The Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney is Australia’s national centre for maritime history collections, exhibitions and knowledge. Opened in 1991, it is one of six museums directly administrated by the Australian Federal Government and the only one located outside of the ACT. The museum also plays a key role in supporting local maritime museums and smaller historical organisations across Australia. The Maritime Museums of Australia Project Support Scheme, which began in 1995, has given over $2.53 million to support smaller historical organisations, and provided funding for more than 551 projects and over 85 museological training opportunities.
The museum’s collection includes a huge variety of objects significant to Australian and international maritime history, varying from photographs, paintings and models of ships to the 4 ships displayed on the water outside the museum. The Museum’s exhibitions and programs include topics as diverse as immigration, colonial history, Indigenous Australian history and maritime archaeology.
Photo from The Australian National Maritime website: https://www.sea.museum/en/whats-on/our-fleet/hmb-endeavour-replica
I had visited the Maritime Museum many times when I was younger, but Peter and Roland’s tour of it for our class gave me a new perspective on it. Hearing their insights about the process of acquiring objects for the collection and designing exhibitions at this museum gave me a glimpse into a particular way of producing history that I hadn’t encountered before in my History degree.
Unlike many of the organisations that students are working with in History Beyond the Classroom, the Maritime Museum’s entire purpose as a national museum is to engage with the public. Museums are a space where the skills of academic history are used to write and present quite a different form of history, addressing the general public with concise object based histories. I was immediately interested in the process behind this way of producing history, which could be limited by the fragility of certain collection objects, or the architecture of the exhibition space, but which offers unique opportunities to bring together varied physical objects from the past to educate the public.
Maritime history offers a particular lens on Australia’s history, cutting through the chronological periodisation, geographical and cultural partitions I am familiar with. The sea and human societies lives on and around it has always been a part of Australia’s past, and has played a pivotal role in Australia’s recent history. Maritime History appears narrow in its focus, but it is expansive in the varied themes it can encompass.
After the tour Peter Hobbins mentioned there were volunteering opportunities at the museum and I was keen to get involved in volunteering there, even though at that point I had already contacted another organisation to work on a project for History Beyond the Classroom. I wanted to learn more about the kind of historical work the museum did, and I also found their approach and purpose interesting.
When I realised that my previous choice of organisation wasn’t going to work due to the lack of response, I chose to contact the Maritime Museum to find out if I could work on a historical project there. The topic of my project is still undecided, but Peter Hobbins has proposed two suggestions of projects focused on presenting either photographic primary sources or archaeological reports to the public. I am still planning on volunteering at the Museum alongside this, either now, or in future.