiences, combining famous images with extraordinary lesser-known works that focus on the artist’s exploration of water in all its forms. Full of energy and dynamism, Adams’ photographs of mountains, clouds and waterfalls, seascapes, bays and tide pools provide a fresh perspective on a celebrated artist. Organised by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. Support for the exhibition was provided by David H Arrington, and the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. Funded by the USA Bicentennial Gift Entry free with Big Ticket, and for Members. Exhibition only: Adult $15 Child & Concession $10 anmm.gov.au/anseladams #anseladams

Elysium Antarctic Visual Epic

Until 3 November

In 2010 a team of explorers comprising wildlife photographers, filmmakers and scientists embarked on an expedition from the Antarctic Peninsula to South Georgia. This stunning visual record of the expedition captures life above and below the ice, the fauna and flora, glaciers, and the magnificent land and seascapes of this great wilderness.

anmm.gov.au/elysium #elysium

Rescue

Until 14 July

Rescue services are lifelines to countless people in times of need. Rescue puts you in charge as you discover what it’s like to be involved in land, sea and air rescues. Interactive exhibits will teach you about search techniques, rescue supplies and equipment. Do you have what it takes to be a hero?

anmm.gov.au/rescue rescueexhibition

Saltwater Visions

Until 6 October

NAIDOC Week 2013 commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Yolgnu people’s Yirrkala Bark land rights petitions to Federal Parliament. Five of the 10 barks on display from the museum’s Saltwater Collection were evidence in a 2008 Australian High Court case that recognised traditional owners and their use of coastline and coastal waters. These important bark paintings, are the spiritual and legal basis of the Yolngu people’s ownership of saltwater country in north-east Arnhem Land. They were purchased with the assistance of Stephen Grant of the GrantPirrie Gallery. anmm.gov.au/naidoc #naidoc

ANMM travelling

exhibitions

On their own –Britain’s child migrants

8 June - 25 August 2013

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

From the 1860s until the 1970s, more than 100,000 British children were sent to Australia, Canada and other Commonwealth countries through child migration schemes. The lives of these children changed dramatically and fortunes varied. Some forged new futures; others suffered lonely, brutal childhoods. All experienced dislocation and separation from family and homeland. A collaboration between the ANMM and National Museums Liverpool, UK

Exhibition produced by

Major partner

Main expedition sponsor Supporting sponsors

Heritage bank

QUEENSLAND MARITIME MUSEUM

Safely deposited in Brisbane’s upmarket South Bank, the Sunshine State’s maritime heritage is in the secure hands of volunteer custodians. Queensland Maritime Museum director Ian Jempson introduces a down-town attraction with a historic dry dock at its heart.

All the waters around Australia became our bailiwick, from Singapore to Antarctica to New Zealand to the equator and back. Our waters went from Mare Incognitum to some of the best studied in the world … Bruce Hamon’s work on the gyral structure of the East Australian Current has changed the face of dynamic oceanography; Graham Chittleborough’s unravelling of the life cycle of the western rock lobster was beautiful; David Rochford’s descriptions of the water masses around Australia were monumental.

CSIRO at Sea – 50 Years of Marine Science, CSIRO, 1988

W HAT HAS THIS ELOQUENT SUMMARY

of oceanography to do with the Queensland Maritime Museum (QMM)? Well, this oceanographic research that transformed Australia’s scientific reputation occurred aboard the World-War-2 frigate HMAS Diamantina or her sister HMAS Gascoyne And Diamantina has been the centrepiece of this museum since 1980 when she decommissioned and was gifted to QMM by the Australian Government.

Diamantina ’s story – and significance to Queensland’s maritime history – really begins in 1859 when Governor Sir George Bowen arrived with his wife Lady Diamantina to proclaim the new colony of Queensland. Countess Diamantina, of Ionian birth and aged 27, quickly won the hearts of the colonists, and a large river discovered in western Queensland in 1862 was named in her honour.

Fast forward to 1940, with Britain facing economic collapse from the successful German submarine campaign against Allied merchant shipping in the North Atlantic. Winston Churchill would say that the only thing that really frightened him during the war were the U-boats. Canada and Britain had insufficient convoy escorts, and the corvettes and destroyers available were not well suited to the task. A dedicated anti-submarine convoy escort was urgently needed, and by early 1941 the first River Class frigates were under construction. During the next four years Canada, Britain and Australia built 135 River Class ships, while the USA built 74 of the very similar Tacoma Class.

This was the genesis of all modern naval frigates – and Diamantina is the sole survivor, world-wide, of this significant transition in warship design. HMAS Diamantina was built by Walkers at Maryborough in Queensland and was commissioned in April 1945. She was probably the last RAN vessel to engage enemy forces in WW2, and hosted the surrender of Japanese forces at Nauru and Ocean Island; the latter was the final such ceremony of the war.

Following a period in reserve HMAS Diamantina was recommissioned in 1959 primarily to support oceanic sciences. During the next 20 years she traversed the oceans surrounding Australia undertaking oceanographic, hydrographic and meteorological research. An expanse

of 150,000 square nautical miles of the Southern Ocean is named the Diamantina Zone in recognition of her contribution. QMM has restored the ship to her 1945 configuration, and visitors can explore her from stem to stern.

In recent years we have placed greater emphasis on improving the interpretation of our displays. An audio tour of the museum was introduced in 2012 and Diamantina is the subject of about 50% of the tour, which includes the bottom of the South Brisbane Dry Dock where she is berthed. The dry dock was constructed by hand over five years from 1876 and is an important industrial heritage site in Brisbane – right in the heart of the stylish cultural and leisure precinct known as South Bank.

Over 5,000 ships were serviced or repaired in the dock prior to its closure in 1973. It was a vital asset during WW2 and serviced a squadron of US submarines based in Brisbane. A new stairway built in 2011, aided by an Australian Government grant, gives visitors access to the dock floor beneath Diamantina. With her in the dock is CLS2 Carpentaria, sister to CLS4 at the Australian National Maritime Museum. These two unmanned lightships were constructed at Cockatoo Island in Sydney in 1916–18 and, fitted with acetylene-fuelled lamps, were deployed to the western approaches of Torres Strait to warn mariners of hazards.

CLS2 forms part of a much larger lighthouse technology collection held by the museum,

MARITIME HERITAGE AROUND AUSTRALIA BRISBANE

She was probably the last RAN vessel to engage enemy forces in WW2

River Class frigate Diamantina in the South Brisbane Dry Dock. All photographs are by Tim Nemeth unless otherwise credited.

representing the lights managed by the Commonwealth Light Service (CLS) and the state-controlled aids to navigation. A third-order light manufactured by Chance Brothers was installed at Cape Don in the Northern Territory in 1917. Its lens and pedestal are now the centrepiece exhibits in the lighthouse gallery. Two retired CLS engineers volunteer at the museum and manage this important collection.

One unique and very rare object in this collection is the Barbier & Benard pedestal from North Barnard Island. Manufactured in Paris in 1897 it was, at that time, a masterpiece of electrical engineering well ahead of its time. Only nine were manufactured and ours is the only known surviving example in the world. The electrical components were recently restored to an operational condition and a new display for the pedestal is being prepared. Painstaking research through archives in Australia and Paris has also identified the original type of lens fitted to this pedestal, and a matching lens was discovered in our collection. Pedestal and lens will be united in this new display.

QMM was established in 1971 by a group of citizens determined to preserve Queensland’s rich maritime heritage. With the generous support of the state’s Department of Harbours and Marine, shipping companies, the RAN, ports, mariners and the wider community during the past 42 years, the museum has developed as a very fine collection

and display of maritime heritage. The first major acquisition in 1971 was the coal-fired steam tug Forceful that had a 45-year career working in Brisbane. Volunteers restored her and she was operated by the museum until 2006 when she was retired and became a static exhibit.

Torres Strait Islanders had used mother-ofpearl shell for centuries but its commercial exploitation began in 1869 when a South Sea Islander working for a bêche de mer trader discovered the resource, sparking the rapid growth of an industry that operated for the next 100 years. Lustrous mother-of-pearl was much sought after for use as buttons, decoration and inlays in household items. Initially the shell was retrieved from shallow waters but as stocks depleted deeper diving was required, bringing larger vessels such as luggers into service. European owner/ managers initially employed Japanese or South-East Asian divers and Indigenous crews. Eventually the local islanders assumed roles as owners and divers.

The Torres Strait pearling lugger Penguin in QMM’s collection was built in 1907 as Mercia at Thursday Island by Tsugitaro Furuta, who built 41 luggers over 30 years. Penguin worked for various owners until the late 1960s. During WW2 she was requisitioned for the RAAF in New Guinea waters. In the 1970s she was a service vessel for the Dauan Island Council in Torres Strait before being gifted to the museum in 1982, where she’s displayed on land next to the dry dock. Visitors can now climb into her

Our volunteer workforce has, for the past 42 years, been the backbone of our operations and they are an inspirational team

01 Maritime heritage workers from across Australia gathered at the Queensland Maritime Museum for the annual conference of the Australian Council of Maritime Museums, hosted by the author Ian Jempson and volunteers from QMM. Delegates are shown at the Ship Inn conference centre adjacent the museum site. Photographer Keith Boulton/QMM

02 The lighthouse gallery featuring the Cape Don Light

cramped interior. The smell of shell has long faded but romance and songs of a bygone age can still be heard in her timbers.

Norman Wright & Sons is one of the iconic names of Queensland boatbuilding. A 16-foot skiff named Fury, built by Norman Wright in 1937, took a long journey into the museum’s small-craft collection.

An American serviceman took a liking to Fury, acquired her and took her to the west coast of the USA where she sailed for many years. Changing ownership a number of times, in 1990 she was given to avid wooden boat restorer and sailor Annie Kolls of San Diego. Keen to know the skiff’s story, she re-established the connection with Brisbane after much research. A visit to the city convinced Annie that Fury should return home and in 1996 she donated the skiff to QMM. By 2002 QMM volunteers had restored Fury to her original condition.

The museum has over 50 small craft representing many types of vessels that have ventured onto Queensland and Australian waterways. Probably the highest-profile of them is Jessica Watson’s S&S yacht Pink Lady, in which the Queensland girl became the youngest person to sail around the world, singlehanded and non-stop. That’s just one of the many stories represented by this collection.

Potestas is Latin for ‘power’, from the motto of the Brisbane State High School. This beautifully crafted timber rowing shell

was made by Siggy Tantner in 1963, the first ‘eight’ built for the school. Its builder migrated to Australia from Yugoslavia in 1950 with his wife Katharina; his papers described him as a boatbuilder, carpenter and joiner. He was known in Brisbane as a master craftsman and research on this quiet achiever continues.

In 2001 Doctors Patrick Weinrauch and Paul McCarthy competed with 29 other boats in the 3,000 nautical-mile Atlantic Rowing Challenge. Freedom is a two-person ocean rowing boat of eight metres length, with an open deck and enclosed cabin aft. The flat-pack kit boat was supplied to entrants who were required to assemble it. The late Bob Miles, a well-respected surfboat builder, assisted with the construction. Paul and Patrick completed the course in 45 days 9 hours, coming in second behind a crew from New Zealand. Tragically in 2005, Dr McCarthy was killed in a Sea King helicopter crash at Nias Island, off Sumatra, while providing medical care for earthquake and tsunami victims.

Her Majesty’s Queensland Ships Gayundah and Paluma were gunboats purchased from England to form the Queensland Marine Defence Force for the protection of the state, commissioned in 1884 and arriving to great public acclaim the following year. They were heavily armed with a bow-mounted, breechloading 8-inch gun and a stern-mounted 6-inch gun. Following interesting and quite diverse careers both ships were eventually

scrapped and, during WW1, the 8-inch guns were buried on the riverbank at Kangaroo Point. In 1977 the Army excavated one 12-ton barrel and in 1983 the second barrel, two carriages and a slide were recovered. The items were donated to QMM in the mid-1980s and Gayundah ’s gun was mounted on the slide and one of the carriages. In 2013, the museum fabricated an identical replica of the missing slide, mounted the second barrel and both weapons now sit proudly side-by-side.

The Queensland Maritime Museum currently operates without government funding. Our volunteer workforce has, for the past 42 years, been the backbone of our operations and they are an inspirational team. They maintain and restore vessels, curate displays, maintain a very large collection – and in the emergency of the 2012 Brisbane floods, their courage and determination were crucial! Most importantly, our visitors are well cared for by our expert volunteers. They look forward to welcoming you when you next visit Brisbane.

01 Commonwealth Light Ship 2 Carpentaria astern of frigate HMAS Diamantina

02 Display re-creates the smoking room of Lucinda, the Queensland Government steam yacht on which the Australian Constitution was drafted.

03 Queensland Maritime Museum volunteer Chris Williams with guests.

04 Part of the small boat display housed in one of the dry dock’s working quarters.

Pedigree classics

AUSTRALIAN REGISTER OF HISTORIC VESSELS

ANMM.GOV.AU/ARHV This online, national heritage project devised and coordinated by the Australian National Maritime Museum reaches across Australia to collate data about the nation’s existing historic vessels, their designers, builders and their stories.

Photographer William Hall recorded, in their heyday, two of the older entries from the most recent additions to the Australian Register of Historic Vessels, writes its curator David Payne. They were among the 17 craft approved for listing when the register’s council met in March 2013.

TWO OF OUR MOST RECENT ADDITIONS to the Australian Register of Historic Vessels are represented by classic images from the museum’s collection of William Hall photographs. The raised-deck motor cruiser Oomoobah and the fine little racing yacht Aoma caught Hall’s attention, their elegant profiles and stylish lines making them an appealing choice. Stopping the action and getting the angle and background right is never easy, as anyone who’s tried to photograph a moving vessel from another moving vessel can attest. It was an even bigger challenge in those earlier days of photography when it all hinged on capturing that shot on a single glass-plate negative in a bulky camera.

The luxurious Oomoobah was designed and built in 1927 by Morrison and Sinclair in Balmain, NSW, for the well-known Sydney business man and boating enthusiast Percy Arnott, and quickly became one of the most prestigious motor yachts in Sydney

and Pittwater. The Arnott family were well known in both sail and power, and Sam Arnott, father of Percy, had been an early commodore of the Royal Motor Yacht Club.

Outings afloat by the Arnott family were reported in the social pages of the newspapers. Shirley Arnott’s 19th birthday was featured in The Sydney Morning Herald in November 1938, while her sister Thea’s two-month holiday aboard the vessel at Pittwater had been noted in January that year. The Women’s Weekly takes over in 1941 reporting further parties aboard Oomoobah on the harbour. The vessel was soon afterwards taken up for war service by the RAN, operating out of Milne Bay, Normanby and Goodenough Islands in the south-west Pacific. Its postwar history is not well recorded, and it came to the ARHV’s attention as an enquiry from a deceased estate. The late owner had refurbished the vessel to a high standard, and although the superstructure is different from the original in its styling, the proportions and layout remain consistent with the original arrangement.

Two William Hall photographs of Oomoobah capture those days when Sydney Harbour was everyone’s pleasure ground, seemingly more accessible than now. One image reminds us of the social-pages reports, with the young family members on the bow enjoying a day in the sun as, presumably, their father took the helm. The motor yacht is heading toward the city, with a hint of westerly sun on the bow. It looks in perfect condition, a sparkle to the brass work, clean topsides and a neat bow wave as the stem

cuts through a light chop on the water in the lee of Bradleys Head. A boat to be proud of, posed perfectly for photographer William Hall waiting in his launch.

Another picture shows Oomoobah at a fuelling wharf identified by a Shell Oil sign. We are looking across to Kirribilli and Admiralty House from Bennelong Point, reminding us how essentially commercial this now iconic cultural site once was.

In the background a vehicular ferry works its last days before the Harbour Bridge was opened, and moored behind Oomoobah is the New South Wales government’s vice-regal yacht Lady Hopetoun. The photographer has etched out the Lady ’s funnel, leaving a ghostly shadow in the middle of the image, because it would have looked as though the funnel belonged to Percy Arnott’s Oomoobah

Hall captures another yacht that’s just entered the Australian Register of Historic Vessels – Aoma, built by New Zealand’s Logan Brothers in Auckland in 1899 for

01 The 16.76 metre-long (55-foot), canoe-stern Oomoobah, built of spotted gum, Oregon, beech and teak and powered by two Invincible marine petrol engines. Oomoobah is the Indigenous name for the owner’s birthplace, Newcastle. Photographs are from the William Hall Collection, ANMM Collection.

02 Designed and built by New Zealand’s famous and successful Logan Brothers, Aoma’s principal dimensions were LOA 41 ft, WL 27 ft, beam 6 ft 9 in and draft 5 ft 6 in (12.62 x 8.3 x 2.05 x 1.67 metres).

prominent Sydney sailor Charles Brockhoff. Aoma – Maori for ‘White Cloud’ – was a 30-Foot Linear Rating yacht, built for her competitive owner to the Linear Rating Rule that had recently superseded the ‘length and sail-area rule’ as the international handicapping rule for yacht racing.

The photograph shows Aoma at full stretch, capturing not only the action of these fast racers, but the awkward nature of photography itself as the 20th century got underway. We see Aoma, spinnaker and jackyard tops’l set and the sails all filling, charging past the point into Rose Bay in a good nor’easter, sun high in the sky. The crew are focused ahead, concentrating and weighing up the next manoeuvre, possibly a gybe around Shark Island and a reach across toward Fort Denison.

Hall has had to work hard too, first getting his launch into position by anticipating where and when Aoma would be, to get a good angle and background, then setting himself and the camera up in the cockpit, all the time balancing in a rolling craft and trying to keep the spray off his equipment too. At the moment he opens the shutter his launch has rolled to the left, skewing the horizon and bringing Aoma more upright in the image. Its bow has just risen on the crest

of a wave, the sun highlights the bow-wave spray, the contrast between shadow and light is dramatic, and the point of land gives context and depth of field. But for the angle of the shoreline, it’s an almost-perfect shot.

A second image (see back cover) has Aoma sailing tidily to windward, heading west in a southerly, chased by Kukuburra, another intriguing 30-Foot Linear Rater designed and built in Sydney. Again Hall has got himself into position and put the boats into an action composition. The launch has rolled left slightly, but his shot has captured the cut of the bow into the seaway, the taut set of the sails, sunlight on the cabin top and deck. For a sailor it’s possible to feel the moment, driving to windward on a cold afternoon trying to get a break with the opposition on your shoulder – yacht racing at its best.

The photographs also capture Aoma ’s neat hull, which featured the strong and light, diagonal-planked, frameless construction that was a common feature of all Logan craft. In this case it was triple planked in New Zealand kauri. The inside layers are a diagonal run from keel to sheer, while the outer layer is fore and aft parallel to the generous, curved sheer. This, with an overhanging spoon bow and long counter, gave Aoma a very attractive,

balanced profile. This cutter was gaff rigged on a pole mast; the separate topmast of earlier rigs was now improved by the simplicity of a single spar.

In the late 1890s yachting was undergoing a revival after the major national depression of the earlier 1890s had restricted development and new orders, and reduced fleet numbers. Aoma was shipped across the Tasman after trials in Auckland, and began racing with the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron and Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club fleets on Sydney Harbour, quickly establishing itself as a very competitive boat in a fleet that featured a number of other successful New Zealand designs, several of them from the Logan Brothers.

Subsequent owners continued to race Aoma with success, and it was altered to Bermudan rig by Morrison and Sinclair early in the 1930s – reported in The Australian Motor Boat and Yachting Monthly of 15 November 1932. At an unknown date it moved to Melbourne and raced on Port Phillip. The yacht was bought by enthusiast Michael Black in 1994 and in late 2012 he sold Aoma to the current owner, who plans to restore the yacht to its original gaff-rigged configuration and once again sail Aoma as a 30-Foot Linear Rater.

To Victoria from the Isle of Man

IN A HOME-MADE SCHOONER

The promise of gold has lured many an adventurer to foreign lands. James Cain was one, sailing from the Isle of Man to Victoria in a purpose-built schooner in the 1850s. A fortune in gold eluded him, writes Welcome Wall historian Veronica Kooyman, but he settled the land and became the ancestor of Australian generations.

GOLD TRANSFORMED THE AUSTRALIAN colonies, and it transformed countless lives too, although not always in the expected way. Manxman James Cain embarked on a trim and speedy schooner in 1853, built to carry hopeful prospectors to the Victorian goldfields. For him the land would yield not gold but an honest farmer’s livelihood, enough to found a dynasty of Australians. His name was added to the Welcome Wall by the family of his grandson, Paul Benjamin, and unveiled on a new panel in May 2013.

In 1851 Edward Hargraves discovered a grain of gold near Bathurst, NSW, by legend recognising geological features

similar to those of the Californian goldfields from which he’d just returned. Within four months, Ophir – the place where he found gold – was home to more than a thousand prospectors. Within a year gold was struck at Ballarat and Bendigo in the colony of Victoria, where a £200 reward had been offered for its discovery. News spread around the world and the gold rush was on. Within two years the state’s population exploded from 77,000 to 540,000. Imports and investment boomed, including Australia’s first railway and telegraphs, as Victoria contributed more than one third of the world’s gold. Immigrants arrived from Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary and China.

Far away in the Irish Sea, between Ireland and northern England, lies the Isle of Man. Never a part of the UK, it survived on fishing, farming and mining and had suffered potato crop failure and depression in the late 1840s, encouraging emigration. Lured by the stories of gold discoveries, a group of Manxmen determined to make their way to Victoria and had a schooner named Vixen purpose-built for the long voyage, by H Graves in the port of Peel. The Manx Sun of 6 September 1851 called her ‘one of the finest vessels that has ever been launched in Peel … coppered … 93 tons new measurement, and has proved herself to be what she appears.’ She demonstrated her qualities by outsailing

several rivals while earning her keep under charter, in the years before she sailed for the goldfields.

On 26 January 1853 Vixen sailed from Peel carrying 37 men and no shortage of captains. They have been recorded as Captain Tom Cubbon, Vixen’s navigator Captain Corlett from the Isle of Man Steam Packet Co, with a Port St Mary fisherman named Captain Sansbury rated as the actual commander. Their cargo included picks, shovels, clothing, boots, barrows and chairs – but no spoons to eat their soup with, in one report. The frugal Manxmen carved spoons from beef bones. All, including 14 married men, had left behind their families to prospect for gold on the other side of the world. The complement included three brothers: James, John and William Cain. They must have sailed swiftly and directly, for it’s reported they crossed the Equator on 23 February and reached Port Philip Heads in only 92 days, arriving in Port Melbourne on 3 May 1853. Vixen was laid up under a watchman and in small parties the adventurers headed for the various goldfields in Victoria.

Mining for gold was hard and dirty work and many prospectors suffered in the hard times. The living conditions were poor, claims were small, competition was fierce and the licence fees were high. Police were deployed on ‘digger hunts’, searching the

In one of history’s great migrations, over six million people have crossed the seas to settle in Australia. The museum’s tribute to all of them, The Welcome Wall, encourages people to recall and record their stories of coming to live in Australia

01 Portrait of James Cain. Photos courtesy of his descendants

02 Schooner Vixen departing the town of Peel, 1853, flying the Isle of Man pennant from her topmast. Artist unknown, oil on canvas. Reproduced courtesy of the Manx National Collection

01 Gladys Benjamin, 91, a descendant of James Cain, attended the unveiling of his name on the Welcome Wall in May, reported in her local newspaper St George and Sutherland Shire Leader 02 Extended family and descendants of settler, Manxman James Cain, among those shown at a picnic at Natte Yallock c 1910. Photographer unknown, reproduced courtesy of the family

Historiclink: GladysBenjamin,91,islookingforwardtoherandherhusband’sfamiliesbeingimmortalised. Picture:LisaMcMahon

Historyconnectsfamily

By MonicaHeary GLADYSBenjamin,91,of

Cronulla,haslookedforwardfor alongtimetoakindofwedding attheAustralianNationalMaritimeMuseum. Thiswaswhenthenameofher ownancestorwasplacedcloseto thatofherlatehusband’sonthe WelcomeWallatthemuseum. Theunveilingtookplaceon May5when450newnames wereaddedtothewall. TheonethatreadsCain commemoratesthreebrothers— James,JohnandWilliamCain— whosetoffinasmallcustombuiltboatcalledtheVixenfrom theIsleofManin1853. ‘‘Theboatwasonly93tonand therewere36passengersplus thecaptain,withchairs,wheelbarrow,picksandshovels— anythingsuitableformining,but theyforgotspoonswhichthey fashionedfrombones,’’Mrs Benjaminsaid. Shesaidwhentheshipwas

neartheAfricancoastthoseon otherboatsthoughttheship,with itsall-malepassengers, containedpirates,andatfirst refusedtotaketheirmailtopost forthoseonboard. ‘‘AftertheAmericansfoundout theyweren’tpirates,theytookthe mail,’’MrsBenjaminsaid. Eventually,thefamilyofJames, herhusband’sancestor,settled atNatteYallocknearAvocain Victoriawhereoneofthegreat-

WELCOMEWALL

grandsonsstillworksasafarmer. MrsBenjaminsaidherown ancestorsweretheHannigans, thenamelaterbecoming Hanigan,withancestorssetting offin1858fromCountyTyrone, NorthernIreland,withafamilyof ninechildrenandsettlinginthe Shoalhavenregion. MrsBenjaminhasthreechildrenandsixgrandchildrenand haslivedinSutherlandShire since1956.

TheAustralianNationalMaritimeMuseumunveilsnewnameson themigrantWelcomeWalltwiceayear. Thelatestisthe31stunveilingceremonybringingthetotal numberto25,536. Thereare228countriesrepresentedonthewall,withEngland leadingwith7208names,followedbyItalywith3247. Thewall,onthemuseum’snorthernboundary,facingDarling HarbourandPyrmontBay,wasopenedin1999. Details:92983667oranmm.gov.au/ww

goldfields for those who had failed to pay their fee. A number of the Manxmen gave up the treasure hunt and returned to their ship, reviving their sailing traditions by starting a venture as a mail boat between Melbourne and Sydney, and lightering for large cargo ships.

James Cain persisted in his quest for eight years, digging at various locations in Victoria. In the early 1860s he walked from the diggings with his shovel and was one of the first men to select an 80-acre block on the rich river plains at Natte Yallock on the Avoca River west of Bendigo, which had recently been opened for land selection. Here he began a new livelihood, initially cultivating onions and potatoes with unexpectedly successful results.

The work was tough, with the settlers hauling their produce on their backs to towns ten or more miles away, and carrying their purchased supplies back to the settlement. Descendants say James Cain was the first pioneer in the area to cultivate wheat, grown on half an acre dug with a spade. His first crop of 35 bushels was reaped by hand with a sickle and threshed by hand with a flail. Over time more efficient,

capital-intensive methods were employed, and the success of men like James Cain stimulated the development of farming in this rich agricultural district.

James settled in Natte Yallock with his wife, Mary Anne Henderson, who was a widow with three children, and together they added two sons and a daughter. The farm at Natte Yallock has remained in the Cain family, expanding in size and diversifying. It is currently cultivated by James’ greatgrandson, Maurice Cain, and his family.

But what happened to the plucky little Vixen? Ten years after arriving in Australia, 27 of the original Manxmen made the return voyage home aboard the ship they had sailed to Australia. Back in Peel the schooner continued working coastal trades and fishing. In March 1864, after sailing safely half-way round the world and home again, Vixen was caught in a blowing gale and foundered with all hands off a small island close to home, called the Calf of Man. However, the intrepid adventure of the men of Peel inspired another group of local men, only a few years after the departure of the Vixen, to build a sloop called Peveril to sail to Melbourne. But that’s another story.

They must have sailed swiftly and directly, for it’s reported they crossed the Equator on 23 February and reached Port Philip Heads in only 92 days, arriving in Port Melbourne on 3 May 1853

The Welcome Wall

It costs just $105 to register a name and honour your family’s arrival in this great country! We’d love to add your family’s name to The Welcome Wall, cast in bronze, and place your story on the online database at www.anmm.gov.au/ww. So please don’t hesitate to call our staff during business hours with any enquiries on 02 9298 3777.

The Light Between Oceans

The Light Between Oceans

M L Stedman, published by Vintage Books, Sydney, NSW, 2012. Paperback, 362 pp. ISBN 9781742755717. RRP $19.95

POOR TOM SHERBOURNE SURVIVED SEVERAL years in the trenches during World War 1. He is wracked by a sense of guilt – why did he return unscathed when so many others did not? Tom takes a job that certainly promises solitude and with it, perhaps, the possibility of solace – it’s the lonely life of a lighthouse keeper. He is stationed on Janus Rock, a small island off the coast of Western Australia.

Although the warning signs are there – the last light keeper at Janus Rock went quite insane – things appear at last to be going well for Tom. While on one of his rare shore leaves in the small Western Australian town of Point Partageuse, he meets a bold and loving local girl, Isabel, marries her and brings her to Janus Rock. The newlyweds revel in the windswept wildness of the island. But their idyll is marred in the years that follow by Isabel having a stillborn child and suffering several miscarriages. It appears that she is unable to have children.

Then, right on cue, a boat washes ashore carrying a crying baby. It also carries a dead man.

Against Tom’s instincts and the moral compass that has survived the war, he allows Isabel to convince him that the child is a gift of fate. They bury the man, assuming the mother is also dead. The outside world only impinges on their lives every few months with the arrival of the supply boat, and so they are able to pretend to outsiders that the baby is theirs. Yet what appears as a godsend soon becomes a complex emotional journey in which the reader becomes moral judge and jury.

The Light Between Oceans has received some critical acclaim, and it won the Indie Awards ‘Book of the Year’ in 2013. Yet refreshingly, it has not been a best seller through glowing reviews and slick marketing, but through an avid readership and word of mouth. It was voted ‘Historical Novel of the Year 2012’ by GoodReads, the online reading community.

The Light Between Oceans was not, initially, this book reviewer’s delight. The first hundred or so pages I found to

be somewhat uninspiring and at times clichéd. But when the Indian Ocean brings forth the flotsam of a baby they name Lucy, the book shifts several gears, creeps up on you and becomes hard to put down. Like watching a train crash, even though you know what is coming, you can’t look away. It is no wonder film rights have been taken up by Dreamworks: the story is compelling.

It’s the first selection for the museum’s Members fledgling book group

The light station on Janus Rock is a key backdrop to the ensuing emotional high drama. Stedman does a great job of making it feel as though the long 19th century has never ended on the far flung reaches of remote Western Australia in the 1920s. Neither has racism or bigotry. Stedman’s depiction of the fictional Point Partugeuse and Janus Rock (with all its symbolism of the two-faced Greek God Janus looking at once back into the past and forward to the future) is realistic and evocative.

The life of a remote light station keeper keeping his oil-burning, third-order, dioptric, Chance Brothers lens in working order is accurately portrayed.

In her debut work of historical fiction Stedman has crafted a story that is excruciatingly spellbinding. There are wonderful moments of writing, though sometimes lost in uninspiring dialogue. Personally, I longed for this story to be less ‘life-like’ and more magic realism. Perhaps this remains for the filmed version of the dilemma of the poor light station family of Tom and Isabel Sherbourne.

Dr Stephen Gapps, curator

The Members book group will discuss The Light Between Oceans at its inaugural meeting in the Members lounge at 4 pm on Sunday 18 August. Meet curator and book reviewer Dr Stephen Gapps. Details page 47

Hobart classics 2013

AUSTRALIAN WOODEN BOAT FESTIVAL

THIS YEAR THE BIENNIAL AUSTRALIAN

Wooden Boat Festival celebrated its 10th appearance with yet another show-stopping display of wooden craft, supported by activities, trade stalls and Tasmanian food, all laid out on the waterfront of the state’s delightful capital Hobart. I was there to represent the museum in Hobart in February 2013, unfortunately too close to the deadline for the last edition of Signals to include this report on a very significant heritage event in the Australian maritime calendar. What began as a niche get-together for wooden boating enthusiasts who wanted to show their craft to each other and the wider community, back in November 1994, has since become a huge public event for Hobart and a gift for Tasmania’s tourist industry. The boating enthusiasts who are still its core constituents must be overwhelmed by the public interest,

since the crowds are extraordinary.

A key ingredient in the success of the last two festivals has been Tasmanian State Government support and major sponsorship from MYstate Ltd, Tasmania’s largest financial institution, which has allowed the organisers to open the event to the public for free on both occasions. Not only is there no financial barrier to entry, there are no physical barriers to spoil the ambience of the waterfront; gone are the surrounding fences and security, queues to get in and the issues with existing commercial operators trying to share the site.

The colour, the varnish, the interstate and even international vessels and visitors who make the trip, together with more than a whiff of Stockholm tar and Huon pine shavings – all this and a considerable dose of goodwill in the atmosphere helped to overcome the only cloud that was literally

hovering over the festival: the aftermath of the dreadful bushfires that had affected parts of the state, and were still burning to the west of the city bringing smoke across in the westerly winds.

The Australian National Maritime Museum was one of the interstate visitors, promoting the Australian Register of Historic Vessels at our stall in Princes Wharf and showcasing the wide range of work the museum does in support of Australia’s maritime heritage. This included our recent initiatives in the area of Indigenous watercraft, participating in the strong community revival of interest in relearning lost skills and knowledge of these fascinating technologies (featured in recent issues of Signals). Some simple canoe models that we demonstrated were folded up using a veneer supplied by an adjacent trade stall, attracting a lot of interest.

01 In April the museum’s ketch Kathleen Gillett was once again the star of the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia’s annual Great Veterans Race on Sydney Harbour, open to yachts 30 years of age and over that have competed in a Sydney–Hobart Yacht Race. Kathleen Gillett is a veteran of the very first Sydney–Hobart race, sailed by her owner and builder, artist Jack Earl, in the December 1945 ‘cruise in company’ that captured the attention of a war-weary public and became the annual bluewater classic now considered one of the world’s great ocean races. Jack Earl built Kathleen Gillett to a famously seaworthy design by Norwegian naval architect Colin Archer, naming her after his wife and in 1947–48 making the second Australian circumnavigation of the world by yacht. Sailed by museum staff, the yacht was photographed under her full sailing rig by staff shipwright Jim Christodoulou.

02 Members commemorated the Battle of the Coral Sea in March 1942 at a special lunch in the museum’s Terrace Room, listening to commentaries from distinguished speakers. Pictured here are guests of honour Lieutenant Commander Ralph Derbridge mbe ran (retired), President, Naval Officers’ Club of Australia; the museum’s own Naval Councillor Rear Admiral Tim Barrett am csc ran, currently Commander Australian Fleet; ANMM assistant director (operations) Peter Rout; US Naval Attaché Captain Stewart Holbrook usn

03 Naval wives Jum Holbrook and Jenny Barrett. Photographs 02 & 03 courtesy Jum Holbrook.

Former ANMM Councillor and longtime maritime journalist Bruce Stannard, writing in the March 2013 issue of AFLOAT magazine, put the scale of the Australian Wooden Boat Festival into a global perspective. ‘There is nothing even remotely comparable to this festival anywhere else in Australia, or North America for that matter. The wooden boat festival at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut is but a third the size of the Hobart festival. Its only rival in the northern hemisphere is the week-long Festival of the Sea at Brest on the Brittany coast of France.’

Many of the craft that left after a closing sail-past led by the former state VIP launch MV Egeria, are planning to be back. The festival’s return in 2015 is already anticipated by everyone involved.

David Payne, curator Australian Register of Historic Vessels

Maritime art

CATALOGUES PRESENTED TO THE MUSEUM

A RARE TWO-VOLUME CATALOGUE documenting Australia’s largest and finest private collection of maritime art has been presented to the museum by John Hannan, the passionate collector behind this unrivalled holding. Mr Hannan is chairman of his family’s Sydney-based print and digital media business, IPMG. The collection of leading maritime artists, both Australian and international, was assembled by Mr Hannan over many decades, and was named by him, in honour of his parents, the Norman and Dorothea Hannan Memorial Art Collection.

The collection, housed in the company offices and John Hannan’s private residence, currently comprises some 350 paintings. It continually increases in size, however, thanks to the collector’s passion for the artistic depiction of 19th and 20th century vessels with an Australian connection, and the profound personal interest in ships and the sea that he shared with his late father Norman.

A conversation with the collector inevitably leads to his recounting of personal experiences of sea travel, enhanced by his vast knowledge of particular ships. Countless outings on yachts on Sydney Harbour have also provided opportunities for witnessing shipping movements, establishing a personal connection with famous liners and the many other types of vessels trading to and from Australia.

John Hannan acquired his first marine paintings in the mid-1970s – works by prominent Australian marine artists Fred

Elliott and John Allcot. The collection now comprises works by most of the leading Australian ship portraitists from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as currently working artists. Paintings by the highly respected wartime artists Arthur Burgess and Charles Bryant are included, as well as the British painter Charles Pears and American Antonio Jacobsen. One notable feature of the collection is the number of watercolours and oil paintings of John Allcot, surely the largest single collection of this prominent, popular and prolific Australian painter’s work.

Personal connections are an important aspect of the collection, illustrated, for example, by works of Oswald Brett who now resides in the United States but maintains an ongoing friendship with collector John Hannan. Brett, whose work reflects his own seagoing experiences and the days of steam and sail on Sydney Harbour, himself received tuition from John Allcot. He shared these reminiscences with his host John Hannan during his most recent visit to Australia when the two men cruised on Pittwater and the Hawkesbury River on board the Hannan family’s motor yacht Sirdar. It’s a friendship that’s maintained through phone calls and regularly received greeting cards depicting ships hand-painted by the artist for his friend the collector.

The two-volume catalogue was assembled over recent years to document, for the first time, this extensive collection in its entirety. It was compiled with assistance

from ANMM volunteer Warwick Abadee, who helped to organise its entries, and is itself a work of art involving the meticulous photography of each work, with high-fidelity printing of each record sheet on art paper. The catalogue was produced in a limited edition of just three luxurious copies, one of which was presented to the museum in May on behalf of John Hannan, who was unfortunately indisposed. The volumes were gratefully accepted into the Australian National Maritime Museum collection by the museum’s director Kevin Sumption.

The Norman and Dorothea Hannan Memorial Art Collection is a tribute to John Hannan’s unswerving enthusiasm for ships and the sea and his boundless energy and passion as a collector. While it is expected to remain in the care of the Hannan family, its catalogue will be an invaluable resource for maritime historians and art specialists, now and in the future.

Stan Stefaniak

01 Author of this article, Stan Stefaniak, presented these catalogues to museum director Kevin Sumption (left) on behalf of collector John Hannan. Stan, a Member of this museum, is a maritime artist whose works feature in John Hannan’s maritime art collection, and hang in our Members lounge as well. Photographer A Frolows/ANMM 02 John Hannan (left) with maritime artist Oswald Brett on board the Hannan family motor yacht Sirdar in 2011. Photographer Stan Stefaniak

SEA WHAT’S IN STORE

MONSOON TRADERS

The story of the Honourable East India Company –‘John Company’ – the Elizabethan trading venture that led to the British Raj and made India the jewel in the Imperial crown.

$89.95 / $80.96 Members

ANSEL ADAMS

A catalogue to accompany our current exhibition of this famous American landscape photographer’s visions of water, rivers, lakes and the sea.

$79.95 / $71.96 Members

Shop online at www.anmm.gov.au/thestore 9.30 am–5 pm 7 days a week | 02 9298 3698 / fax

INDIAN TEXTILES

The first comprehensive survey of the handmade textiles of the South Asian subcontinent, in hundreds of glorious photographs of vibrant colours, textiles and motifs.

$89.95 / $80.96 Members

ELYSIUM

Limited-edition fine art coffee table book featuring images from the Elysium expedition including images on display at our current exhibition.

$120 / $108 Members

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Signals

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Editor Jeffrey Mellefont

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01 The 30-Foot Linear Raters Aoma (right) and Kukuburra sailing tidily to windward on Sydney Harbour

– see article page 56. Photograph William Hall Collection, ANMM

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