Australian National Maritime Museum

Abstract Cellulose nitrate transparent plastic film was used by photographers and movie filmmakers from its release in the 1880s to the 1950s. The storage of this material is a challenge for cultural institutions because of its instability and hazardous nature, as nitrate is highly flammable and deteriorates over time. Historically, cellulose acetate gradually began to replace cellulose nitrate as it is not flammable. Despite its non-flammable properties, leading to cellulose acetate being called ‘safety’ film, over time it became clear that it also deteriorates in hazardous ways. Identification of cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate in collections is necessary for preservation and risk management to collections and humans. Both cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate are found in gallery, library, archive and museum photographic collections. As a result, identification and management of this material might be the responsibility of curators, librarians, archivists, collection managers, registrars or conservators, depending on the institution staffing and structure. Currently, there is no single identification method readily available to heritage institutions that meets the requirements to identify and distinguish between cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate reliably, non-destructively and rapidly. In this study samples from both the Sydney University Museums and Australian National Maritime Museum collections have been analysed using infrared total reflectance spectroscopy, a novel approach which demonstrates great potential for rapid and non-invasive identification particularly when combined with multivariate statistical analysis methods. Principal component analysis (PCA) allowed for non-subjective data mining and the development of a model which is hoped to be used in the future for predicting sample identification. After calculation of the PCA model, the novel application of the Parsimax orthogonal rotation method potentially provides a means of determining the level of chemical deterioration in the cellulose nitrate film.

Data on corrosion of metals are normally derived from two sources, namely, immersion/exposure tests and controlled electrochemical experiments. Because of inherent problems associated with the extrapolation of short-term measurements to long-term performance, many field workers are skeptical of the value of electrochemical data. In order to compare these two methods, corrosion rate data obtained for bronzes using (1) chemical analysis of corrosion products and (2) instantaneous corrosion rate measurements are presented. The material was examined after 170 years’ immersion in tropical waters northwest of Western Australia where the American China Trader “Rapid” foundered in 1811. The nature of the corrosion products and the microenvironment will be discussed in terms of pH, oxygen access, Eh gradients, and the microstructure of the objects. Problems associated with non-uniform surfaces and slow rates of attaining a steady state will be discussed. Corrosion rates from the two methods are in good agreement and compare well with literature values for similar materials.

The corrosion microenvironment of a dozen Second World War iron shipwrecks in Chuuk Lagoon, Federated States of Micronesia, was investigated to see if there were any measurable changes caused by a recent major typhoon. Seven previously inspected wreck sites were used for calibration to assess the environmental impacts. Five new wrecks, including the Fumitzuki, a destroyer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, were assessed at up to twice the depth of previous studies. The new data showed that the logarithm of the corrosion rate falls linearly with depth to 36 m. Measurements of corrosion potentials, concretion thickness and pH showed that many of the vessels suffered partial deconcretion during the typhoon Maysak in April 2015 with concomitant increases in the rate of decay. Regrowth of the colonising marine organisms are presently ameliorating the impact of the typhoon.

This paper attempts to give an overview of Australian maritime archaeology since 1974. Our main interest is the growth and incorporation of maritime archaeology into cultural resource management (or 'heritage') studies and procedures. We have charted this growth as well as examined what has happened to research programs over that time. Finally we will conclude with some thoughts on future opportunities and challenges in the field.

MARGARETTE LINCOLNLondon: National Maritime Museum Publishing, 2007Pp. 218. £20. ISBN 978 0 948065 92 7 Naval Wives and Mistresses, 1750–1815 follows on from Margarette Lincoln’s 2002 Ashgate monog...

In 2014, the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) received reports from recreational divers that the shipwreck site of HMAS Perth (I) was being systematically salvaged by commercial divers. After extensive discussions with Indonesian Government departments and agencies the ANMM led the first Australian/Indonesian remote sensing survey of Perth in December 2016. This was followed by an in-water survey in May 2017. These investigations revealed Perth has been devastated by systematic, large-scale unauthorized salvage. Following the survey, ANMM and its Indonesian research partner Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (ARKENAS), working in conjunction with the Royal Australian Navy and Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, successfully lobbied the Indonesian Government to have the site declared Indonesia's first Marine Protected Area.

Ensuring a sustainable future for the global ocean requires meaningful dialogue and engagement with society. Around the world, efforts to engage and collaborate with society increasingly emphasise ocean literacy as a potential tool for engaging and educating people on ocean issues. A conceptual measure of people’s awareness, attitudes, and behaviours towards the ocean, ocean literacy has been highlighted as a key objective in recent ocean sustainability agreements and initiatives, including the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. In Australia, research and applied interest in ocean literacy is burgeoning. It is therefore timely to take stock and explore recent work that may inform future pathways towards supporting and engaging society in achieving ocean sustainability. Here, we explore examples of ocean literacy research and practice in Australia, to develop prospective thinking on inter/transdisciplinary approaches for advancing ocean literacy under sustainability objectives. In doing so, we anticipate the next steps for progressing ocean literacy in the Australian context, including supporting ocean learning and education, engaging communities at all levels, fostering cross‐sector collaboration on connecting people to the ocean, and building strong and actionable policy and funding frameworks to ensure long‐term impact. We emphasise the need to collaboratively develop a national ocean literacy strategy to guide and structure these efforts and to establish an Australian ocean literacy coalition to facilitate research, cross‐sector collaboration, and implementation in practice.

The light cruiser Protector, built 1884, served as an Australian naval asset for 40 years. Decommissioned from the Royal Australian Navy in 1924, it was subsequently converted into a lighter. The vessel re-entered military service during the Second World War, but was involved in a collision, condemned, and ultimately installed as a breakwater on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. While much of Protector's military career is well documented, little is known of its conversion and adaptation to civilian roles. What follows is a discussion of efforts to archaeologically document Protector's surviving hull and identify signatures of adaptive reuse indicative of its post-military career.

Coal samples from HMAV Bounty were analysed using standard techniques to shed light on their provenance. Petrographic analysis indicated they were Carboniferous, with high vitrinite and liptinite content and a mean random reflectance of vitrinite of 0.99%. Palynological analysis indicated the samples were derived from the Middle Coal Measures, Westphalian B. Combining coal rank (vitrinite reflectance), age, knowledge of seam distributions and coalfield history indicates the most like source to be the Durham Coalfield, possibly the Hutton or Low Main Seams. These coals were mined along the valley of the Weir in the latter part of the 18th century. © 2007 The Authors

Placing a new interpretive plaque on an old monument or popping it into a museum is often held up by historians as a satisfactory resolution to awkward history. But this defence of out dated monuments as heritage smooths over past historical injustices rather than confronts them. It also offers a way to defend other yet to be contested monuments. This essay responds to contributions to the contextualisation of the Statue Wars presented in this issue and how these historians address such flashpoints of history.

In the nineteenth century the long sea voyage across thousands of miles of open ocean to Australia was a step into the unknown. International migration at this time usually involved travel by sea, as it had in previous centuries. Ships were the primary long distance transportation method and the movement of passengers was one of their most important functions. It has been estimated that more than 1.6 million immigrants travelled to Australia by ship between 1788 and 1900, nearly half of these people were assisted immigrants of one type or another and they came primarily from Great Britain with smaller numbers from Europe (Barrie 1989:121).

This paper describes the Australian National Maritime Museum's Indigenous watercraft project, conceived by its curators due to the lacking presence of Australia's first mariners and their vessels in cultural institutions and academic scholarship. The Nawi project aims to align with best-practice in Indigenous Australian museological policy to better facilitate strong Indigenous cultural futures, rather than dwell in an Indigenous past. Nawi participants built a dynamic picture of Indigenous watercraft culture today that is open to all nuances and complexities in Indigenous Australian (post)colonial experiences and identity, without privileging authenticity of unbroken connection over cultural resurgence. This paper also raises issues about authenticity faced by cultural institutions regarding Indigenous watercraft replicas. It concludes with a discussion about the concept of “community”, and how the Nawi project emphasizes its importance in cultural practice today through the lens of the amazing array of watercraft of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

A detailed analysis of the physical condition of the buildings at the Benedictine community in New Norcia, Western Australia, was conducted as part of a conservation review for the needs of the textile collections under a grant from the National Library of Australia. This involved checking different rooms for suitability as collection stores through micrometeorological assessments of logged climate data. The best storage environments were found to be upstairs in the south-facing rooms of the old convent building. The north-facing rooms can be modified, through removal of internal stud timber and Masonite walls, into a naturally lighted space in which the textile collection can be worked upon. Relocation of the collection is viewed as a strategic long-term move as the present storage is clean, but very cramped. Monitoring with sticky traps has shown that the present and proposed storage areas are relatively free of dust. When the existing textile store is vacated the Art Store should be moved to this location instead of the current location, as there is only one external wall instead of three which would cause unacceptably rapid changes in conditions.

In 2013, researchers affiliated with the South Australian Maritime Museum and University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Visual Technologies [ACVT] conducted an archaeological and laser scanning survey of the former Australian warship HMCS/HMAS Protector . Between its launch in 1884 and service in the First World War, Protector was substantially modified. Once decommissioned, the ship again underwent drastic changes. While several archival photographs exist that depict Protector at various stages of its life, they provide only scant understanding of the transformative processes applied to Protector ’s hull. Researchers at ACVT have developed methods of generating 3D models from archival photographs, and are using Protector as a case study. Models have been created that depict the vessel at three specific periods of its service life, which in turn has enabled archaeologists to identify gradual variations to Protector ’s hull that, in some cases, were so subtle they could not be discerned in existing archival photographs and other historic media.

In the two decades after 1936, the assessment and instruction of aviators was transformed by adopting synthetic training aids. These devices were typified by the Link Trainer, an ersatz aeroplane that taught basic piloting skills and instrument flying. Purchased both by Australian civil operators and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), Link Trainer use proliferated from 1939. After 1945, an escalating accident rate led the RAAF to consider an emergent technology: flight simulators. Developed in the UK and USA, Dehmel-style flight simulators were powered by analogue computers to emulate specific aircraft types. Drawing upon Korean War experience and Canadian precedents, in 1956 the RAAF took delivery of Australia's first flight simulator, Redifon's model C.773 for the Avon Sabre fighter. Integrating both military and civilian experience, this article argues that western faith in flight simulators often ran ahead of their capabilities and fidelity to ‘seat of the pants’ flying.

This paper was given at the ALIA Biennial Conference Powering our future, Sydney NSW 20–22 May 2002

Earthworks associated with widening of the Great Eastern Highway in Perth, Western Australia, unearthed an original section of the convict-built wooden road that linked Perth to Guildford, built between 1865 and 1867. An emergency in situ analysis of the timbers was conducted using surface pH and redox potential profiles, along with degradation depths using a pointed stainless steel probe. The water content of the wooden blocks was determined under laboratory conditions. The combination of probe depths and water content showed that the jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) blocks were moderately waterlogged and significantly affected by brown rot fungus at the outer margins. Recoverable timbers were block lifted by Belmont Council workers using standard archaeological techniques and wrapped in high density black polyethylene builders' membrane and stored in the council yard for 3 weeks, under 30 cm of mulch. Conservation treatment took place in a covered annex of the Belmont museum and involved saturating the blocks with sprayed solutions of PEG 3350 and Luviskol K-90®. Consolidation and impregnation took 1 year of weekly treatment before 6 months of slow air drying. The consolidated surfaces were brush cleaned of sandy soil debris and the dried blocks placed in temporary Perspex® covered show cases with ventilation holes to facilitate water evaporation until equilibrium is reached.

Usage scenarios for technology that capture society’s imagination are often discussed in scientific and popular theory long before said technology becomes a reality.1 The current interest in system...

Abstract Since the 1960s, living history museums have become a prominent feature in Australian rural and regional landscapes. Defying their critics, costumed performances at heritage sites continue to attract numerous visitors. This article traces the origins of the living history museum, from its roots in late-nineteenth-century display culture to present-day configurations in the tourist economy. Writing from the perspective of a cultural analyst who has also worked as a costumed interpreter, I consider the range of representations in historical re-enactments, the problems with and possibilities for these sites of performance, and the cultural practices of memory more broadly.

Ultimately maritime archaeology seeks to provide information about the way in which people lived in past times whether this is through technological, economic, social or cultural information. Maritime archaeology in Australia operates in an extremely well documented time frame - a quintessentially 'historical' period. The interaction between history and maritime archaeology has many subtle and varied effects upon the day to day operations of practitioners involved in maritime heritage preservation and cultural resource management.