Bart Bear's Blog

One very interesting museum in Fremantle is the Shipwreck Museum. It has lots of stories about the ships that were wrecked along the Western Australian coast, from the time of the first explorers to the present day. There are cannons, coins and cutlery from old wrecks and even a big section of the hull of "Batavia", a sailing ship with a very gruesome history. There are also lots of models. Dad and I make lots of models, mostly aircraft although there is a kit of the QM2 that we will be tackling soon, so we spend a fair bit of time looking at the absolute masterpieces of museum models. This one is a model of a Dutch East Indiaman. I don't know which one it is because I got Dad to write the name down and he lost the bit of paper. It is a superb representation of the first type of European ship to investigate the coast of Australia. Most of them had got too far south on their way across the Indian Ocean and were not sure just where they were and lots of them were wrecked on the reefs and islands along the coast. As far as we know, they never tried to settle here .Their reports of a big unknown land was the start of the exploration of Australia, which they called "New Holland".

Labels: boats, Western Australia