Signals, Issue 85

Page iSIGNALS 85 December 2008–February 2009

Number 85 December 2008–February 2009

SIGNALS 85 December 2008–February 2009Page ii

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SIGNALS 85 December 2008–February 2009

Australian National Maritime Museum’s quarterly magazine Number 85 December 2008–February 2009Signals

Contents2 Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors

The last and greatest episode of human expansion across the planet

10 War and loveA moving tale of romance in the aftermath of global conflict

16 Kathleen darling …A world-voyaging yacht named for a sailor’s beloved wife

21 Members message, events and activitiesTalks, tours, previews, cruises, special events … Members’ summer calendar

26 What’s on at the museumSummer events and activities for visitors, exhibitions and school programs

30 Sea of Dangers: Cook and de SurvilleProfessor Geoffrey Blainey talks about his latest work of history

35 Calling former child migrantsBritish child and youth migration schemes will be this exhibition’s focus

38 Still the fastest after 30 years The fastest man on water returns to visit Spirit of Australia

41 ReadingSurf-o-Rama – Treasures of Australian Surfing

42 Tales from the Welcome WallA Baltic odyssey – from Estonia to Manly

44 Currents & SponsorsEndeavour voyages; USA exchanges; history prize; Novotel Rockford

48 From the director

COVER:Our latest international exhibition, from New Zealand’s Auckland Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira – tells the amazing story of the discovery and settlement of the Pacific islands – humankind’s last and greatest expansion across the planet. The cover photograph shows Hokule’a, the reconstruction of a Polynesian blue-water voyaging craft, on its historic re-enactment voyage from Hawai’i to Tahiti in 1976. Photographer Ed George/National Geographic Image Collection

ABOVE: Museum vessels Thistle and Akarana participated in the Sydney Amateur Yacht Club’s Gaffers Day, the biennial spring regatta that brings out Sydney Harbour’s finest classic yachts. Thistle is a Victorian couta fishing boat, believed to date from 1903. Akarana is the racing cutter designed and built by Robert Logan in New Zealand in 1888 to participate in Australia’s centennial regattas in Melbourne and Sydney. Akarana was the New Zealand government’s bicentennial gift to Australia. Photographer John C Jeremy

SIGNALS 85 December 2008–February 2009Page 2

The discovery and settlement of the Pacific islands is the last and greatest story of human expansion across this planet. It’s the subject of our latest exhibition, from New Zealand’s Auckland Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira. This introduction to the past and present of these intrepid, voyaging cultures is by Professor Kerry Howe of Massey University, Auckland.

ABOVE: Hokule’a voyaging from Hawai’i to Tahiti, 1976. Note the form of double-hulled ocean-going ‘canoe’, and the distinctive Pacific style of sail. Photographer Ed George/National Geographic Image Collection ABOVE RIGHT: Dates indicate time of first settlement in years before the present. Map by K Howe, adapted by J Austen

Vaka is a seagoing canoe, and Moana means ‘ocean’ in several key Polynesian languages.


MODERN HUMANS evolved in Africa, perhaps 130,000 years ago. Intelligent and curious, by about 100,000 years ago some had settled in the Mediterranean region and others travelled eastwards through India to reach China and South-East Asia. By about 60,000 years ago humans had crossed narrow waterways to reach New Guinea and Australia. They were in Western Europe and Siberia by 40,000 years ago.

During this time the earth was gripped by the last great ice age and a huge ice sheet covered the northern half of Eurasia and North America, making sea levels much lower than they are today. New Guinea and Australia were joined. After the ice started to recede, about 18,000 years ago, humans could travel across a land bridge (today’s Bering Strait) that was still

linking Eurasia to North America. By about 12,000 years ago they had travelled to the southern tip of South America.

Pacific Ocean, the last frontier

With the exception of crossing the waterway to New Guinea/Australia, humans had discovered and settled all the earth’s major land masses largely on foot. The main habitable area remaining for them to explore and settle was the Pacific Ocean with its many islands. This was impossible before two great developments in human history – advances in agriculture and technology.

Pacific islands were poor in resources, lacking food plants such as coconuts, yams or taro. In order to live there humans needed to be able to transport and

grow their own food. It was only in the last 10,000 years that humans changed from being hunters and gatherers to planting crops and domesticating animals. Such large-scale travel would also require ocean-going vessels and a system of navigation – what is called a blue-water technology – to reach the islands. This technology only appeared about 4–5,000 years ago.

Thus the Pacific islands were the very last places on earth to be settled by humans. This migration is not just a magnificent Pacific event, it is also the last chapter in the story of the human settlement of the entire earth. By the time humans settled the remotest islands in the Pacific – and that was only about 700 years ago – they had reached the end of their habitable world.

Chatham Islands

Marshall Islands

Hawaiian Islands

Solomon Islands

Papua New Guinea

Fiji

Samoa

Tuvalu

Gilbert Islands

Northern Mariana Islands

New Caledonia

AUSTRALIA

N

S

W E

New Zealand

Kiribati

Vanuatu

Philippine IslandsMICRONESIA

MELANESIA

POLYNESIA

Society Islands

Pitcairn Island

Line Islands

Cook Islands

Marquesas Islands

Tonga

Caroline Islands

INDONESIA

Phoenix Islands

Guam

CHINA

Easter Island

1000 km

6,000–5,000 years ago

4,000 years ago

3,200 years ago

3,000 years ago

1,600 years ago?

1,700 years ago?

700 years ago

2,000 years ago?

?

0 1000 2000 3000 4000 Miles

0 1000 2000 3000 6000 Kilometres4000 5000


The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth’s surface. Western navigators started to explore it about 400 years ago (in the 16th century). It took them several hundred more years of difficult exploration before they had much understanding of the Pacific. Thus a common Western view was, and sometimes still is, that this ocean is vast, featureless, dangerous, and its tiny islands are hazardous to navigation. Overall, the Pacific seemed to offer few resources or lands worth bothering about.

The Pacific perspective

Thousands of years before Western explorers arrived in the Pacific, there were people who had discovered and settled almost every island across that great ocean. To them it was not a place of fear, it was home.

For Pacific peoples, the sea provided abundant marine life for food and was not viewed as an obstacle, but as a highway. It represented a way back in time to where their ancestors had come from, and it offered a way into the future with the quest to find new islands. The stars

became navigational beacons, and often representations of ancestors. The clouds told them of coming weather patterns. Island peoples did not consider themselves isolated. Their islands were the very safe centres of their physical and spiritual worlds.

Most natural objects, such as the sea itself, the features of the island landscape,

the plants and animals, had names and stories that gave them a social or spiritual significance. These names and stories were commonly applied on many islands over time, leaving a kind of road map of ancestral history and culture. Pacific cultures had traditions about how the world and everything in it was made, and about the deeds of various hero ancestor-gods. They believed their world was governed by supernatural forces. Much of their culture involved elaborate beliefs and rituals that were designed to appease the gods, gain their help, and protect people from evil spirits.

In particular, Pacific people had stories of how their ancestors had arrived at an island and its subsequent human history. Across many parts of the Pacific there are diverse and detailed stories of human migration. These cannot be treated as strictly factual since they evolved to meet both political and social purposes, but they still have historical significance.

Many island societies have traditions of their ancestors arriving in great canoes ‘from the west’ which is actually the case. Throughout Polynesia there is a tale about

an ancestral homeland called Hawaiki or Hawaiki Nui. This may not even be an actual place, but it indicates awareness of the immediate common origins of the societies now scattered widely around eastern Polynesia. In fact many migratory traditions give support to modern scholarly findings about Pacific peoples’ distant homelands.

ABOVE LEfT: Basalt adze, Cook Islands: the basic Austronesian shipwright tool for shaping and hollowing timbers. Auckland Museum collection 1310

ABOVE CENTRE: Tata or tiheru, finely embellished bailer for a prestigious, sacred war canoe. Canoe bailers across the Pacific share the same functional shape that evolved over a thousand or more years. Auckland Museum collection 61

ABOVE RIGHT: Lapita pot dating 2,600–2,700 BP (before present), from Aiwa Island in the Lau Group of fiji. By this period Austronesian settlers were developing a distinctive Polynesian culture. Loan, courtesy of University of Auckland

For Pacific peoples, the sea provided abundant marine life for food and was not viewed as an obstacle, but as a highway

LEfT: Western navigators saw the Polynesians’ reef-fringed Pacific island homes as hazards to navigation. Irving Johnson’s famous Yankee wrecked on Raratonga in the Cook Islands. Photographer J Mellefont, 1982

RIGHT: The original Austronesian ocean-going canoe design – dugout hull, two outriggers, triangular sail – is still widespread, these examples observed in Padang Bai, Bali. Photographer J Mellefont, 1986

fAR RIGHT: Lapita movements in years before the present. Map by K Howe, adapted by J Austen


The migrating Austronesians

The people who first discovered and settled the remote islands of the Pacific – all those to the east of the Solomon Islands – have a common origin. They were all members of the Austronesian societies that lived throughout southern China and South-East Asia some 5,000–6,000 years ago. This predates the Chinese civilisation.

In addition to curiosity and daring, the Austronesians had the two skills necessary to settle distant islands. They were experts at cultivating crops, and had domesticated animals such as dogs, pigs and chickens. And they had developed the world’s first effective ocean-going craft using sails and outriggers.

One branch of the Austronesian family headed west from South-East Asia and crossed the Indian Ocean to settle the big, uninhabited island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa – but that’s another story. It was in the Pacific that their greatest achievements would occur.

About 4,000 years ago some Austronesians had reached the New Guinea region, where humans had already settled. Later they headed out beyond the Solomon Islands and entered oceanic regions never before seen by humans. They travelled along the Melanesian island chain, as well as into Micronesia, reaching Fiji, Samoa and Tonga where a distinctive Polynesian culture developed. They then crossed to the region of the Society Islands in Polynesia in the central Pacific. From there they radiated out to the distant islands of Hawai’i, Easter Island, and New Zealand.

The Austronesians have left behind evidence of their migrations enabling modern research to track their movement across the oceans – even as far as South and possibly Central America.

Trails of evidence

Archaeologists have uncovered material culture in huge quantities – tools, cooking and domestic equipment, garden implements, weapons, fishing gear,

decorative items and stone work. The trails of these items can be dated by radio-carbon dating techniques. The Austronesians also modified the landscape in many ways, digging fortification and irrigation ditches, creating gardens and clearing forests.

One of the best and most important examples of an artefact trail is a style of pottery known as Lapita. The Austronesians started making this type of pottery near New Guinea 3,500 years ago, and continued to make it as they moved through the Melanesian island chain and reached Fiji, Samoa and Tonga at least 3,000 years ago. The Lapita trail shows that the first settlers of central Polynesia came via the Melanesian islands, and when this took place.

Using modern DNA studies, scientists can also show the ancient genetic trails across the Pacific ocean of people, plants and animals. The modern peoples of Polynesia have an ancestral genetic trail that leads back into South-East Asia, via Melanesia.

1000 km

Chatham Islands

Marshall Islands

Hawaiian Islands

Solomon Islands

Papua New Guinea

Fiji

Samoa

Tuvalu

Gilbert Islands

Northern Mariana Islands

New Caledonia

AUSTRALIA

N

S

W E

New Zealand

Kiribati

Vanuatu

Philippine Islands

MICRONESIA

MELANESIA

POLYNESIA

Society Islands

Pitcairn Island

Line Islands

Cook Islands

Marquesas Islands

Tonga

Caroline Islands

INDONESIA

Phoenix Islands

Guam

CHINA

Easter Island

3,500 years ago

3,000 years ago


Most of the major food plants on the Pacific islands – including coconuts, yams, taro and sugar cane – have genetic origins in the New Guinea and South-East Asian regions and were introduced by the Austronesians and their descendants. Well over 30 new species of plants were introduced from the west. The one notable exception is the sweet potato, which originates in Peru. It is now believed the sweet potato was introduced to eastern Polynesia by these Pacific voyagers returning from South America.

The pigs, fowls and dogs found throughout the Pacific originated in South-East Asia and were brought by the Austronesians. They also introduced the Pacific rat (rattus exulans), plus a New Guinea night lizard. Asian jungle fowl carried by the voyagers became widespread throughout many Pacific islands and are now known to have reached South America long before Europeans did – the first hard evidence that voyagers of Austronesian origin reached South America.

All languages spoken in island South-East Asia and throughout the Pacific Ocean (excluding Australia and most of New Guinea) belong to a single language family called Austronesian. This consists of over 1,000 different related languages. Pacific islands languages can all be traced back to founding ancestral Austronesian languages in South-East Asia. For example, Maori spoken in New Zealand is most closely related to Cook Island Maori, then Tahitian, which in turn derives from ancient Samoan and so on back through island Melanesia and into South-East Asia.

Examination of patterns of cultural behaviour across the Pacific, including place naming, social, political and religious practices, and especially oral traditions, all provide trails back into the far west of Oceania.

Vaka – an evolving technology

The migrating Austronesians did not simply get onto ready-made voyaging canoes and sail across the Pacific from South-East Asia. Over a 4–5,000 year period they experimented with many kinds of hull and sail designs according to the resources available, and particularly as they sailed increasingly longer distances eastwards across open water.

The major technical breakthrough initially came in South-East Asia when the sail was either invented or introduced to the region, and outriggers were constructed to stabilise a canoe with a


mast and a sail. This provided the basis for the world’s first blue-water vessels. Nowhere else on earth did people develop successful ocean-going vessels until thousands of years later.

In the more sheltered waters of South-East Asia, a vessel typically had a lateen sail and an outrigger on each side of the hull. Heading into the more open seas of

hull shapes. The basic two-spar lateen sail of South-East Asia went through a remarkable set of modifications, including the self-standing Pacific ‘claw’ sail.

Ocean-going vessels were generally safe and efficient. They could sail against the wind. Some were very fast, especially certain single-hull, single outrigger types. The double-hull vessels of eastern

The Austronesian navigators lacked the magnetic compass, marine charts and a Western concept of latitude or longitude. Instead they developed systems based on careful observation of stars, sea conditions, wind and weather patterns. There is evidence of a method of recording navigational information in stick ‘charts’ made by the Marshall Islanders. This knowledge gave them the ability to ‘triple voyage’. They could sail from island A to find island B (voyage 1). From B they could return to A (voyage 2). Back on A, they now knew where B was for a return voyage (voyage 3).

The first requirement of voyaging is to be able to maintain a constant direction. Austronesian navigators had several ways of doing this. By day they could observe the direction of prevailing swells. By night they followed stars as they rose and fell close to the horizon. They had a kind of star chart in their heads, based on many years of careful study, so that they knew which horizon stars to follow at various times of the night and during different seasons. They also had ways of working out how far they were along their intended route, estimating their speed, drift and time at sea.

An important strategy was ‘expanding the target’, which enabled them to be aware of an island before they could actually see it. Even the smallest island could be expanded to have a target diameter of 100 kilometres. This could be done by noting such things as distinctive cloud patterns above islands; island colours, especially lagoons that reflected on the underside of

Over a 4–5,000 year period they experimented with many kinds of hull and sail designs according to the resources available

LEfT: Drawings of proas – single-outrigger vessels from Micronesia – by Admiral Edmond-françois Pâris from his great work Essai sur la Construction Navale des Peuples Extra-Europeens (1843). They show views of ‘Vaca [vaka] from Conga-Cabou [Tongatapu, Tonga]’, and elevation, section, plan and detail of a ‘proa from Satahoual [Satual, Micronesia]’. ANMM collection

RIGHT: Rebbelib or stick charts from the Marshall Islands, teaching aids used to instruct apprentice navigators about the ocean currents, swell and wave patterns around islands marked by cowrie shells. Auckland Museum collection 2814

island Melanesia and Micronesia, the single hull with a single balancing outrigger became common. In the open seas around Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, large double-hull vessels developed (although the hulls were often of unequal size).

In eastern Polynesia they developed double, equal-size hulls. These provided a large, effective and very stable platform for people and goods travelling very long distances. Early European explorers recorded some vessels at over 33 metres in length. A typical voyaging vessel in eastern Polynesia might have been about 20 metres long.

Where there were large trees, such as on Fiji, hulls could be made of hollowed logs. Many islands had no large trees so smaller pieces of timber were used to create ribs and short, irregular planks, lashed together with fibres. Sail and mast designs also changed radically along with

Polynesia were capable of sailing safely and quickly over many thousands of kilometres. To simply call them all ‘canoes’ gives a misleading impression of the scale and sophistication of the world’s first ocean-going technology.

Navigators and knowledge

To discover islands in the Pacific Ocean, the voyaging Austronesian explorers needed to know where they were, and how to find their way back home. Over a long period of time, they developed a range of effective navigational skills that enabled them to purposefully and deliberately navigate over vast distances of ocean. These skills were taught only to specially selected young men who were trained in navigators’ schools. Such learning was a closely guarded secret and the navigators had great prestige within communities, since it was they alone who could guide them safely at sea.


clouds; and changing sea colours near land. They were able to detect deep ocean swells bouncing back from, or curving around, islands. Other clues included birds that fly out to sea in the morning and back to land to roost in the evening, and drifting objects from nearby land – coconuts, seaweed, driftwood.

Since many islands are located in archipelagos, their combined expanded targets offered a vast ‘screen’ of islands. The navigator headed for the centre of the screen, then navigated within the archipelago to find the specific island they were targeting.

It is now thought that these voyaging cultures had an overall strategy for exploration that involved heading upwind into the tropical Pacific’s prevailing south-easterly winds, or waiting for the brief annual reversal of these winds. In either case the navigator could readily return home whether new land was found or not.

Landfall

Like humans everywhere on earth, island peoples adapted their societies and economies to suit their cultural values and their available resources. They introduced new plants and animals. They often changed their new environments by clearing forest and depleting or even causing extinction among native birds and animals. They made an island a home.

There came a time when the great Austronesian voyages of exploration came to an end, and that was long before

Westerners sailed into the Pacific. They probably ended because they were no longer necessary. They had discovered most islands in the ocean. They had crossed the entire ocean from South-East Asia to the Americas. They had been as far north as Hawai’i and as far south as the tiny islands well south of New Zealand.

As island societies became established, over hundreds and even thousands of years, they developed strong emotional, spiritual, political, social and economic bonds to their lands. Life centred around the island home, and no longer on the endless quest to sail away looking for new ones. The developing requirements of politics, warfare and trade meant that different types of sailing vessels were developed.

By the time of the first Western contact, some of the long-distance ocean-going technology, and navigational knowledge, had diminished. But even if their longest voyages had largely ceased, many Pacific peoples still sailed extensively on cultural, military and trading routes within their island groups. They remained a highly skilled maritime people, but their sailing skills were now more commonly applied to regional travels rather than trans-oceanic exploration.

Two worlds meet

The most sudden and extensive changes came with the arrival of Westerners, particularly after the voyages of James Cook in the 18th century. Following the

explorers came missionaries and traders and eventually European settlers and government officials. By the end of the 19th century almost all Pacific islands were controlled by Western powers – Spain, France, Britain, Germany and the United States.

In the earlier years there were instances of both friendly and violent contact as two different maritime peoples met for the first time. Many island societies responded enthusiastically to foreign presence. They were often keen to trade in order to get new Western goods, and they were interested in new ideas such as Christianity and literacy. Over time many of their values and institutions were dramatically changed, often to the Pacific peoples’ disadvantage. Diseases also came with Western contact and these caused suffering and depopulation.

Western explorers were often amazed to learn that island peoples had explored and settled the Pacific Ocean long beforehand. They wanted to find out where these maritime cultures came from and how they travelled. The newcomers recorded many details of their sailing vessels and were often most impressed by their size and speed. Cook took a Ra’iatean high priest – Tupaia – on his voyage south to New Zealand. He was astounded that Tupaia was aware of distant islands and could always point accurately in the direction of his home. But beyond realising that island navigators used stars, sun and moon, Western mariners gained little knowledge of how they navigated.


Pacific people were also very interested in European ships and were keen to travel on board, acting as guides, sailors and labourers for Western traders. The vast Pacific whaling fleets of the 1830s and ’40s contained very large numbers of them among their crews. Leaders in many places, including Tahiti and Hawai’i, saw the military and trading potential of Western vessels, and ended up owning considerable fleets of them.

One result of extensive contact with Westerners was that Pacific-island peoples’ own sailing craft and sailing routes were sometimes abandoned, along with traditional navigational skills. Only in some more remote parts of the Pacific, notably in parts of Micronesia, did these skills survive.

Renaissance

By the mid-20th century it was widely assumed that ancient Pacific navigational skills had died out, as had so much traditional knowledge and custom. Some Western observers denied that these skills had ever existed. In his book Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific (1956), Andrew Sharp argued that the early navigators had made their way more by wind-blown chance and accident than deliberate navigation.

David Lewis challenged Sharp by noting that some old navigators in Micronesia – such as Hipour and Tevake – still practised the old navigational skills. Lewis, a yachtsman, sailed with some of them and then started to use their

techniques sailing about the islands himself. He described their ways of navigation in his book We, the Navigators (1972). Today Lewis is widely credited with ‘saving the vanishing art’ of navigation.

In the 1970s the modern renaissance of traditional navigation and sailing began in earnest in Hawai’i, notably with Ben Finney and the Polynesian Voyaging

Society’s double-hulled vessel Hokule’a. In 1975 it made a ground-breaking voyage from Hawai’i to Tahiti. Hokule’a has since sailed to most parts of Polynesia including New Zealand and Easter Island.

Numerous replica voyaging vessels have since been built and they have been sailed using the traditional navigational skills, including: Taratai from Kiribati (James Siers); Hawaikinui from Tahiti (Matahi Gregory Whakataka Brightwell, Francis Puara Cowan); Takitumu from the Cook Islands (Sir Tom Davis); Te Aurere from New Zealand (Hekenukumai Busby).

Replica voyaging was in part about proving the effectiveness of traditional navigation. A new generation of Pacific navigators has emerged – men like Nainoa Thompson in Hawai’i and Hek Busby in New Zealand. But replica voyaging is also about a revival of cultural pride throughout many parts of the Pacific. Voyaging canoes have become centre-pieces of a pan-Polynesian nationalism. They gather in force at

Polynesian cultural festivals and have been on cultural and ceremonial tours. Seven vessels once raced 3,000 kilometres from the Marquesas Islands to Hawai’i.

The deeds of ancestral Pacific navigators and their skills are now being celebrated and relived.

An earlier version of this essay, by Professor Kerry Howe of Massey University, Auckland, appeared on the Auckland Museum’s Vaka Moana website.

fAR LEfT: Double-hull Tahitian canoes as witnessed by James Cook. View of the Island of Otaheiti, Engraved for Bankes’s New System of Geography Published by Royal Authority. Collection of Signals editor

CENTRE: Peue ‘ei, head-dress of porpoise teeth for a high-ranking Marquesan woman, displays the power traditionally associated with marine mammals. In this example, prestigious blue-glass European trade beads have replaced the traditional fish vertebrae. Auckland Museum collection 16764

LEfT: Prow splashboard from a masawa canoe of the Trobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea), used for the famous ritual, inter-island trade cycle known as kula. Auckland Museum collection 56140

There came a time when the great voyages of exploration came to an end, long before Westerners sailed into the Pacific

Exhibition organised by

Auckland, New Zealand

Sponsored by


War & love

Teruko Morimoto and Warrant Officer Bill Blair in Kure, Japan



I could not go on living without him. And what I was doing brought disgrace on my parents and my sisters. I got some poison and hid it in a drawer with a suicide letter addressed to Bill and my parents. Teruko Blair

LATER IN LIFE, in her memoirs, Japanese war bride Teruko Blair likened herself to the tragic Madame Butterfly, as she recounted how afraid she had been that her husband Bill might be sent back to Australia, and that she would be denied permission to join him. A new showcase story in our Passengers exhibition describes the experiences of Teruko and another Japanese woman – Sadako Morris – who fell in love with Australian soldiers and, defying a ban on fraternisation with the ‘ex-enemy’, married them and came to live in Australia.

In doing so, they and more than 600 other Japanese women made Australian immigration history, as the first significant group of non-Europeans permitted to settle here under the White Australia Policy – the various regulations that, from 1901 to 1973, deliberately restricted immigration both racially and culturally.

At the end of World War II a defeated Japan – its economy in shreds and many of its cities destroyed – was occupied by Allied forces to oversee its demilitarisation and the transition to democracy. At first over 400,000 US troops were stationed around Japan; in 1946 they were joined by the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), made up of Australian, British,

New Zealand and Indian troops. Most of the 12,000 Australians were based around Kure, not far from Hiroshima, where they were charged with demilitarising the Japanese naval base. They would remain there for the next 10 years.

The BCOF Commander in Chief, Lieutenant General Northcott, issued firm instructions concerning fraternisation with the locals: In dealing with the Japanese you are dealing with a conquered enemy … You must be formal

and correct. You must not enter their homes or take part in their family life. Your unofficial dealings with the Japanese must be kept to a minimum.

In spite of these instructions, and the presence of provosts (military police) to enforce them, it was inevitable that servicemen would mix with the local people. Numerous opportunities for interaction arose, particularly through the daily contact between soldiers at the BCOF camp and the thousands of Japanese workers who were employed there. Many of these were women, who worked as cleaners, office workers, house girls and waitresses.

It was in just this way that Teruko Morimoto met Warrant Officer Bill Blair. Teruko was from Hiroshima, and while miraculously her family had survived the atomic bomb, their home had been

War & love In a new story from our Passengers exhibition, two Japanese war brides give deeply personal accounts of meeting and falling in love with Australian soldiers, and making a new life in Australia – despite strict military ‘non-fraternisation’ rules and condemnation by their families and society. Story by curator of post-Federation immigration Sally Hone (in association with former curator Lindl Lawton).

destroyed. Life was difficult and food was strictly rationed, so in 1948 Teruko took a job as a waitress in the officers’ mess at Kure.

Teruko recounts that she and her girlfriends had not liked Bill at first – they called him the ‘tsung tsung junni’ (the ‘stuck-up sergeant major’) when they saw him striding around the base, baton in hand. However her friend Midori invited her to a dance with Bill, and she accepted. Teruko soon warmed to him, realising

that Bill was not so stuck-up after all. Before long they had sworn their love for one another, but since intermarriage was strictly forbidden, they instead visited a church and a Shinto shrine in June 1950 to pray for their union. Teruko’s only memento of that ‘wedding’ day – a small box of seashells from the Inland Sea – is on display in the exhibition.

Reflecting on that time, Teruko says: Japanese people disapproved of girls who went out with the ex-enemy. When we walked down the street, I felt the cold eyes. I knew what they were thinking; she must be a street girl, a prostitute.

Teruko was lucky with her own family: despite their initial hesitation, they eventually embraced her Australian suitor. Other Japanese girls in relationships with foreign soldiers had to conduct their affairs in complete secrecy

You are dealing with a conquered enemy … you must not enter their homes or take part in their family life


and many were ostracised by their families. On top of the disgrace of their daughters having relationships with the ex-enemy, at the time there were plenty of stories told of soldiers abandoning women. Often the men would be sent back home, swearing to return, but were never heard from again. Many children were born and raised in Japan without their fathers, with the added stigma, in this monocultural island society, of being of mixed blood.

The feelings were reciprocated. Australian Government opposition to its soldiers marrying Japanese women had been most strongly expressed in the words of the then-Labor Government minister of immigration, Arthur Calwell, who in 1948 declared: While relatives remain of the men who suffered at the hands of the Japanese, it would be the grossest act of public indecency to permit a Japanese of either sex to pollute Australian or Australian-controlled shores.

But by 1952, with a peace treaty signed and Australia keen to develop a trade relationship with Japan, the immigration minister in the newly elected Menzies government, Harold Holt, lifted the ban on marriage between Australian soldiers and Japanese women. This had come after intense lobbying by many soldiers, who had by then received considerable media coverage of their struggle. Gordon Parker, a young Australian member of the BCOF, was the first to be permitted to marry and bring his wife Cherry and their children to Australia. His story inspired many other couples to follow suit. Nevertheless, couples had to go through many bureaucratic hurdles to marry – from submitting detailed application forms to undergoing formal and informal character checks.

Teruko and Bill Blair were married by the British Consul General in February 1953. Teruko, who still felt ashamed of ‘living in sin’, recounts that the wedding enabled her at last to ‘walk tall’. Her son was born seven months later and in November 1953, Teruko and her baby joined over 25 other Japanese brides on the Taiping bound for Australia.

The departure was painful for all of Teruko’s family. Teruko’s sister later confided that her father had been in tears after she left – to him, Australia ‘was the end of the world’ and he did not think he would ever see her again. The journey on board the ship was uncomfortable, and Teruko knew very little about the country that would soon be her new home. However, looking back, she says: ‘I never once doubted that I had made the right decision.’

When Teruko sailed into Sydney Harbour, her first impression of Sydney was of ‘beautiful roofs and hills and green. I thought it was a picture book’. Her spirits lifted, and she thought she ‘could be happy in this country’. When Teruko finally arrived in Melbourne, Bill Blair’s family gave her a warm reception. She wrote to her family: ‘Don’t worry – I can survive in this country’. An additional and welcome surprise was a belated wedding gift from Bill – a precious Satsuma coffee set that she had long admired in Japan.

The following years were busy for Teruko, raising her three children and often moving house as Bill was posted to various locations around Victoria and

NSW. Teruko recalls that she felt terribly homesick and missed Japanese food, but she never let her family in Japan know how sad she felt. Looking back, Teruko laughs as she tells the story of how she hated the way the Blair family cooked rice. One day when the family left for a weekend outing, she began preparing some Japanese rice balls, hoping to have a picnic with her baby in the backyard. However, the family surprised her with an early return and she had to hide the plate of rice balls under the bed. She never had a chance to eat them!

Australia in the 1950s was a far cry from today’s multiculturalism – people from all backgrounds were expected to assimilate into Australian society. So Teruko, like other Japanese war brides, had good reason to be apprehensive about racism here. To make sure her children had a

smooth time at school, she did not teach them Japanese. However, she did instil in them Japanese concepts of honour and respect, and enjoyed teaching them all the Japanese songs she could remember from her own childhood.

It was 15 years before Teruko was able to visit her family back in Japan. In the meantime, letters sustained her – especially from her younger sister Junko, to whom she had been very close. Junko wrote regularly about family and her university, illustrating her letters with comical sketches of daily life. Teruko cherished each letter, transcribing them into a book, together with Junko’s illustrations. Included in the exhibit, this evocative document illustrates how

To her father, Australia ‘was the end of the world’ and he did not think he would ever see her again


Teruko maintained close ties to her family in spite of the distance that separated them.

Although some other Japanese brides were not so lucky, Teruko felt accepted by her new country. In 1991 she published her memoirs in Japanese, titled Embraced by Australia. Poignant mementos of Teruko’s experiences in the officers’ mess at Kure, of meeting Bill, and of her life in Australia are displayed in this exhibit. These include delicate dolls, the precious wedding coffee set, and an exquisitely hand-painted kimono, as well as memorabilia from Bill’s army days.

Sadako Morris was another Japanese war bride who took a leap of faith and came to Australia with her soldier husband John Morris, a signaller in the Australian army. Sadako Kikuchi was from Kure, and during the occupation worked as a seamstress in a department store. She recalls that life after the war was very hard and she had to survive by scavenging for scrap metal to sell and chipping old cement off bricks for recycling. Gradually natural curiosity, openness and the black market brought the local inhabitants and the servicemen together, despite the rules against fraternisation. Sadako had four brothers: the eldest, Tokuo, proud and patriotic, would have nothing to do with the ex-enemy; however her younger brother, Yasuo, befriended the Australian soldiers, who subsequently became a source of sought-after goods such as tinned foods, cigarettes and chocolate.

John and Sadako met in the department store. Although Sadako was shy at first, they introduced themselves and soon started dating. Sadako brought John home to meet her family, and he visited a few times, bringing gifts such as food and wool. However, when the Kikuchi family discovered they were more seriously involved, she was banned from seeing him again and her parents threatened to disown her. From then on, Sadako and John kept their meetings secret, using Sadako’s brother Yasuo as a go-between.

Eventually the strong-willed Sadako opted to leave the family home. John found an apartment for her in Kure, and so could visit whenever he was free. And despite ‘disowning’ her, most members of the family continued to visit Sadako – even her father would secretly deliver fish he had caught for her in the Inland Sea.

Sadako’s collection of John’s BCOF memorabilia makes an evocative addition

In December 1953 Sadako Morris née Kikuchi sailed for Australia on SS Changte (top); Sadako Kikuchi and John Morris (above right) with the family of Sadako’s older sister; Sadako and John’s wedding on 16 August 1952 at St Peter’s Garrison Church, Kure (below); Sadako and John at home in Adelaide with their children (right).

Page 13

OPPOSITE: Teruko Morimoto and Warrant Officer Bill Blair with other Japanese-Australian couples during the post-war occupation of Japan; Teruko, bill and Bill junior at home in Australia.

Photographs from the collections of Teruko Blair and Sadako Morris


The new display in our Passengers exhibition uses poignant memorabilia to relate tales of love overcoming wartime enmities. Photographer A frolows/ANMM



to this exhibit. His service books, badges, Christmas menus signed by mates in his battalion and an army ‘hymn’ were kept by Sadako for John as a reminder of those times. She says John was proud of his military service, although he did not march on Anzac Day until later in life. Other memorabilia displayed here – tickets, brochures and postcards from cultural and historical sites around Japan – are evidence of John’s travels before he met Sadako.

On a more personal note, also displayed is a collection of postcards, poetry, song lyrics and bank notes with handwritten declarations of love – all souvenirs from Sadako and John’s courtship in Japan. Like Teruko and Bill, unable to marry, John and Sadako exchanged notes

declaring their commitment. On one, John wrote: This states that at 2010 hours on 31st Dec’ 50 I gave this money as a bond of friendship forever to Sadako Kikuchi.

Like many couples in Japan, they went to the Izuma Taishya shrine to pray for a long relationship, and Sadako kept a packet of postcards as a memento and good luck token after their visit.

Sadako fell pregnant in 1952, but the couple was reminded by the brigadier’s office that the army did not permit marriage. Inspired by the story of Gordon Parker, however, they decided to test the system themselves. They applied, and were finally given permission to marry in August 1952. The Australian padre and Japanese reverend jointly solemnised their wedding on 16 August 1952 at St Peter’s Garrison Church, Kure. Happily, most of Sadako’s family attended the ceremony. Sadako recalls that at eight months pregnant, she was hot and uncomfortable in her ceremonial kimono!

Their daughter June was born in September, and in April 1953 the couple celebrated their official marriage with a ceremony at the British Consulate in Kobe. Their second daughter was born in October 1953, and two months later Sadako boarded the Changte with her two baby girls. With great sadness, she said goodbye to her family, wondering whether she had made the right decision in going to a distant, unknown land, and putting all her trust in one man.

Once on board, the company of other Japanese war brides whom Sadako befriended helped to alleviate the homesickness for them all. When they reached Sydney on 7 January 1954, she was met by her husband and they travelled on together to Adelaide where, on arrival, they were surrounded by local news reporters. In typical tabloid style, the Adelaide News exclaimed ‘Jap brides in SA with soldier husbands. Will settle here.’ However the tone was mostly welcoming. Sadako carefully kept the clipping and photograph in her family album.

Like Teruko Blair, Sadako was given a warm welcome by John’s family. While surprised at a lower living standard than she had expected, she adapted well to her

By the time the BCOF finally withdrew from Japan in 1956, around 650 Japanese women had left to make a home here with their Australian husbands. For these women, coming to Australia took great courage. They knew no-one but their husbands, spoke limited English, and had little idea of what life in Australia would be like. Separation from their families was painful, and they had to trust that their in-laws would receive them well. This of course was not always the case – some risked being cut off by their Japanese families and at the same time faced hostility in Australia. Fortunately, the experience of Teruko Blair and Sadako Morris was largely positive.

Teruko, now in her eighties, and still spritely and active, lives on the NSW south coast. Sadako lives in Adelaide. They know each other through the Japanese War Bride Association reunions, which have provided an important meeting ground in Australia, as well as with their counterparts in the US (where some 50,000 Japanese women migrated as war brides). Like many Japanese war brides in Australia, Teruko and Sadako successfully built their lives in this country – learning English, raising children, making friends and entering the paid workforce. Their immigration to Australia brought some difficulty, but overall, fulfilment – very far from the ‘gross indecency’ that Arthur Calwell had predicted in 1948!

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article and the exhibit both draw on the excellent work of my predecessor, curator Lindl Lawton, including her oral history interview with Teruko Blair in 2007, on Dr Keiko Tamura’s Michi’s Memories – the Story of a Japanese War Bride (Pandanus Books Canberra 2003) and the memoir Renai by June Hammond, daughter of Sadako and John Morris. The quote beginning this article is from Weaving a Double Cloth: Stories of Asia-Pacific Women in Australia, Myra J Bourke, Susanne Holzknecht & Annie Bartlett, 2002, Pandanus Books, Canberra, pp 95–96. The museum is indebted to Teruko and Sadako for generously sharing their stories.

Dr Keiko Tamura, author of Michi’s Memories – the Story of a Japanese War Bride, will give a talk at the museum at 10 am Thursday 5 February 2009. There will be an opportunity to talk to Teruko Blair and Sadako Morris and to view the exhibition. Bookings essential 9298 3655 – includes morning tea.

She wondered whether she had made the right decision … going to a distant, unknown land … putting all her trust in one man

new country, surmounting difficulties with the language and the occasional schoolyard taunt to her children. Gradually she and John established a home and garden, with their circle of friends including other Japanese couples who had settled in Adelaide. Sadako recalls hosting parties with other Japanese wives chatting around a table piled with Japanese delicacies while their husbands yarned outside over a keg of beer!

Sadako missed Japan. She had only a few precious belongings to remind her – including the stunning purple kimono displayed in this exhibit, a favourite that her mother had made for her during the years of hardship at the end of the war. She recalls how she savoured every letter she received from home: I used to smell the letters and feel the paper to make me feel closer to my family in Japan.

However, Sadako found contentment raising her two girls and son in Adelaide. John encouraged their children to think of themselves not as ‘half Japanese, half Australian’, but as ‘double’ – that is, they were enriched by both cultures. After 10 years Sadako finally revisited Japan, where she was warmly welcomed by her family and delighted in the sights and sounds of a newly rebuilt Japan. But while there, she realised how much she missed her husband and children in Australia, and came to understand that ‘she would not have had it any other way’.


This is a tale of two Kathleens – Australian artist Jack Earl’s wife Kathleen Gillett, and the seaworthy ketch he named after her. Sixty years after Jack sailed Kathleen Gillett around the world, curators Patricia Miles and Daina Fletcher chart the inspiring story of this romantic adventurer and his voyage. The restored Kathleen Gillett – based on a famous Norwegian design – was Norway’s generous Bicentennial gift to Australia in 1988.

Jack Earl’s voyage around the world 1947–48

Kathleen darling ...


THERE WERE TWO Kathleens in Jack Earl’s life – his wife, Kathleen Gillett, and the yacht he named after her. Both were to become an inspiration to Jack, while his hardy ketch was to become a legend in the world of Australian ocean sailing. The ketch is now one of the treasures of the museum’s collection of historic vessels – a very special one that was restored and presented to Australia by the Government of Norway as a Bicentennial gift, in 1988.

In December 2008 the museum celebrates the 60th anniversary of the triumphal return to Sydney Harbour by Jack, his ketch Kathleen Gillett and the crew who took the vessel around the world in 1947 and 1948. It was a time of rare adventure, a time when only one other Australian yacht had sailed around the world – the 1935–37 voyage of Harold Nossiter, also from Sydney, and his sons in the schooner Sirius.

The exhibition Kathleen darling … Jack Earl’s voyage around the world 1947–48 is now open in the museum’s Tasman Light gallery. It tells the story of the journey through photographs taken along the way, a small selection of paintings by Jack, who was a marine artist, quotations from the log he made for his wife Kathleen, and a handsome facsimile of the log itself.

The anniversary will be celebrated by the only surviving crew member, Lyell

‘Mick’ Morris. With his wife Phyllis and their family, Mick will recall all those adventures that he experienced voyaging around the world, 60 years since he sailed with Jack through Sydney Heads to a welcoming party of sailors and media at Watsons Bay. Members of Jack Earl’s family will also be there to celebrate the anniversary. Jack Earl died in 1994 while his wife Kathleen, his ‘peerless mate’, had died in 1987.

Back in the 1930s the newly-wed Jack and Kathleen cherished a romantic dream, to build a boat and to sail around the

world. These were years of economic depression and Jack found work where he could as an illustrator on different Sydney newspapers. From the time he took his plan for an ocean cruiser to Sydney boatbuilder Charles Larson, it took them six long years to see the boat launched. Work proceeded in stops and starts as Jack and Kathleen found the money. Meanwhile they had two children, Michael and Maris.

To build the blue-water sailing boat, Larson adapted one of the famous designs of Norwegian Colin Archer, whose craft were known for safety in heavy seas. Jack

and his family lived on board while they fitted out the ketch during the years of World War II, when the vessel was also used for military reconnaissance.

During the war years Jack and a few sailing friends established the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia. Because he planned to sail the world, Jack had chosen the sail number 29 for Kathleen Gillett, to inflate the club’s apparent numbers. Soon after the war ended, Jack tested the seaworthiness of his ketch on an ocean cruise to Hobart in the company of friends and fellow club members, at Christmas in 1945.

At the suggestion of visiting English yachtsman Captain John Illingworth, sailing in Rani, the holiday cruise became a race. Illingworth and Rani won, while Jack Earl came in fourth in Kathleen Gillett. The race has sailed every Christmas since then and is the blue water classic known as the Sydney-Hobart yacht race. It is still run by the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, a haven for blue-water sailors that now has around 2,500 members.

In 1947 Jack set out on his long-planned world cruise with four other crew in his ketch Kathleen Gillett. By this time, with two growing children, it was not

financially possible for all his family to go. Jack was now 39. They feared that if he did not make the voyage now, he never would. Jack had to look for crew who could pay their way, while his beloved wife Kathleen and the children had to stay behind. They joined Jack and the crew in North Queensland for five days, where they said their final goodbyes before an 18-month separation.

Sailor friends of Jack, Mick Morris and Don Angus, went as mate and navigator. Keith Humphreys and Jack Day made up the crew. Keith left the boat in Queensland so they sailed with only four

OPPOSITE: Jack Earl’s portrait of Kathleen Gillett in the Pacific Ocean trade winds between the Galapagos and the Marquesa island groups, painted for Mick Morris. ANMM collection

LEfT: The artist’s portrait of his ‘peerless mate’ Kathleen Gillett, painted in 1932. ANMM collection, gift from Jack Earl

The newly-wed Jack and Kathleen cherished a romantic dream, to build a boat and to sail around the world


aboard until another Australian, Will Sinclair, joined them at Durban. Kathleen Gillett sailed north around the top of Australia, across the Indian Ocean to Cape Town, crossed the South Atlantic to Panama, then sailed home across the Pacific.

Phyllis Finn, Mick Morris’s girlfriend, tracked the voyage and its exotic ports of call on a map displayed in the exhibition, as she received letters from Mick. Although he wrote constantly, the mails were slow and visitors to the exhibition can see where she stopped marking the route at Tonga, because they were almost home by then.

The display features photographs of their experiences – celebrating Christmas with cake and sweet sherry at four in the morning off the island of St Helena, meeting the movie star Errol Flynn in Trinidad, passing through the Panama Canal made fast to a tug, watching seals in the Galapagos Islands. It also includes Jack’s portraits of his two Kathleens – his wife, and their boat.

Mick Morris wrote a series of articles, illustrated by Jack, which were published at home in the popular sailing magazine Seacraft. In an era before air travel the voyage was exotic and captured the public imagination. In large artists’ books of blank paper Jack kept an elaborate log of their adventures addressed to Kathleen, sending each section home by whatever means he could. It was a magnificent record of an exceptional voyage, and has been described as Jack’s declaration of love to Kathleen.


Into the log book he put sketches and paintings, photographs, cables received, invoices from local businesses, notes, newscuttings, local postage stamps – anything which would bring the voyage alive for her. In Sydney the log became as celebrated as the voyage. Friends, family, sailors and colleagues anticipated the arrival of each new volume and pored over the contents. Jack included personal notes to Kathleen inserted in small envelopes, for her eyes only. A limited edition facsimile of the log was published by Weldon in 1991, at the time this museum first opened to the public, and is now a collector’s item.

Jack Earl worked on the log into the night or in the early mornings while the others were ashore or asleep. In Mauritius, when a friend was about to leave by steamer for Australia, he wrote: I will have to go like steam to clean and finish off this log for him to take along – it is 4 AM now ... Good night my perfect little Darling … I love you. Jack

Kathleen Gillett was sold by Jack in the 1950s, with a colourful subsequent career that included island trade in the Torres Strait and crocodile hunting around Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. In 1987 the ketch, much changed from its original specifications, was located in Guam and purchased by the Norwegian Government which funded its extensive rebuilding as that country’s official gift to Australia for the Bicentennial of European settlement, celebrated in 1988. This fine vessel now forms part of the museum’s historic fleet and sails regularly on Sydney Harbour.

ANTICLOCKWISE fROM ABOVE:

Pages from Jack’s log illustrating their stopover in Cape Town. This is the facsimile edition of the logs published by Weldon in 1991.

Jack waved goodbye as they left from Mosman Bay on 7 June 1947, surrounded by friends on boats wishing them a safe voyage. Unknown photographer, reproduced courtesy Lyell Morris

The ones who stayed behind: Kathleen with their children Michael and Maris, and the family’s dog. Reproduced from Jack Earl’s album courtesy Jack Earl Trust

Christmas in the South Atlantic Ocean – cake and sweet sherry at 4 am. Photographer Will Sinclair, reproduced courtesy Lyell Morris

Phyllis finn and Mick Morris reunited, at Watsons Bay on 7 December 1948. Unknown photographer, reproduced courtesy Lyell Morris


Message to Members

From Members manager Adrian Adam

Looking for that last-minute Christmas gift? Why not purchase a museum membership – it lasts all year and is a great gift idea for friends or family. We can send it direct to the recipient with a gift card in a matter of days. There is a gift form contained in this magazine to mail in or simply call the Members office – but please order no later than 21 December.

THE COMING holiday period will be a great time for the young and young at heart, so do drop in over the summer months with children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces or young kin of any description. While you’re here you’ll certainly want to see our exciting new exhibition Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors, exploring humanity’s greatest – and earliest – trans-oceanic adventure, the first settling of the vast Pacific Ocean. It’s another great international exhibition that we have imported for Australian audiences, coming to us from Auckland Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira, New Zealand. It’s only with us from 6 December to 15 February so don’t miss it.

Meanwhile the kids will love Wetworld, which returns from 27 December with all the Aqua-Play and Super-Soaker action. There’s an exclusive Members Wetworld breakfast on Wednesday 7 January where the kids can take over Wetworld without the crowds. Kids Deck also runs every day through the school holidays while in Pacific Play the kids will get hands-on in workshops learning skills from around the Pacific Islands. Don’t forget all the children’s programs are free for Members!

Enjoyment for Members continues over summer. On the water, we have a pre-Christmas sunset sail on the South Australian sail-training vessel One and All. Launched in 1985, it sailed in the 1987–88 First Fleet Re-enactment. Don’t miss this chance to sail on a classic Australian tall ship. Another blue-ribbon harbour day is our Boxing Day Sydney-Hobart race-start cruise on board MV Seivadis. Then our own HMB Endeavour replica heads out to lead the Australia Day parade of sail, always a great way to spend 26 January. Also on Australia Day is a family cruise on board MV John Cadman II.

Looking ahead to 2009 our Members will tour to Hobart in February for the Australian Wooden Boat Festival. If wooden boats are your thing or if you just want to take in the beauty of Hobart and its surrounds, you should join us. But don’t delay – book now as we have limited places available. See the Members events pages in the centre for more details of these and many other activities for Members.

By the time you read this the submarine HMAS Onslow will be back at the museum after being in dry dock at Garden Island for some much-needed maintenance. Some lucky Members toured her in dry dock, but for those interested you can follow the story of Onslow’s overhaul in the museum’s new online blog. It’s a meditation on aspects of submarine conservation by the enigmatic philosopher-observer identified only as ‘abodyoflight’ – a kind of ‘Zen and the art of submarine maintenance’. Simply visit our website and follow the ‘Blog’ prompts, or go straight to http://blogs.anmm.gov.au. The museum also has Facebook, Myspace and Flickr pages to check out.

When visiting the museum please make use of the Members lounge where you can take some time out over a complimentary tea, coffee or cordial for the kids. Or for that lunch and glass of wine with family or friends by the water, you can’t beat Yots café – remember Members receive a 10% discount so have your membership card handy.

There are some new voices on the end of the line in the Members office. Welcome to Helen Jones who is acting Members services coordinator, and Liz Tomkinson who will be manager of the section for some months in my absence. Thank you for your continued support throughout the year and we all look forward to seeing you at the museum in 2009. With Christmas just around the corner, on behalf of all of us in the Members office, please have a safe and happy Christmas and a terrific New Year.

The CSIRO marine national facility’s Southern Surveyor was a guest at our wharves in September, when Members enjoyed a behind-the-scenes tour of this versatile blue-water research vessel. Photographer A frolows/ANMM


How to book It’s easy to book for the Members events on the next pages … it only takes a phone call and if you have a credit card ready we can take care of payments on the spot.

• To reserve tickets for events call the Members Office on 02 9298 3644 (business hours) or email [email protected]. Bookings strictly in order of receipt.

• Ifpayingbyphone,havecreditcarddetailsathand.

• Ifpayingbymailaftermakingareservation,pleaseincludeacompleted booking form with a cheque made out to the Australian National Maritime Museum.

• The booking form is on reverse of the address sheet with your Signals mailout.

• Ifpaymentforaneventisnotreceivedseven (7) days before the function your booking may be cancelled.

Booked out?We always try to repeat the event in another program.

CancellationsIfyoucan’tattendabookedevent,pleasenotifyusatleastfive (5) daysbeforethefunctionforarefund.Otherwise,weregretarefund cannot be made. Events and dates are correct at the time of printingbutthesemayvary…ifso,we’llbesuretoinformyou.

Parking near museumWilson Parking offers Members discount parking at nearby HarboursideCarpark,MurrayStreet,DarlingHarbour. To obtain a discount, you must have your ticket validated at the museum ticket desk.

Events for Members

Members Events Calendar

December

Tue 9 Talk & preview: Vaka Moana exhibition

Sun 14 Talk: New Bedford Whaling Museum

Tue 23 On water: Tall ship STV One and All

Fri 26 On water: Sydney-Hobart race-start cruise

January

Wed 7 For kids: Wetworld family breakfast

Sun 11 Special: Silent film Dall’Italia all’Australia

Mon 26 On water: Australia Day ferry cruise

Mon 26 On water: Australia Day Endeavour replica sail

Mon 26 Special: Australia Day fireworks & picnic

Fri 30 Talk & tour: WWII raider Krait

February

Sun 1 Talk: The magic of marine models

Thu 5 Tour: 2009 Hobart Wooden Boat Festival

Sun 22 Day tour: NMA Darwin exhibition, Canberra

Sat 28 On water: Heritage skiff race ferry cruise

March

Wed 4 Special: Movies by moonlight on Vampire

Thu 5 Special: Movies by moonlight on Vampire

Fri 6 Lunchtime curator tour: Great White fleet

Thu 12 Lecture: 7th Phil Renouf Memorial Lecture

Ted Graham, chairman of the finding Sydney foundation, and Dr Mike McCarthy of the Western Australian Maritime Museum, spoke to Members about the hunt for the wreck of HMAS Sydney (II). Photographer A Adam/ANMM

Members visited our submarine HMAS Onslow in the Garden Island dry dock during its recent refit. Photographer L Tomkinson/ANMM


Lectures and talksPreview: Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors6.15–8 pm Tuesday 9 December at the museum

Join distinguished Professor Kerry Howe from Massey University,Auckland,forthisspecialtalkandpreviewoftheexhibition about the discovery and settlement of the Pacific islands. Learn about the daring explorers who crossed this vast ocean–theworld’sfirstdeep-seanavigators.ProfessorHowetalksabouttherarecarvingsandcanoesdisplayed,andthecomputer modelling and recent scientific research in genetics and linguistics that have added to our knowledge of this great oceanic feat.Members $15, guests $20. Includes Coral Sea wine, cheese and James Squire beer

19th century whaling links America and Australia2–3.30 pm Sunday 14 December at the museum

Join Michael Dyer from the New Bedford Whaling Museum who is working at ANMM on the first-ever USA Gallery Fellowship, studying the influence of whaling on the earliest American–Australian relations and how this changed over the 19th century. The Australian colony provided a relatively stable, English-speaking presence on the far side of the world – of great importance to US whalemen and to the owners who sent them out. This illustrated presentation includes images from the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection.Members $15, guests $20. Includes Coral Sea wine, cheese and James Squire beer

The magic of models at the maritime museum2–4.30 pm Sunday 1 February at the museum

The art and skill of building marine models is revealed by two experts. Long-time ANMM volunteer Richard Keyes speaks of the many little ships he has built at our modellers desk over the years, displaying a selection of his favourites. Mike Bass from Cutting Edge Models (pictured) recounts some recent projects: a model of HMS Beagle he has constructed for our 2009 Charles Darwin exhibition; his work on the museum’s HMAS Sydney series; and models built for the Australian War Memorial and Australian Defence Industries.Members $15, guests $20. Includes both talks, Coral Sea wine, cheese and James Squire beer

7th Phil Renouf Memorial Lecture‘Salt water in his veins – tall stories and other ships’6.15–8.30 pm Thursday 12 March at the museum

The museum and Sydney Heritage Fleet join forces again to present this annual lecture in honour of the late president of SHF, Phil Renouf. This year’s speaker is editor of Australian Sea Heritage Alan Edenborough. His lavishly illustrated lecture ranges widely from the epic story of saving James Craig, the magic of sailing in tall ship races in Europe, and stories of his forebears who came to Australia in the 1830s, their tales featuring wool, wine and convicts.ANMM and SHF members $20, guests $25. Followed by Coral Sea wine, cheese and James Squire beer

Tours and walksTalk and inspection – commando raider Krait 10–11.30 am Friday 30 January at the museum

Special Unit operatives boldly sailed this ex-Japanese fishing tender vessel from Exmouth, Western Australia, to occupied Singapore in 1943, and used limpet mines to sink or damage 40,000 tons of enemy shipping. Acquired from postwar owners in Borneo during the 1960s, Krait was operated by the Royal Volunteer Coastal Patrol for many years and is now on loan from the Australian War Memorial. ANMM Fleet Manager Steven Adams relates the story of Krait and leads a closer inspection of this extraordinary vessel.Members only, $20, limited places. Includes morning tea

Day tour: Darwin at the National Museum of Australia8 am–7 pm Sunday 22 February at the NMA in Canberra

To whet your appetite for our own Charles Darwin exhibition opening March 2009, travel to the ACT and NMA to see their Charles Darwin exhibition. Enjoy an introduction and guided tour and learn about the famous naturalist’s life and work, travels and research leading to his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The exhibition is organised by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in collaboration with the Museum of Science, Boston; The Field Museum, Chicago; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; and the Natural History Museum, London, England.Members $85, guests $95. Includes luxury coach, morning tea, museum and exhibition entry, lunch at the museum


Events for Members

Lunchtime curator tour: Great White Fleet: US sea power on parade 190812 noon–1.15 pm Friday 6 March at the museum

2008 marked the 100th anniversary of the arrival of America’s Great White Fleet, despatched by President Roosevelt to demonstrate US naval capability to the world. Australians greeted the 16 white-painted battleships and their escorts – the largest fleet ever to circumnavigate the globe – with huge fanfare. Join exhibition curator Paul Hundley for his talk about the impact of the visit on Australia, followed by a curator-led tour of the exhibition.Members $15, guests $20. Includes light lunch, Coral Sea wine, cheese and James Squire beer

On the waterMembers Christmas sail – STV One and All4.30–7.30 pm Tuesday 23 December on Sydney Harbour

Sail-training vessel One and All was built by W G Porter & Son and an enthusiastic team of volunteers at North Haven, South Australia, and launched in 1985. Based on classic 1850s brigantines, this tall ship is constructed of timber to modern Australian Maritime Safety Authority standards. One of its first major voyages was the 1987–88 First Fleet Re-enactment, joining the fleet at Rio De Janeiro. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to sail on a classic Australian tall ship.

Members: adult $65, child $45. Guests: adult $75, child $55. Includes finger food and a welcoming champagne. Cash bar on board

Sydney-Hobart race-start ferry cruise11 am–2.30 pm Friday 26 December on Sydney Harbour

Bid farewell to this year’s Sydney-Hobart yacht fleet on board the luxury ferry MV Seivadis. Take in the colour, excitement and salt spray of the harbour’s bluest blue-ribbon day. Picnic on your leftover Christmas dinner and watch out for spinnakers as we follow the fleet to the heads.Members: adult $55, child $30. Guests: adult $65, child $40. BYO picnic. Cash bar on board. Meet next to Vampire

Australia Day family ferry cruise10.30 am–2.30 pm Monday 26 January on Sydney Harbour

Enjoy Australia Day harbour festivities on MV John Cadman II. Get stirred up in the wash of the famous Ferrython, the Australia Day harbour parade, the historic fleet, the tall ships, the Army Sea King helicopter flypast, and lots more. Members: adult $45, child $30, family of 4 $120. Guests: adult $55, child $35, family of 4 $145. BYO picnic, cash bar on board. Meet at Harbourside steps, Darling Harbour

Australia Day HM Bark Endeavour sail12.30 pm–5.00 pm Monday 26 January on Sydney Harbour

Enjoy a great day out on HM Bark Endeavour replica and take in all the fun and excitement of the Australia Day festivities on the harbour. Join in the famous Australia Day parade of sail, catch a glimpse of the historic fleet, compete in the tall ships race, enjoy live music and lots more. Members $185, guests $200. Includes gourmet lunch, afternoon tea, Coral Sea wine and James Squire beer. Meet next to Endeavour gangway at the museum

Ferry cruise: view the heritage 18-ft skiff race1.30–4.30 pm Saturday 28 February on the harbour

Join this relaxing afternoon ferry cruise to view the historic 18-ft skiffs that race out of Sydney Flying Squadron headquarters at Careening Cove. See prewar replicas Britannia, Tangalooma, Mistake and Yendys and many more. Also view the modern skiffs and thrill to the colour and excitement of the harbour’s fastest racers. The museum’s wooden boat expert and manager of the Australian Register of Historic Vessels, David Payne, will be on hand to provide a commentary.Members $45, guests $55. Includes afternoon tea and refreshments. Meet at the Heritage Pontoon next to submarine Onslow

BOOKINGS AND ENQUIRIES Booking form on reverse of mailing address sheet. Phone 02 9298 3644 or fax 02 9298 3660, unless otherwise indicated. All details are correct at time of publication but subject to change.


Special eventsAustralia Day family fireworks & BYO picnic 7–10 pm Monday 26 January, museum forecourt and Vampire decks

Celebrate Australia’s national day and watch the magnificent Darling Harbour fireworks at our family-friendly location, with entertainment by our roving jazz band. Fireworks at 9 pm in Cockle Bay can be viewed from all areas of the museum forecourt. BYO picnic dinner and we’ll provide chairs, children’s playground, face-painting – and the view! Rain, hail or moonshine. Snacks, coffee and refreshments on sale.Members: adults $15, child (16 and under) $10, family of 4 $40. Guests: adults $20, child $15, family of 4 $55

Silent movie: Dall’Italia all’Australia5–6.30 pm Sunday 11 January at the museum

In 1924, Italian director Angelo Drovetti embarked on an epic 8,000-nautical-mile voyage with his movie camera. The result, Dall’Italia all’Australia (From Italy to Australia), has been called the most comprehensive film of a migrant voyage ever made. This silent classic will be introduced by author Anthony De Bolfo and accompanied live by acclaimed Italian

musicians Kavisha Mazzella and David De Santi. The programis presented in association with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura and Co.As.It. Members $20, guests $25. Includes Coral Sea wine, cheese, and James Squire beer

Movies by moonlight on HMAS Vampire 6.15–8 pm Wednesday 4 & Thursday 5 March

The helideck of museum destroyer HMAS Vampire will be turned into an alfresco movie theatre as we screen these films against the X-gun turret:Wednesday 4 – We Dive at Dawn (1943)All leave is cancelled on British submarine Sea Tiger as the crew are ordered to find and destroy a Nazi battleship, the Brandenburg. Starring Sir John Mills and Eric Portman, this is a classic of its genre. Includes a pre-screening tour of submarine HMAS Onslow.Thursday 5 – They’re a Weird Mob (1966)Journalist Nino Culotta (Walter Chiari) arrives in Australia, becomes a builder’s labourer, learns to talk and drink like an Aussie, and falls in love with an Australian girl (Clare Dunne). Descibed as one of the funniest films ever made in Australia, it features memorable scenes of 1960s Sydney and its working docks.Strictly limited places per screening. Members $20, guests $25 per film. Includes refreshments, Jaffas and popcorn

Wetworld family breakfast8.30–10 am Wednesday 7 January in Wetworld

Get your kids to grab their swimmers and come along to our exclusive before-hours Members playtime in Wetworld (in the big marquee on our north wharf). Here’s their chance to explore all the great water-based activities in Wetworld without the crowds. There’s the Super Soaker Action Zone, the ‘gutter regatta’, a chance to make amazing bubbles, our radio-controlled boats (sponsored by Waterways), and much more. Be prepared to get a bit wet! And we’ll kick off with a welcoming champagne for parents or carers!Members (adults and children) $8, guests $12. Includes light breakfast and refreshments

Tasmania’s 2009 Australian Wooden Boat Festival5–9 February 2009 – another exclusive heritage tour

Travel with the Australian National Maritime Museum on this fully escorted tour to join in celebrations at Tasmania’s 2009 Australian Wooden Boat Festival – one that’s established a reputation as one of the world’s best maritime festivals. Held on Hobart’s vibrant waterfront, the four-day festival brings together the biggest collection of wooden boats in the southern hemisphere. Then wind a trail around Hobart and its surrounds including museums, convict sites, historic houses and maritime landmarks. Highlights of the tour: • Explore the port town of Hobart• Visit the Port Arthur Historic Site • Peppermint Bay Cruise along the D’Entrecasteaux Channel • Visit the Tasmanian Museum & Gallery and Tasmanian

Maritime Museum • Tour of the Tasmanian Botanic Gardens and trip to

Mt Wellington • Passes and special tours to the Australian Wooden Boat

Festival and much more ...Twin-share $1730, single supplement $390. All breakfasts, transport, accommodation and entry to attractions included. For more information and a detailed itinerary contact the Members office on 9298 3644 or [email protected] or visit www.anmm.gov.au/membersevents

EMAIL BULLETINS Have you subscribed to our email bulletins yet? Email your address to [email protected] to ensure that you’ll always be advised of activities organised at short notice in response to special opportunities.


Program times and venues are correct at time of going to press. To check programs before your museum visit call 02 9298 3777.

What’s on at the museum

Summer school holidays 27 December 2008–25 January 2009

10 am–4 pm daily

Wetworld is full of entertaining activities that encourage children to explore and enjoy the properties of water. There are experiments to perform in the Wet Lab, exciting river races, Aqua Play and the Super Soaker Action Zone. There’s even a boat you can climb in and explore! For children 3–9 years. $9 per child or FREE with any purchased ticket. Adults/Members FREE. Hourly sessions 10 am-4 pm daily. Wetworld is proudly sponsored by

Pacific play!11 am–3 pm daily 5–25 January

In conjunction with the exhibition Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors, take part in a series of workshops and learn skills from the Pacific islands. Hands-on activities include body tattooing through to log drumming, plus cultural performances and demonstrations. For full program details visit www.anmm.gov.au/vakamoana For children 5–12 years. $9 per child or FREE with any purchased ticket. Adults/Members FREE

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Family fun Sundays11 am–3 pm every Sunday during term

See a traditional stick map from the Pacific islands and discover the navigational skills that have been in use for over 3,000 years. Then make your own paper vaka (canoe) to take home. In conjunction with the exhibition Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors.For children 5–12 years. $7 per child or FREE with any purchased ticket. Adults/Members FREE

Just imagine! A musical pirate adventure10.30–11.30 am Tuesday 2 DecemberFor children 2–5 years + carers

Join pirate Captain Bandanna and Splash the Mermaid for this interactive show with non-stop audience participation. Travel with them to different islands where you will open treasure chests as you sing and dance along to their award-winning songs.$7 per child. Adults/Members FREE. Groups welcome. Bookings essential – 02 9298 3655

Kids Deck Hourly sessions 10 am–4 pm daily

In conjunction with the exhibition Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors, learn how the Pacific Ocean was first explored and settled, see a traditional stick map from the Pacific islands and discover the navigational skills that have been in use for over 3,000 years. Then make your own paper vaka (canoe) to take home.For children 5–12 years. $9 per child or FREE with any purchased ticket. Adults/Members FREE


Summer 2008–09 program

Special eventsInternational Day of People with DisabilityMonday 1–Sunday 14 December

Flags ahoy! To celebrate the International Day of People with Disability, the museum will be flying the colours of artworks painted on flags by members of community and disability groups from around Sydney.

11 am Sunday 7 December – A curator-led touch tour of our new exhibition Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors for people with vision impairment. Complimentary morning tea provided.

11 am–2 pm Sunday 14 December – Auslan interpreters will be on site for tours of the museum, destroyer Vampire, submarine Onslow and replica of James Cook’s HMB Endeavour.

Bookings essential for accessible programs. For information and bookings call 02 9298 3777 or email [email protected]

Memories of Japanese war brides10 am–12 noon Thursday 5 February, museum theatre

In conjunction with our new exhibit, hear a talk by Dr Keiko Tamura, author of Michi’s Memories, the Story of a Japanese War Bride. Following morning tea, there will be an opportunity to talk to war brides Teruko Blair and Sadako Morris, and to view the exhibition of their poignant personal memorabilia. (See story page 10)Bookings essential 9298 3655

Happy Birthday Mr Darwin10 am–12.30 pm Thursday 26 March

Two centuries after the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years since publication of his On the Origin of Species, we invite you to accompany him on the voyage of a lifetime. Dr Nigel Erskine, curator of the exhibition Charles Darwin – Voyages and ideas that shook the world, will discuss the voyage of the Beagle and its significance for Darwin’s later work. Richard Neville from the Mitchell Library will talk about Beagle artist Conrad Martens, and Dr Brett Summerell of the Royal Botanic Gardens will assess the contribution of botanist and surgeon Joseph Hooker, who later classified Darwin’s collection of Galapagos plants and was to become his greatest friend. Following morning tea, enjoy a viewing of the exhibition.Adults $39. Bookings essential from WEA 02 9264 2781

FREE filmsEvery Sunday during term

A FREE film to complement the temporary exhibition program. Visit www.anmm.gov.au for our full film program 7, 14, 21 December: Welcome to Cockatoo

Mini Mariners10–10.45 am every Tuesday during term (excluding 2 and 23 December) For children 2–5 years + carersDecember – Pirates ahoy! Follow the treasure map around the museum to find out where the secret loot is hidden. Then you can make your own treasure chest to take home. Come dressed the part to double the fun. Please note this program will not be offered on Tuesday 2 or 23 DecemberFebruary – Sail around the world! We are launching this new Mini Mariners program so grab your passport and let’s set off on an adventure to foreign lands.$7 per child. Adults/Members FREE. Booked playgroups are welcome – call 02 9298 3655. Please note this program is not offered during the school holidays and for safety reasons is held inside the museum. For more information please visit our website at www.anmm.gov.au

FREE ACTIVITIESDiscovery trail

Collect a self-guided Discovery Trail activity sheet from the museum’s information desk to investigate the exhibition Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors.

Family film2 pm daily

A FREE film to complement the temporary exhibition program. Visit www.anmm.gov.au for our full film programHorrible Histories – Highly Hawai’ian. Stitch and Mo travel to ancient Hawai’i.

SPECIAL GROUP RATES For groups of 10 children or more. $9 per child for a fully organised program of activities that includes:•allmuseumexhibitions•allchildren’sactivities•entrytothedestroyerVampire and the submarine Onslow •FREEentryfor2adultsper10children•FREEbusparkingNB $4 extra per child for the 1874 tall ship James Craig. Bookings essential to ensure your space! Phone 02 9298 3777 Fax 02 9298 3660 Email: [email protected]


Summer 2008–09 exhibitions

In our galleries

Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors6 December 2008–15 February 2009 Gallery One

The discovery and settlement of the Pacific islands is the last and greatest story of human expansion across this planet. The daring explorers who crossed this vast ocean were the world’s first deep-sea navigators. Rare carvings and canoes are among 130

artefacts displayed, along with computer modelling and recent scientific research in genetics and linguistics.

Exhibition by Auckland Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira, Auckland New Zealand

Trash or Treasure? Souvenirs of travelUntil 17 May 2009 South Gallery

Discoveradiversearrayof souvenirs collected by pilgrims,sailors,soldiers,cruise passengers and tourists.It’saritualtravellershave performed for centuries.

Quaint,cheap,stylishorprecious,asouvenirembodiesjustalittle of our irreplaceable travel experiences.

Kathleen darling … Jack Earl’s voyage around the world 1947–48Until 22 February 2009 Tasman Light

In1947SydneyartistJackEarl pursued his romantic dreamtosailtheworld,setting out with four mates in his ketch Kathleen Gillett – named after his beloved wife who had to stay behind. After 18 months in exotic places they returned to Sydney60yearsagoon 7December,andKathleen Gillett is now part of our historic fleet.

Great White Fleet – US sea power on parade 1908 From 14 August 2008 USA Gallery

It’s100yearssincetheUSA’s‘GreatWhiteFleet’visitedAustralia,despatchedbyPresidentRoosevelttodemonstrate American naval capability to the world. Australiansgreetedits16white-painted battleships and their escorts with huge enthusiasm.

Tall ship adventure: a young man’s journey New York to Fremantle 1905Until 20 July 2009

Thisisthestoryof19-year-oldFredTaylor’sadventureundersail aboard the barque Queen Margaret from New York to Fremantle,toldthroughhisjournalandphotographs. ThecollectioncomesfromtheSmithsonianInstitution, National Museum of American History.

On the water

Replica of James Cook’s EndeavourOpen daily 10 am–4 pm except Australia Day

Visit the magnificent Australian-builtreplicaofCaptainJamesCook’sship,in which he circumnavigated theworld(1768–71),chartedAustralia’seastcoastandclaimeditforBritain.Members FREE. Adults $15, child/concession $8, family $30. Other ticket combinations available. Enquiries 02 9298 3777

Barque James Craig (1874)Daily Wharf 7 (except when sailing)

SydneyHeritageFleet’smagnificentiron-hulledshipistheresultofanaward-winning30-yearrestoration.Tourtheshipwith various museum ticket packages (discount for Members). TheshipsailsalternateSaturdaysandSundays. Check www.shf.org.au for details.

ANMM travelling exhibitions

Great White Fleet – US sea power on parade 190815 November 2008–22 February 2009 Western Australian Museum, Albany

Antarctic Views by Hurley and Ponting12 December 2008–26 January 2009 Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery

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For schools

Navigators & Endeavour Years 3–10 HSIE

The exhibition Navigators – Defining Australia investigates early contact with the Australian continent. On this guided tour students encounternon-Europeantraders,examinetraditional and scientific navigationtechniques,

and consider the influence of early European explorers. This is an ideal tour to combine with a visit to our replica of HMB Endeavour – one of the most historically accurate in the world.ForthosestudyingCookandearlyEuropeanexploration,a visit to HMB Endeavour brings the era alive. Navigators tour only – $6 per student Endeavour only – $8 per student Endeavour & Navigators package – $12 per student

Transport Years K–2 HSIE, Science

Studentstourthemuseumidentifyingvariousformsoftransportconnectedwithwater–sailingships,row-boats,ferries,tugs,aNavydestroyer,watertrafficandevenahelicopter!Anoptionalcruisebyheritageferrytakesinindustrial,commercialandpassenger transport systems on the harbour. $6 per student (cruise extra)

Navigators Years 3–6 HSIE

This program investigates early contact withtheAustraliancontinent.Studentsencounternon-Europeantraders,traditional navigation techniques and early European explorers. They view constellations in the night sky used for navigation,andlookattheinfluenceofEuropeanexplorersintheAgeofSail.Itemsondisplayincludeartefactsfrom

ships such as Endeavour and Batavia,andmaterialfromDutch,English,French,TorresStraitIslanderandMakassanexplorers.$6 per student

Trash or Treasure? – Souvenirs of travel Years 1–10 HSIE

As this fascinating exhibition explains, souvenirs serve as tangible reminders of destinations we have visited. They can evoke memories and encourage travellers to pass on personal stories to friends and family. Discover how Australian places, people and culture have been represented in kitsch, unique and beautiful souvenirs from the 1890s until today.Guided tours – $6 per student

Pyrmont walkYears 9–12 History, Geography

Explorethisinner-citysuburbfromtheperspectiveofchangingdemographics,construction,planninganddevelopment.Ledbyateacher-guide,studentswalkthestreetsofPyrmontandexamine changes. The program is suitable as a site study for HistoryandGeography.Aharbourcruiseexaminingchangeanddevelopment along the waterfront is also available.From $12 per student. Cruise extra

Pirate school Years K–4 English, Maths, HSIE, Creative Arts

Jointhepirateschoolforlessonsintreasurecounting,speakinglikeapirate,mapreadingandmore!Thenjoinatreasurehuntthrough the museum and board the tall ship James Craig. $10 per student (James Craig $2 extra per student)

Splash! Years K–2 HSIE, PD, PE & Health, Creative Arts

Splash!isahands-onprogramwhereyoungervisitorsexploreleisurein,on,underandnearthewaterthroughmovement,dress-ups,gamesandstories.Theprogramincludesaguidedtour of the Watermarks exhibition and students make their own themed craftwork to take home. $8 per student

Science and the seaYears 6–8 Science

This program demonstrates key scientific principles that relate to a maritime environment. Working through a series of activity stations,studentscoverareassuchasbuoyancy,corrosion,navigation and communication. A tour of the museum allows students to see these scientific principles in action.$12 per student, includes submarine tour

Over 30 programs are available for students K–12, across a range of syllabus areas. Options include extension workshops, hands-on sessions, theatre, tours with museum teacher-guides and harbour cruises. Programs link to both core museum and special temporary exhibitions. Bookings essential: telephone 02 9298 3655 fax 02 9298 3660 email [email protected] or visit our website: www.anmm.gov.au


ANMM curator of exploration Dr Nigel Erskine speaks to historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey ac about his latest book Sea of Dangers – Captain Cook and his rivals. It chronicles the near-encounters of James Cook on Endeavour and French merchant Jean de Surville on St Jean-Baptiste, both seeking the elusive southern continent.

Sea of Dangers Cook and de Surville

ABOVE: french chart dated 1753, by Jacques Nicolas Bellin, shows the approximate extent of de Surville’s understanding of the Pacific Ocean. It shows the equator, both tropics and ‘the meridian of Paris’, with ample empty space in which might lurk an undiscovered southern land. Colour copper engraving, ANMM collection


THE LITTLE-KNOWN French navigator Jean-François-Marie de Surville was exploring the South Pacific in St Jean-Baptiste while Captain James Cook was making his famous first circumnavigation in Endeavour. Although neither had any inkling of the other’s presence, their two ships passed almost within sight of each other as they rounded the northern tip of New Zealand. And five months before his celebrated rival reached Botany Bay, de Surville was only a few miles off Sydney Harbour.

have been entirely overlooked. Can you tell us a bit about de Surville and his expedition?

BLAINEY: Yes, he’s known a little in New Zealand, but I’ve not met any Australian who’s heard his name. And he doesn’t seem to be very well-known in France either. Jean de Surville set out from Pondicherry in French India in a ship twice the size of Cook’s, loaded with

textiles and tradable commodities. He was in search of some rumoured settlements and lands with which he might trade, including a reputed colony of Jewish traders and a land sighted 80 years previously by an English buccaneer, Edward Davis, believed to exist somewhere in the South Pacific. He was also interested – as so many others were at the time – in finding the missing continent, the Great South Land. He crossed the Bay of Bengal to Malay waters, visited the Philippines, tried to trade in the Solomons, and then sailed

south down the Coral Sea between the Great Barrier Reef and New Caledonia. Eventually he sailed closer to Australia, and the evidence is fairly strong that early in December 1769 he was very close to Sydney Heads!

ERSKINE: An intriguing prospect. Do you have any idea how close? Do the journals give us any reasonable information about his position?

BLAINEY: Unfortunately, one of the differences between de Surville and Cook was that Cook was remarkably skilled in calculating his position at sea, and the Frenchman wasn’t. Occasionally he was several hundred sea miles out in his longitude, so it’s impossible to tell from his calculations how far he was from the coast. Latitude was easier to measure, and over 72 crucial hours de Surville sailed from the latitude of Terrigal [on the NSW Central Coast] to Botany Bay. On the morning of 4 December 1769, before sunrise, there was a strong smell of land

The search for the elusive southern continent assumes the proportions of a Holy Grail

In his latest book, Sea of Dangers: Captain Cook and his rivals, Geoffrey Blainey compares the two voyages and the two captains. Both were under secret instructions to search for a mysterious missing continent believed to lie somewhere in the vast Pacific Ocean between Australia and South America. The hope was that it would be far more fertile than the desolate west coast of New Holland described by Dutch explorers. De Surville was prepared not just for discovery but for commerce with whomever he might encounter, sailing from the French enclave Pondicherry in India in a large merchant ship loaded with trade goods. His long voyage, however, was wracked by scurvy. Had Cook’s crew suffered as severely, Endeavour might never have reached Australia.

Professor Blainey argues that de Surville made a number of significant discoveries – particularly of an important new sea-route – but has not received his due recognition.

NIGEL ERSKINE: Professor Blainey, it seems that we’re seeing new books on James Cook virtually every year. Your latest compares his expedition, in search of a mysterious southern continent, with that of the French mariner, Jean de Surville. Can you tell us what it was that prompted you to revisit the subject of Cook?

GEOFFREY BLAINEY: One of the reasons I decided to read heavily in this area, and to write the book, was an experience I had in 2006 when I toured your museum’s replica of the Endeavour, during its visit to Melbourne. When I went onto the ship, into those cramped spaces where Cook and his men had worked, and saw the way they had lived, I came away with a sense of high excitement. That got me reading Cook’s journals again … after which, I came upon de Surville’s.

ERSKINE: It would be fair to say that very few know of Jean de Surville, or his ship St Jean-Baptiste. Some of the sources you’ve used – the translation by New Zealand historian John Dunmore and other of the Hakluyt Society journals – have been out there for many years, yet certainly in this country they seem to

Sea of Dangers – Captain Cook and his rivals, Viking–Penguin Group, Victoria 2008. Hardcover, illustrations, index; RRP $49.95


coming with the offshore wind, and this was noted by all officers who kept journals. They smelt land for about three hours – they described it as the smell of meadow hay, and rather spicy. In the days of sail, passengers approaching the southern Australian coast in clippers often smelt land before it was visible, especially if they’d been out to sea for months. So I’d put high primacy on this as one indicator that de Surville may have been tantalisingly close – perhaps 20, or 30, or 40 miles – off the Australian coast.

ERSKINE: You point out that by this stage, about a third of the French crew were suffering from scurvy. So it’s odd that de Surville, a mature seafarer by this time, didn’t at least try to find the land, perhaps a place where his crew could recover their strength. Instead he decided to steer towards New Zealand.

BLAINEY: Yes, that is puzzling. With the number of deaths from scurvy on St Jean-Baptiste that month, you’d wonder why he didn’t send a boat to inspect the coast, wouldn’t you? But the French Captain carried in his head the highly unfavourable opinion of Australia that was widely held at the time, based on the Dutch experience on the west coast. They

had to sink wells to find fresh water, and often they didn’t find much to eat. Dampier had the same miserable impression of the west Australian coast, and this view found its way into French writings that were carried aboard St Jean-Baptiste. De Surville had also read about New Zealand from Tasman’s account – they were well-read, these early explorers! – and he believed it was fertile. De Surville correctly judged that New Zealand was fairly close, and he decided he would be better off going straight there, rather than spending time finding his way ashore in Australia.

ERSKINE: The two voyages are very different, aren’t they? Cook is on a scientific voyage – to view the Transit of Venus, and then to search for Terra Australis Incognita – whereas the Frenchman has a much more mercantile interest. Is the fact that the French East

India Company’s operations were in a state of decline a driving force for some of de Surville’s actions?

BLAINEY: Yes. The voyage was financed by shareholders rather than by the French Government (de Surville himself was a shareholder), so they wanted to complete the voyage as quickly as possible. They would also have wanted to be the first to find the colony of Jews, or Davis Land, and occupy it, because that would be a new colonial settlement for France at a time when it had just lost Canada and several other possessions. So I think there was a legitimate reason for speed. Reading closely about de Surville made me understand that being a naval man in a

government ship was a major advantage for Cook – he could afford to take his time. If Cook had been on a private trading voyage that had taken him to Tahiti, and then he’d been allowed to go further, he would have turned back fairly quickly if he didn’t find anything of commercial potential.

ERSKINE: You describe de Surville’s stay in Doubtless Bay at New Zealand’s North Cape, and his mostly harmonious relations with the Maori. Yet some of de Surville’s actions – for example, leaving most of his anchors on the sea bed after a gale hits him in Doubtless Bay – seem reckless. I was thinking about the Dutch East India Company captains who were so regimented in what they could and couldn’t do, and the way the Dutch company normally went about planning their voyages.

BLAINEY: Yes, that’s right. If you’re on a trading mission, time is of the utmost importance. If you return quickly to your home port, the ship is soon ready for another voyage. But even when he’s in Doubtless Bay, there’s almost an unseemly haste to get away. If he’d stayed another week, the health of his crew would have been much better. We’re hampered a bit by the fact that de Surville’s written instructions haven’t survived, but it’s not impossible to work out what was in his mind: he was a trader in a hurry.

ERSKINE: Going back to the search for the elusive southern continent, it assumes the proportions of a Holy Grail at this time, doesn’t it?

BLAINEY: Yes, I’ve written about this in a tangential way in Tyranny of Distance, but it was only after I began to read the journals of Cook and Banks more closely, and the journals of the officers on St Jean-Baptiste, that I realised what a powerful argument there was in their minds for the existence of a missing continent. If we look at a map of the world, there’s far more land in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere. The belief was widely held, carried over from Roman times, that there must be some kind of balance in the universe, and that in those great unexplored oceans surely there must be a continent, perhaps the size of Asia, that would complete the balance. North and South America had been found only a couple of centuries earlier, and they had proved enormously rich in minerals, new plants and animals. So there was a strong belief that if you could find this missing continent the world would gain another

Although Cook was much less experienced when his voyage began than de Surville, he was on the whole more balanced

LEfT: Professor Geoffrey Blainey AC, the prominent Australian historian whose many books include the groundbreaking Tyranny of Distance – How distance shaped Australia’s history (1966).

RIGHT: Dr Nigel Erskine, curator of exploration at the museum, sailed from New Zealand to Sydney as voyage crew on the Endeavour replica in 2005.


Portrait of Admiral Isaac Manley in later life, watercolour by Richard Dighton; collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Reproduced courtesy of the museum

collection of new species, and maybe rich gold and silver mines. The continent was never found, but it was a very powerful argument at the time.

ERSKINE: Yes, I found that a particularly interesting aspect of your book: the fact that to modern readers this whole argument seems a bit odd, but to people at that time, when so much of the world was still being discovered, as you say, it was perfectly legitimate.

BLAINEY: Another thing I should mention is that, until I read more widely, I hadn’t realised that there was also a strong belief that part of the new continent would be tropical or sub-tropical. In the 18th century it was widely accepted that a

terms of the supplies of water and food required to maintain that number of people.

BLAINEY: And they ran out, or almost ran out of water. That suggests that the planning of the voyage wasn’t very effective, unless they believed they’d be able to buy food en route. Although the French achieved a limited reprovisioning in New Zealand, overall de Surville was much less successful than Cook in acquiring fresh food and drinking water along the way.

ERSKINE: If de Surville had landed on the east coast of Australia, do you think it would have changed our history significantly?

suggests that he was the first European to make a successful west-to-east crossing of the South Pacific. Hitherto, the main voyages had been east to west. He did so before Cook independently came to the same conclusion, and made use of the westerlies in his second voyage. Now, finding a good sea-route is often as important as finding a new land. And given the importance of that particular sea-route in the early British history of Australia and New Zealand, finding the course taken by the strong westerlies in the South Pacific was, to my mind, a very important commercial discovery.

ERSKINE: Yes, like finding the Brewer route from the Cape of Good Hope across the southern Indian Ocean to New Holland and the East Indies. I can’t resist asking you a final question, not about the book at all. During your career you’ve been chairman of the Australia Council, and have reported on museums and funding for the arts. What direction do you think museums should be taking to remain viable in the 21st century?

BLAINEY: My view is that museums must be good theatre. They have to appeal to a very wide cross-section of society. And if they run a strong political line, they have to balance that by running a strong opposing political line in another section [laughs]. A museum has to make a wide section of society feel at home, to make people feel that they want to tell their friends so that their friends want to go there. I think every museum has to put on such a show that a high proportion of the people who go there feel excited, or satisfied, or go away in some sense enriched. Your replica of the Endeavour, that’s really a kind of a museum, isn’t it? A floating museum.

ERSKINE: Yes, and it connects with communities around the Australian coast. It’s just come back from a voyage to Brisbane, with stops at Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour and Newcastle. We get so many calls from people for whom it has sparked that same sense of excitement, and interest in their history, that you experienced.

BLAINEY: I really think the replica is a remarkable experience, especially the places where you have to crouch to make your way through, and to stand in the great cabin at the stern, where Cook and Banks and Solander worked together … to me, that’s immensely exciting. I think that if previously, someone had asked me whether I would support the building of a replica, I don’t think I would have said ‘Yes’. But of course, now I would.

The evidence suggests that de Surville was the first to make a successful west-to-east crossing of the South Pacifictropical colony would be much more valuable and productive than one in the temperate zone. We no longer hold that idea, but for them the search was much more exciting in low latitudes. My conclusion was that since Cook and de Surville didn’t find the missing continent in warmer latitudes, all later voyages further south were by definition looking for a lesser prize.

ERSKINE: You mentioned that there were quite significant differences in the vessels – the French vessel was much larger – but what do you see as the essential differences between the two expeditions in terms of leadership and planning?

BLAINEY: There can be no doubt that the British Admiralty planned and equipped Cook’s expedition much more effectively than de Surville equipped himself. The preparations made by the Royal Navy were really very clever and far-reaching. That includes the handling of scurvy – even though Cook didn’t realise why he was successful in coping with it. I think, too, that although Cook was much less experienced when his voyage began than de Surville, he was on the whole more balanced – more cautious, but more enterprising. Maybe it’s because he had more time on his hands, but it’s probably due to something in Cook himself – a quick learner, really, a very clever man, I think.

ERSKINE: There also seems to be an optimum crew size for long-distance voyaging, and de Surville apparently had around 200 men. That seems extreme in

BLAINEY: Well, let’s say that he landed in Sydney Harbour, or Botany Bay, and took his men ashore … recuperated their health a bit, and while ashore, explored the vicinity (in the same way that they went on to explore the hinterland of Doubtless Bay in New Zealand). He would probably have made some claim to that strip of coast, which eventually would have become known, and the British would therefore have been wary of placing a settlement there. That would probably have stopped the British using those two harbours for the next 20 years or so after Cook arrived. If the French had placed a small settlement in Sydney Harbour – let’s say in 1780 – then after the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Britain might have taken it by treaty if they thought it worthwhile. I’m only speculating of course. De Surville was primarily interested in trade, and if Sydney Harbour or Botany Bay offered no trading opportunities then he might not have regarded them as very valuable.

ERSKINE: Given the misfortunes of his voyage, some would consider de Surville to be a failure. He found no lost continents or settlements to trade with in the Pacific, and drowned in the surf off Callao in Peru when he had reached South America desperate to reprovision in the Spanish colony. Yet you say that de Surville has not received his share of praise.

BLAINEY: The few biographers of Cook who mention de Surville – and they mention him only briefly – don’t think much of him. What did he get out of it after all? To me, though, the evidence


www.combinedartsocieties.com

VÉÅu|Çxw TÜà fÉv|xà|xá Éy fçwÇxç 19th Annual ‘ART OF SYDNEY’ EXHIBITION

23rd to 27th January, 2009 The Terrace Room - Australian National Maritime Museum

Official Opening and Presentation of Awards – Friday 23rd January from 7pm Tickets $25 each – Contact The Secretary – (02) 9642 1553 or 9745 1717

Opening hours – Admission is FREE Saturday and Sunday Monday 26th January Tuesday 27th January 24th & 25th January (Australia Day) 9.30am to 6pm 9.30am to 8pm 9.30am to 10.30pm Close

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THE AUSTRALIAN National Maritime Museum is currently working on a major initiative to develop an international touring program exploring the experiences of child and youth migrants from the United Kingdom. A first for us, this is a special project because we are working in partnership with the leading UK cultural organisation, National Museums Liverpool.

From the late-19th century until 1967 children were sent under various British government migration schemes to distant

dominions, principally Canada and Australia. Departing from ports such as Liverpool, Tilbury, Southampton and Glasgow, these children travelled unaccompanied by their parents. Some were orphans and some had families who were unable to look after them. Taken from children’s homes and reformatories – and even from the streets – they were sent abroad with the expectation that they would have the opportunity for better lives.

More than 100,000 children were sent to Canada between the 1870s and the early 20th century, and some 10,000 were sent to Australia between 1912 and 1967. In addition, many thousands of youths over

Calling former child migrantsMuseum staff are working with National Museums Liverpool (UK) to chart the story of child migration from the United Kingdom in the period 1870–1967. Curator of post-Federation immigration Sally Hone and senior curator (communities) Daina Fletcher introduce the project – and invite former child migrants to participate.

the age of 15 were sent to these colonies under formal youth migration schemes; all were destined for farm labour, and in Australia they were also intended to boost the white population.

The international touring exhibition is a joint initiative between ANMM director Mary-Louise Williams and Tony Tibbles, director of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, a bustling dockside venue that is part of National Museums Liverpool. Importantly, the driving force behind the collaboration is to enable us to tell the

potent story of child migration in its historical and global context, and to reach audiences in both countries.

While this contentious subject has been explored to some extent in films and books over the past 15 years, no museum has to date covered the breadth of the subject, the many different migration schemes, and the emotional upheaval experienced by child migrants in a global framework. The history of child migration is a complex and multi-layered story. Many are aware of the practice in post-World War II Australia, but may be surprised to learn that it had its roots in late-Victorian Britain, and even earlier.

In 1906 frank Bray was sent to Canada. He wrote this letter to his old school master at the Sheltering Homes for Orphan and Destitute Children, Liverpool. Southampton City Archives

From the late-19th century until 1967 children were sent under various migration schemes to distant British dominions

Page 35SIGNALS 85 December 2008–February 2009


Organisations such as Dr Barnardo’s, Quarriers, the Fairbridge Society, the Christian Brothers, the Dreadnought Trust and the Big Brother Movement worked with governments in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to implement their child and youth migration schemes.

Our project’s narrative will weave together ideas related to Christian philanthropy, migration, empire building and child welfare. They will be refracted through the experiences of the children and youths involved, and linked by the themes of departure, the voyage, and the shock of a new life in an unfamiliar land.

Just as importantly, the program will examine the repercussions these schemes had on children’s lives, by examining the responses of the children, the governments and the organisations involved. Many former child migrants – who felt a strong loss of identity – are still tracing their own stories, tracking down their families, and finding connections to home. They have fought for recognition of their plight, and are determined to ensure that this history is not forgotten.

Our project to explore the stories of child migration will consist of a touring exhibition of artefacts, film and sound recordings, as well as a strong web-based program, including an educational component for students. The program will include a facility to connect former child migrants with each other. The exhibition will open at the Australian National Maritime Museum in June 2010 and open in Liverpool a year later, in the summer of 2011.

The curators are currently researching the schemes and identifying artefacts and personal stories for the program. The development team includes staff from our

Many former child migrants are still tracing their own stories, tracking down families, and finding connections to home

museum and National Museums Liverpool. Rachel Mulhearn, curator of maritime history and deputy head of Merseyside Maritime Museum, visited recently to continue work on the exhibition concept development with ANMM curators Daina Fletcher and Sally Hone, and the broader ANMM team.

A significant aim of the program is to connect audiences – and in particular, school children – from the countries involved in the schemes: the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. So Rachel and the NML staff are working with us to develop targeted school programs, exploring common educational outcomes. The idea of schoolchildren in Liverpool talking with children in Molong, NSW, or Pinjarra, WA, for instance – where the Fairbridge Farm Schools were located – is tantalising, and should provide exciting opportunities to identify local histories in a global framework.

The curators would be delighted to hear from anyone who was a former child migrant, or who worked as an escort on board the ships, in the children’s homes or on the farm schools, and who has material related to their story. Please contact curator Sally Hone telephone 02 9298 3777 or email [email protected]


CLOCKWISE fROM TOP LEfT:

Children on the Ormonde bound for fairbridge farm School, November 1950. State Library of Western Australia 005080D

Waving farewell – fairbridge Society London Annual Report for 1937

Scythe, mattock and sickle used by child migrants at fairbridge farm School about 1950. ANMM collection, gift of Peter Bennett. Photographer A frolows/ANMM

Picking cabbages, fairbridge farm School, Pinjarra, Western Australia, 1954. State Library of Western Australia 011874D

Boys from the British Child Migration Scheme at the forge, fairbridge farm School, Pinjara, Western Australia, 1942. State Library of Western Australia 005311D

Building construction at the Christian Brothers’ Bindoon Boys Town, Western Australia. State Library of Western Australia 004026D

LEfT: Rachel Mulhearn (centre), curator of maritime history and deputy head of Merseyside Maritime Museum, with ANMM’s Sally Hone (left) and Daina fletcher, are collaborating on the child migrant project. Photographer A frolows/ANMM



Still the fastestThirty years after setting his still-unbroken world water speed record, Ken Warby visited the museum where his self-built, jet-powered Spirit of Australia is a centrepiece. To mark the anniversary, curator David Payne explores the theme of speed – both in and on the water.

AUSTRALIA HAS always been proud of its world-record holders. The nation went into the recent 2008 Olympics in China with

the fastest men and women in the water in the blue-ribbon, 100-metres freestyle event. Eamon Sullivan and Libby Tricket both held world records they had set earlier in the year. Sullivan lowered his existing time in the first leg of the relay final. Two days later a jubilant Frenchman, Alain Bernard, shaved 4/100ths of a second off that, but his record lasted barely six minutes; Sullivan got it back in the following heat. He was another 15/100ths of a second faster.

Australia left the Olympics still claiming the fastest man and woman in the water and with its pride intact.

Not long after that we came up to the anniversary of another water speed record that Australia has held for no less than 30 years now – but it’s one that few remember. In fact, if it wasn’t for this museum’s efforts in publicising it, the anniversary would have passed unnoticed. The record we’re talking about is the one that’s been owned for three decades by Australia’s Ken Warby mbe: ‘the fastest man on the water’. Piloting his wooden, jet-powered boat, Spirit of Australia,

Ken set the official world water speed record of 511.11 km/h (317.6 mph) on 8 October 1978, and since then it has never been broken.

The Australian National Maritime Museum is the proud owner of Ken Warby’s brilliant hydroplane, and it’s been displayed as one of our icons ever since the museum’s doors opened to the public. In fact it was one of the museum’s first acquisitions, back in the 1980s when the record was just a decade old. This time we invited Ken Warby to join us for the anniversary – he flew out from the United States where he has lived now for some years – and we made sure that the media heard about it too.

The changes that have taken place in the past 30 years can be highlighted by the contrast in the way these different records were achieved. Swimmers today face fierce competition from rivals around the world and seek to find an advantage measured in tiny fractions of a second. They have a coach – or a team of them, with support staff for injuries and mental preparation. They are backed up by impressive training and competition facilities where starts, strokes, turns and finishes are scrutinised in detail. Diet and training regimes are perfected, and hours of rigorous training and competition are

after 30 years


undertaken. The latest hi-tech swimsuits worth thousands of dollars are developed in a bid to find that final edge. In the end the touch at the finish of the race may be enough to do the job. On rarer occasions the old record line – simulated by computer on the viewer’s screen – is just behind the swimmer as he finishes.

Compare that pathway to success with the way that Ken Warby set out on his journey to surpass the established record of 464 km/h, and then speed past another

milestone, 300 mph or 500 km/h. The fastest he had gone in a powerboat before building Spirit of Australia was around a third of this speed. Designing and building the craft himself at his home in Sydney, he then tested it and improved it in a series of gradual steps. His support team consisted of friends and volunteers.

His program was self-devised, with a day-by-day, learn-from-experience approach. No one ever checked his diet, and his Sydney neighbours watching the progress of the boat taking shape in his backyard

thought he was nuts. His budget – or lack of it – dictated the rate of progress. It was only when he had established his credentials with his first world record, in 1977, that a major sponsor came on board with significant support for his project.

Every chapter of the story is full of fascinating anecdotes. The three airforce-surplus jet engines he used cost him a total of $265. When one was damaged, he installed the $65 one he had put aside for spares – and went straight out and set that

first world record, on Blowering Dam in southern New South Wales. His final record was set using a fourth engine, procured by swapping one of his dud engines for a working model that was used by trainees at the Wagga Wagga RAAF base. They joined the project as enthusiastic support crew down at the dam nearby, where Ken’s record attempts were held.

Earlier, when it became necessary, he had sought technical advice from professional engineers Professor Tom Fink and

It was a simple but effective structure, built of materials anyone could source, and priced to suit Warby’s limited resources

Ken Warby presents museum director Mary-Louise Williams with his wind-tunnel test model of Spirit of Australia, 30 years after setting an unbroken world water speed record of 511.11 km/h (317.6 mph). Photographer A frolows/ANMM


Dr Laurie Doctors from the University of New South Wales. Testing a model of Spirit of Australia in their wind-tunnel, they were astonished at how much Warby clearly knew by intuition. At one point, to gain the last few units of speed needed to break the record, an evening phone conversation and some calculations by hand from Professor Fink (back in Sydney) suggested a breakthrough. Overnight, using a blowtorch in a farmer’s shed, Warby cut 65 mm off the cast-steel rudder to reduce drag. It left a rough finish, but it gave him the means of gaining the vital increase in speed that finally won him the record the next day. There was nothing hi-tech about his wooden boat, and the line of the previous record – if they had possessed such fancy graphics in those days – would have been drawn far, far behind as Spirit of Australia powered past the course markers, on a dam that was open to the public for boating and fishing.

There’s a cliché doing the rounds these days that says: ‘Winning is not a matter of life or death, it’s more important than that’. This is easy to say for most sports, but in Warby’s case the record attempt had every chance of ending in disaster. It was a road that had already been marred, too often, by fatal accidents. Warby was cautious. He did not know the answers for many of the problems he expected to meet along the way, so he followed a path on which he could learn as he progressed. He started with a shape based on his knowledge of hull design, built the basic hull in the wooden

materials that he understood, tested it at partially complete stages, modified things as necessary, and then went on gradually to explore the problem areas and search for the solutions.

Spirit of Australia is a three-point hydroplane, well established as the type for high-speed racing and speed records. The hull took shape first around two main longitudinal solid timber girders, surrounded by transverse bulkheads that included a floor, side frames and deck beams. On the centre line at the bottom is a flat keel. Chine logs, stringers and a solid wood transom complete the framework of Oregon and spruce which is covered with marine-grade plywood, laminated with Dynel cloth. The sponsons are built onto the hull and their structure is similar. Just forward of the cockpit are the airspeed fitting and a cleat – even the world’s fastest boat needs to be towed or tied up!

The twin girders became engine beds supporting a framework of welded mild steel pipe in which the engine is slung. For steering, a mild steel rudder blade and quadrant was securely bolted to the transom, linked by heavy cables to a wheel in the cockpit. Behind the sponsons were stainless steel fins acting like skegs to give the rudder something to push against.

It was a simple but effective structure, built of materials anyone could source, and priced to suit Warby’s limited, self-financed resources. By contrast, two groups currently planning separate

assaults on the record in the next year or so are promoting designs built of the latest available lightweight composite construction materials, requiring sponsors to support a significant budget.

How fast was he? At 500 km/h he was doing one kilometre every seven seconds, and each 100 metres took him only 0.7 seconds. Sullivan’s outstanding swimming has now created a benchmark of 47.05 seconds for 100 metres. Trickett was home in 52.88 seconds, although both do a turn at 50 metres. Spirit of Australia sped in a straight line all the way with barely a deviation, all the time delicately balanced on the tips of its sponsons, its fins, rudder and planing shoe. Looking at the video footage that runs next to the record-breaking boat on display in the museum gallery, it’s utterly unnerving to see the boat, at top speed, casually rocking from side to side. ‘Sponson walking’ Warby calls it, and according to him it’s absolutely vital for success. The gentle oscillating motion releases air pressure that builds up under the hull and could flip the boat.

Strapped into the aircraft-style cockpit by his assistants each time he set off, Warby uses a classic phrase to describe his instinctive piloting of Spirit of Australia: ‘You don’t drive the boat, you wear it.’ This brings us back to the swimmers and what they wear: the eye-catching, drag-reducing swimsuits that take the competitors up to 20 minutes to get into, with the help of assistants. And there, as it happens, is another link between Australia’s fastest record holders both in and on the water. Sullivan and Trickett’s hi-tech Fastskin LZR Racers were made by Speedo, and Speedo was Ken Warby’s major sponsor that day 30 years ago when he piloted his backyard-built jet boat to a record that has never been broken.

Ken Warby and Spirit of Australia at Blowering Dam in October 1978. Photographs of the world-record campaign are by Michael Jensen, Australian Overseas Information Service, reproduced courtesy of the Australian National Archives.

Looking at the video footage, it’s utterly unnerving to see the boat, at top speed, casually rocking from side to side


READINGColleCting ‘objets de surf’Surf-O-Rama: Treasures of Australian Surfing by Murray Walding, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2008. ISBN 978 0 5 22854961, pp 237, colour illustrations, bibliography, index

THIS LAVISHLY illustrated book is a guide to collecting Australian surfing memorabilia and reflects a surge of interest in surfing culture and its emergence as a genre of collecting both in Australia and abroad. Author Murray Walding, himself an avid collector and surfing writer, has written an accessible guide to collecting ‘objets de surf’ that taps unashamedly into baby boomer nostalgia.

Walding places Australian surfing memorabilia within a framework of surfing history and popular culture, acknowledging cross-cultural influences between Australia, Hawai’i and California. Surf-O-Rama is not intended as a price guide; rather it is a popular overview of Australian surfing culture that will appeal to surfing enthusiasts and collectors. The book is divided by chapters into categories of collectibles explored in relation to their broader history and meaning within surfing ethos. The author includes lists of recommended

‘collectables’ at the end of each chapter.

The cut-off point for the book is the mid-1980s, the decade that saw surfboard manufacturing shift from hand shaping to mass production. At this time surfboard design became more homogeneous, while the surf movie industry went into decline with the advent of video and then digital technology. With increasing globalisation, former Australian surf brands went international and dominated the marketing of surf culture in Australia through retail outlets, sponsorship of surf contests and video and DVD releases.

Surf-O-Rama begins with a chapter ‘The First Ride’, tracing the development of the surfboard – the keystone of surfing culture – from its Hawai’ian origins to the mid 1980s. Here Walding acknowledges the key role played by Hawai’ian Olympian Duke Kahanamoku in showing Australians the recreational potential of surfboard riding by giving demonstrations in Sydney in 1914. He correctly dismisses the common assertion that Kahanamoku was the first person to ride a surfboard in Australia.

‘When surfers ruled the footpath’ focuses on the skateboard phenomenon of the early 1960s. Skateboards provided surfers with an alternative outlet for their board-riding skills when the sea was flat. ‘Midget’ Farrelly popularised the skateboard in Australia and produced his own designs commercially.

In ‘Hardcover surfing’ Walding explores the genre of surf-inspired fiction and non-fiction. Sport and Pastime in Australia by Gordon Inglis, published in 1912, refers to the ‘new’ sport of surfing two years before Duke Kahanamoku gave his surfing demonstrations in Sydney. Walding has also included surfing

fiction such as Frederick Kohber’s Gidget published in 1958, and other less well-known works. ‘Magazine memories’ shows the thriving publishing industry of periodicals spawned by the surfing culture, while including interesting examples that well precede the 1960s boom. ‘Between the grooves’ looks at the history of surf music from the 1950s and is richly illustrated with sheet music, record covers and souvenirs.

Colourful poster art on travel posters, pub paintings and surf movie posters feature in ‘High on a wall’. Walding ends the book with a brief look at eclectic surfing souvenirs as diverse as postcards, beach towels, stickers, pennants, cloth patches, board games and even bubble gum wrappers. Although often described as kitsch, these souvenirs reflect the broad reach of surfing popular culture.

For baby boomers Surf-O-Rama will stir up nostalgic memories of adolescence and summers past, but its appeal is far from limited to that demographic. It’s a serious attempt at a history of surfing through its material expression, and presents surfing culture at its colourful best.

Penny Cuthbert, curator, sport and leisure



A Baltic odyssey

THE ORIGINS and early history of the Estonians is fascinating and too complex to be easily summarised. Thousands of years ago a tribe of fair, blue-eyed people moved slowly northwest through uninhabited parts of Eastern Europe, to arrive – these Estonian ancestors – on the shores of the Baltic Sea in about 6,000–4,000 BC. They survived by hunting and fishing.

Towards the end of the 12th century, attempts to Christianise Estonians became more frequent and intense. In 1193 the Pope proclaimed a crusade to the Baltic countries and under this pretext the German order of the Knights of the Sword and the Danes invaded Estonia, which they divided up. After an uprising in 1343 Denmark sold its share of Estonia to the Teutonic Order, which established a kind of feudal system and ruled until the mid-19th century.

There followed centuries of complicated upheavals, uprisings and invasions (among the attackers was Ivan the Terrible in 1558), with peoples and territories frequently changing hands. Independence was finally declared in 1917 and for a while Estonia was a peaceful and prosperous nation. In 1939, however, the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, with Estonia and the Baltic states falling within the USSR’s sphere of influence.

In June 1940 the Soviets seized power in Estonia and installed a puppet government that had Estonia annexed by the USSR in July of the same year. Soon after, public figures and local leaders began to disappear. Deportation commenced in 1941. The number of Estonians killed, arrested and deported was more than 60,000.

One of the many intellectuals, politicians and public figures arrested was Viivi (Vivian) Viljamaa’s father. The family had a house at Tartu, the university city, and another at Tallinn. Viivi Viljamaa was born in October 1937 on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa. The family moved frequently to avoid arrest or deportation. In this they were unsuccessful, and Vivian’s father was taken away to Siberia and perished.

LEfT TO RIGHT:

Vivian Viljamaa’s father in 1943 – a victim of war.

Vivian with her mother and brother in Manly, 1954.

Vivian and daughter Lisa on graduation day.

BELOW: Vivian and Patrick on their wedding day in 1959.

Vivian’s mother managed to get herself and her two children onto a German troop train heading south away from the Russians. In Berlin in the closing days of the war they were in even more fear for their lives due to daily bombing. Vivian’s mother decided to keep moving, boarding a train to Munich where they survived the war to become displaced persons and, subsequently, world refugees.

Among so many millions of others, for the next four years the family was shunted between refugee camps in Germany, Spain

A dangerous, dramatic national and family tale leads to a peaceful new life in Australia. Regular Signals contributor Wendy Wilkins relates the adventures of the Estonian family of Viivi (Vivian) Viljamaa, whose name now appears on The Welcome Wall.


The museum’s tribute to migrants, The Welcome Wall, encourages people to recall and record their stories of coming to live in Australia.

and then Italy. Finally, in October 1949 they were given a piece of paper – still in Vivian’s possession – which stated simply that the family had ‘the right to land in Sydney, Australia’. It was not a visa, nor did they have passports, but they embarked on the US troopship General Blatchford, heading for Sydney, where they arrived on 11 November 1949 with nothing more than a suitcase and the clothes they were wearing. They had no passports, no birth certificates, no money, no work and no English; but they had already survived many ordeals and felt certain that things would get better.

Immediately after arrival at Sydney, the three were transported to an army camp at Bathurst then (after being deloused) further west to Parkes to another camp, and finally to yet another army

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 your story to the online database at www.anmm.gov.au/ww. So please don’t hesitate to call Kennie Ward during business hours with any enquiries regarding the project on 02 9298 3777.

They married when they were both 21, and in January 2009 will celebrate their Golden Jubilee. Vivian did not have the opportunity for a higher education, but she encouraged Pat to complete a tertiary degree; and later encouraged their three children to complete higher degrees. Their boys Patrick and Peter have law and economics degrees and their daughter, Lisa, has three degrees, including a PhD in biotechnology. So within one generation, the family has fought back from adversity and recovered their professional status – a not uncommon achievement among refugees.

Vivian’s brother too has nurtured his children to academic excellence, and they have gained higher degrees. He did something else remarkable: when the Russians left Estonia after

50 years of occupation he returned, and, through the courts, claimed back the family home in Tallinn where he now lives during the Estonian summers. Vivian and Pat’s children, and those of Vivian’s

brother, have all visited Estonia. Vivian’s children have recently been accepted as Estonian citizens and have Estonian passports together with their Australian passports, and so they have made an Estonian footprint in the sand.

Vivian herself has visited Estonia only once, when she felt compelled to lay her hands on her birth certificate. This quest, she has said, also put some demons to rest. Vivian is a passionate Australian citizen and treasures the day she swore allegiance to the nation.

Without visa or passports, they embarked for Sydney on the US troopship General Blatchford

camp at Greta, near Newcastle. At this time, Vivian’s elder brother, 18 years old, was separated from the family to do compulsory work in rural Australia. Vivian and her mother were then ‘freed’, in mid-1951, and soon discovered the seaside delights of Manly in Sydney where they decided to make their new home, six years after fleeing Estonia. Vivian’s mother opened a small dressmaking business in Manly and continued to support Vivian, the only child now in her care.

In Australia Vivian went to school for the first time in her life, starting in year 7 aged 13. Her English was rudimentary and her first report card shows ‘0’ in her first English exam, though her teacher wrote an encouraging ‘improving’ beside the mark. Three years later she passed her school certificate with flying colours in every subject.

When they were both just 15, Vivian met Pat Rodgers. From that time, they have been partners in life and in business.


CURRENTSExchanges with the USAAustralian National Maritime Museum marketing coordinator Sara Morawetz jumped at the opportunity to travel to New York to look at ways in which that international city’s leading museums are extending their audiences.

cultural institution can be relevant to all the different communities they are designed to serve. Donna Walker-Kuhne is considered an international authority in the field, renowned for her ability to increase accessibility and connection to the arts, particularly from within multicultural communities. As our host, Mrs Walker-Kuhne introduced us to a range of New York’s most respected arts and cultural leaders to see first-hand how their concepts of audience development have been put into practice.

One of the greatest success stories across several institutions has been the introduction of ‘First Saturdays’ whereby museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Guggenheim have opened up their doors on the first Saturday of the month and invited the community into the space, until as late as 1.00 am at night. Once the visitors are inside, the museum offers them anything from guest talks and special tours to tango lessons and DJs. The evenings are usually themed around a specific cultural experience.

Attracting crowds of up to 8,000 people per event, each museum has recognised that this is a new and unique type of visitor that exists outside their regular museum audiences. In return, the museums are being recognised outside their primary function as cultural institutions. They are now meeting places and social venues frequented by people who normally do not access the museum or its services.

Such initiatives prove that success for a cultural institution may exist outside its understanding of itself or its day-to-day audience. By reaching into the community and seeking ideas and events that may be considered culturally unconventional, we may indeed find that there is an unconventional audience waiting to respond.

USA Gallery FellowshipMichael Dyer from the New Bedford Whaling Museum is the first person to take up the Australian National Maritime Museum’s new USA Gallery Fellowship. The USA Gallery was originally funded by the United States as a Bicentennial gift to Australia, to explore the shared histories of maritime contact, cooperation and competition in the areas of exploration, trade, defence and leisure, that link our two Pacific rim countries. The USA Gallery Fellowship allows an American museum worker or scholar in the field of maritime history to undertake a research project relating to these shared histories.

Michael Dyer’s main interest is in the influence of whaling on the earliest American–Australian relations, and the way it changed over the 19th century. He will be exploring the way that the colonisation of Australia ensured, from the US perspective, a relatively stable, English-speaking presence on the other side of the world. This was especially important to whalemen very far from home, as well as to the owners who sent them out. Michael is examining 19th-century international relations, business decisions and results, cultural interactions and the development of geographical knowledge. His work will be published in Signals and The Great Circle, as conference presentations and on-line educational materials.

Sara Morawetz at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, meeting Jeff Koon’s Balloon dog.

NEW YORK city is truly a city of diversity. Nearly 170 languages are spoken and over 36 percent of its residents are born outside the United States. Each of the five boroughs is as visually and culturally distinct as the people who inhabit them. For museums in New York this has proven to be a great challenge as well as a great opportunity. In the past decade most major institutions have committed themselves to building relationships with these individual communities in an effort to find unique ways to engage them as a potential audiences.

Recently I was given the opportunity to travel to America to undertake an arts management tour of New York City. The tour, organised by Donna Walker-Kuhne and Kape Communications, was an overview of current audience development practices within Manhattan’s finest cultural institutions. They include organisations such as The Queens Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Public Theatre, The Smithsonian Institution of NY, The Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Arts and Business Council of America.

The term ‘audience development’ has become part of the language used by arts and cultural organisations to describe long-term institutional strategies focused upon the needs of existing and potential audiences. Combining elements of programming, education and marketing, audience development attempts to break down barriers for non-traditional audiences, ensuring that a

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CAPTAIN ROSS Mattson and all the crew of Endeavour are extremely happy with the success of our 2008 voyage and outreach program. Between 15 August and 18 October we sailed 2,900 nautical miles in the course of our voyage north to the ports of Brisbane, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie and Newcastle. We welcomed 177 voyage crew and 19 supernumeraries on the five separate voyages. They were a great bunch of people who adapted well to the 18th-century square-rig life, which included some very testing late-winter and early autumn gales. The crew did their best to give each and every one of them a fantastic experience onboard the ship.

Our Endeavour outreach program is all about offering people in other ports the chance to explore this magnificent replica of one of Australia’s most important historical ships. As soon as we reached each port the crew

Record numbers enjoy Endeavour replica

worked hard to turn the ship into ‘museum mode’, and we welcomed a total of 17,952 visitors onboard over the 17 days that it was open to the public – an average of 1,056 visitors per day. Such a fantastic response to the ship was more than we had expected, and satisfying visitors who were prepared to queue for hours to see the ship called for the very best efforts of our brigade of volunteer guides. They performed marvelously. On top of that, we broke sales records for the Endeavour merchandise marketed through our little souvenir tent. And we made the front page of the papers in Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie and Newcastle with stories highlighting our volunteers, the voyages and our professional crew – all helping to raise the profile of our wonderful voyaging ambassador, the replica of James Cook’s HM Bark Endeavour.

Paula East, shore manager Photographer Mischa Chaleyer-Kynaston/ANMM


2009 maritime history book prize

CURRENTS

THE FRANK BROEZE Memorial Maritime History Book Prize of $2,000 will be awarded for a book treating any aspects of maritime history relating to or impacting on Australia, written or co-authored by an Australian citizen or permanent resident, and published between 1 January 2007 and 31 December 2008. Preference will be given to books published in Australia, but titles written by Australians and published overseas may be considered at the discretion of the judges.

The prize will go to the Australian author or co-authors of a book-length monograph or compilation of their own works. Edited collections of essays by multiple contributors will not be eligible.

The Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize reflects the two sponsoring organisations’ wish to promote a broad view of maritime history showing how the sea and maritime influences have been more central to the making of Australia, its people and culture than has commonly been believed.

The prize is named in honour of the late Professor Frank Broeze of the University of Western Australia, who has been called the

pre-eminent maritime historian of his generation. Professor Broeze introduced Australia’s first university course on maritime history and helped redefine the field in broader terms than ships, sailors and sea power. He reached into economic, business, social and urban histories to make maritime history truly multidisciplinary.

This will be the fifth award for a maritime history book by the two organisations. The first prize was won by Marsden Hordern for Mariners are Warned (Melbourne University Press 1989), a study of the explorer of Australian coasts John Lort Stokes. A reinvigorated prize was inaugurated in 2002 and awarded to Dr Leone Huntsman for her social history Sand in our Souls: the beach in Australian history (Melbourne University Press 2001). In 2004 the award went to Encountering Terra Australis: the Australian voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders, by Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath and John West-Sooby (Wakefield Press, Kent Town SA 2004). The most recent winner, in 2007, was Dr Edward Duyker OAM for his work François Péron – An Impetuous Life: naturalist and voyager (Miegunyah Press 2006).

2007 winner Edward Duyker with director Mary-Louise Williams, and his winning title.

Writers, publishers and readers of maritime history are invited to nominate works for a biennial maritime history book prize of $2,000, sponsored jointly by the Australian Association for Maritime History (AAMH) and the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM). Nominations will close on 30 April 2009.

How to nominate a book

Written nominations will close on 30 April 2009.

Nominations MUST include photocopies of the dust-jacket or end covers, title page, imprint and contents pages (including an ISBN number), PLUS a short synopsis of the book (minimum 300-word). Copies of any published book reviews of the nominated publication should be included.

After an initial assessment of nominations, short-listed authors or publishers will be invited to submit three copies of their book. These will be judged by a committee consisting of the President of the Australian Association for Maritime History, the Director of the Australian National Maritime Museum, and one independent nominee. The prize will be announced and awarded at a time and venue to be advised.

Written nominations should be sent to:Jeffrey Mellefont, publications managerAustralian National Maritime MuseumGPO Box 5131 Sydney NSW 2001Telephone 02 9298 3777 Facsimile 02 9298 3670Email [email protected]


SPONSORSMuseum sponsorsPrincipal sponsor

ANZAustralianCustomsService StateForestofNSW

Major sponsorsAkzo Nobel Blackmores LtdRaytheonAustraliaPtyLtdTenix Pty Ltd

SponsorsAustralianMaritimeSafetyAuthorityAbloySecurityBill and Jean LaneBT AustralasiaCentenary of FederationInstitutionofEngineersAustraliaLouis VuittonSpeedoAustraliaWallenius Wilhelmsen Logistics

Project sponsorsABLOY AustraliaCathay Pacific CargoCSIROForrest TrainingHarboursideDarlingHarbour ‘K’LineLloyd’sRegisterAsia MCSMaritime Union of AustraliaMaxwellOpticalIndustries MediterraneanShippingCompanyMercantile Mutual Holdings PatrickPenrithLakesDevelopmentCorpPhilips Electronics AustraliaSBSScandinavianAirlinesShellCompaniesinAustraliaSpecificFreightSydneybySailVisionsofAustralia–CommonwealthGovtVincent Fairfax Family Foundation

Founding patronsAlcatel AustraliaANL LimitedAnsett AirfreightBovis Lend LeaseBP AustraliaBruce&JoyReidFoundationDoyle’sSeafoodRestaurantHowardSmithLimitedJamesHardieIndustriesPG,TG&MGKailisNational Australia BankP&O NedlloydTelstraWestpac Banking CorporationWallenius Wilhelmsen LogisticsZimShippingAustralasia

DonorsGrantPirrieGalleryStateStreetAustralia

Admiral MembershipsAbloySecurityPtyLtd

CHAMP Pty Ltd

Leighton Holdings

Commodore MembershipsHapag Lloyd (Australia) P/L

Trace Personnel

Captain MembershipsArt Exhibitions Australia Ltd

AsiaworldShippingServicesPtyLtd

Australia Japan Cable Ltd

DSTOAeronautical&ResearchLaboratory

FerrisSkrzynski&AssociatesP/L

HMASAlbatross Welfare Fund

HMASCreswell

HMASKuttabul

HMASNewcastle

HMASVampire Association

HMASWaterhen

HMASWatson Welfare Fund

Maritime Workers of Australia Credit Union

MaritimeUnionofAustralia(NSWBranch)

Maruschka Loupis & Associates

Middle Harbour Yacht Club

Naval Association of Australia

Canterbury-BankstownSubSection

PenrithReturnedServicesLeague

Pivod Technologies Pty Ltd

RoyalCaribbean&CelebrityCruises

SMERegimentalTrustFund

SvitzerAustralasia

SydneyPilotServicePtyLtd

ThalesUnderwaterSystemsP/L

ZimShippingAustralasia

Corporate Members of the museum

Stylish accommodation in the heart of the cityWE ARE DELIGHTED to welcome back Novotel Rockford Darling Harbour as a sponsorship partner, to provide their excellent level of accommodation and hotel services to international curators, conservators and couriers travelling to Sydney from New Zealand to assist with the museum’s major summer exhibition Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors.

Their generous support allows our professional visitors to stay close to the museum when undertaking the demanding task of installing the 130-plus valuable objects, ranging from precious artefacts and Pacific island art works to full-size oceanic canoes, in the exhibition galleries. At the end of the show, they

return to demount the exhibition.

Located adjacent to the Entertainment Centre, Novotel Rockford incorporates the Pumphouse Bar and Restaurant and is one of Sydney’s premier four-star hotels. As part of the Novotel family, the Novotel Rockford Darling Harbour has a reputation for friendly service in a contemporary, family-friendly setting.

The company knows the value of history, too. The heritage-listed Pumphouse, once known as the Pump Station, was utilised by the Hydraulic Power Company between 1890 and 1975 to provide hydraulic power for wool presses, wharf cranes and early lifts – including lifts at the Queen Victoria Building.

‘As good friends of the museum for the last five years, it’s wonderful to welcome the Novotel Rockford Darling Harbour back as a sponsorship partner,’ said museum director Mary-Louise Williams. ‘Their generous in-kind support is very important when bringing such a major exhibition from overseas.’


From the director Mary-Louise Williams

JUST AS this edition of Signals arrives in our Members’ and supporters’ letterboxes, we are opening our exciting new exhibition for the summer, Vaka Moana – Voyages of the Ancestors, from New Zealand’s Auckland Museum – Tamaki Paenga Hira. I know you’re going to enjoy learning more about the remarkable stories it encompasses – the way the Pacific Ocean was first settled by humans in extraordinary feats of navigation by the cultures who became the many and varied peoples of today’s Pacific regions. It’s curious to consider that people believed, not so long ago, that these must have been accidental landfalls at the mercy of the winds. We’re delighted to publish Professor Kerry Howe’s detailed yet very clear summary of our knowledge about these deliberate voyages and intrepid voyagers, pages 2–9.

It gives us much satisfaction, once again, to bring another first-class international touring exhibition to this country, to be appreciated by Australian audiences. We are very proud indeed of the close relations we have build up with leading museums around the world, enabling us to access their cultural treasures in this manner and share them with our audiences. One year from now we’ll be doing it again when Mythic Creatures: dragons, unicorns and mermaids opens here, coming to us thanks to a collaboration with a prestigious consortium of North American museums headed by the American Museum of Natural History, New York.

WE EXTENDED the warmest of welcomes to our voyaging crew when the HM Bark Endeavour replica returned from this year’s outreach voyages to Brisbane, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie and Newcastle. The ship was away from our wharves for two months from mid-August, returning on 18 October. It was a huge logistical task for our Endeavour staff, recruiting and training paying voyagers, preparing, provisioning and navigating the ship, and liaising with port authorities – and that included ensuring the dredgers had done their work properly in the river ports, so that there was enough water for Endeavour to berth! Our staff also worked hard to accommodate the crowds that queued to inspect the ship in each port. It paid off handsomely, with record numbers visiting the ship and learning more about their history. So a very big thanks to our staff and the volunteer guides who made our visitors’ time on board so special.

ON PAGE 46 of Signals we’re calling for nominations for the biennial Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize of $2,000, which we are administering once again in conjunction with the Australian Association for Maritime History (AAMH). The prize aims to promote and encourage the broader vision of maritime history that this museum has been so active in fostering since its inception in the 1980s – one that moves well beyond the traditional naval and exploration histories to embrace the experiences of diverse communities and individuals whose lives have been influenced by the sea. The book prize is

named in honour of the late Professor Frank Broeze of Western Australia, who did so much work to promote this multidisciplinary view of maritime history.

As well as collaborating on and jointly funding this award, the Australian Association for Maritime History and this museum have a long and fruitful association that goes back to the two organisations’ origins. AAMH’s founders included the late Vaughan Evans, who donated his own personal library as the nucleus of our public research library that’s named in his honour. The AAMH is a national body and its executive rotates from one state to another each five years, drawing its officers from universities, museums and other organisations working in the field. In the last five years its executive was based here, with senior curator Lindsey Shaw as president. It’s now moved on to Western Australia and we warmly welcome Dr Kenneth McPherson as its latest president. Dr McPherson has longstanding interests in the history of the Indian Ocean region and is currently a research associate of the Asia Research Centre of Murdoch University, and a research fellow at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

At our annual Remembrance Day service on the anniversary of the armistice of World War I on 11 November, veterans of the Z Special Units and 1 Commando Association NSW gather for a service on the museum’s north wharf. The focus of the service is the museum vessel Krait, the ex-Japanese fishing boat that was boldly sailed from Australia to occupied Singapore in 1943 on Operation Jaywick, to mount a successful commando raid on enemy shipping. The sole surviving veteran of the raid, its radio operator Horrie Young (pictured with Krait), again honoured us with his presence. Wreaths were laid by his daughter Dianne Wills and ANMM director Mary-Louise Williams (top, seated at far right). Photographer J Mellefont/ANMM

You’ll enjoy learning more about the way the Pacific Ocean was first settled by humans


Online shopping now available safely and securely atwww.anmm.gov.au ... click on SHOP. Hundreds of books … something for everyone … from key rings to shipmodels and boating clothes … friendly service … mail order … Members discounts!

We’re open 9.30 am to 5.00 pm seven days a week. To contact our helpful staff phone 02 9298 3698 or fax orders to 02 9298 3675 or email [email protected]

Rediscover your world with small cradle globe$99.95 Members $89.95

Check, mate! Russian navy chess set $120.00 Members $108.00

Great White Fleet can cooler $10, tile $22, mug $15 (Members $9, $19.80,$13.50)

Trash or Treasure? Swedish horse $35 Members $31.50 Viking snow dome $20 Members $18

Tie land – signal flags, map of discovery and Bayeux tapestry. $79.95 Members $71.95

Replica scrimshaw tobacco jar $29.95 Members $26.95Australian clipper jewellery box $55.00 Members $49.50

Boxed brass sextant, 5 , the perfect corporate gift $99.95 Members $89.95

Pirates! Swill from skeleton goblet $15.00 Members $13.50Skeleton mug $20.00 Members $18.00

Replicas of RAN ships’ badges mounted on wall plaques Vampire or Onslow $69.95 Members $62.95

Specially commissioned ship models, different modelsOronsay $250.00

Fly the flag with White Ensign cuff link, tie clip set $49.95 Members $44.95

Monogrammed ANMM leather document satchel $99.95 SPECIAL OFFER Members $60.00


The Museum

Open daily except Christmas Day 9.30 am to 5.00 pm (January to 6.00 pm)Darling Harbour, Sydney NSW Australia Phone 02 9298 3777 Facsimile 02 9298 3780

ANMM Council

Chairman Mr Peter Sinclair am csc

Director Ms Mary-Louise Williams

CouncillorsCdre Stephen Gilmore csc am ran Ms Gaye Hart am Emeritus Professor John Penrose Mr John Rothwell ao Mr Neville Stevens ao Dr Andrew Sutherland Mrs Nerolie Withnall

Signals ISSN1033-4688

Editorial productionEditor Jeffrey Mellefont 02 9298 3647Assistant editor Penny Crino

PhotographyStaff photographer Andrew Frolows

Design & productionJeremy Austen and Jo Kaupe, Austen Kaupe

PrinterPrinted in Australia by Blue Star Print group

Advertising enquiriesJeffrey Mellefont 02 9298 3647 Deadline end of January, April, July, October for issues March, June, September, December

Signals back issues

The museum sells a selection of back issues of Signals. Back issues $4.00, 10 back issues $30.00. Extra copies of current issue $4.95. Call Matt Lee at The Store 02 9298 3698

Material from Signals may be reproduced only with the editor’s permission 02 9298 3647.

The Australian National Maritime Museum is a statutory authority of the Commonwealth Government. For more information contact us at:

GPO Box 5131 Sydney NSW 2001 Australia

ANMM on the web www.anmm.gov.au

Signals, Issue 85

Documents

Transcript of Signals, Issue 85