Fremantle

If you remember my second post ("Time Travel"), you might recall the short video clip of the Kormoran crew disembarking at Fremantle harbor and my grandfather looking into the camera. Fremantle was also the port where the Sydney (II) last docked before her doomed final voyage, and where she was expected to return to on Nov. 20th, 1941 but never arrived.

Today, at the same pier, you can hop on ferries to Rottnest island, or you can look at the giant cargo ships docked across the harbor while sipping on a summer ale at Gage Roads Brewing.

I visited two museums in Fremantle, the WA Maritime Museum and WA Shipwrecks Museum, both of which have dedicated a lot of time and effort to (a) locate the wrecks of both vessels and (2) research and preserve anything related to the battle and the crews.

Below you can see a slideshow of the Sydney memorial wall and the relevant exhibit at the Maritime museum. You'll learn about one of the sailors on the Sydney, Kenneth Norman Hilton Butler, who was from Perth and a promising cricketer.

In the display cases, you can see a model of what the Kormoran looked like in disguise that day, a life vest and some other smaller artifacts from the German crew.

The coolest thing that happened today though was that Michael Gregg, curator for Maritime History at the WA Museum, invited me to chat! Sometimes it pays to reach out to people on a whim! His office is over at the Shipwrecks Museum and he took me "behind the scenes" to his office and showed me a lot of documents and pictures he found in the database. He also introduced me to Dr. Ross Anderson, who was involved in the 2015 expedition to film the wrecks of Sydney and Kormoran. Ross is currently working on a 3D rendered virtual model of the Kormoran and gave me a sneak peak! He is trying to figure out how to turn it into an immersive exhibit at the museum. (I guess I need to come back at some point!) It was amazing to listen to these scholars who have dedicated a large part of their career to the research and preservation of the Sydney / Kormoran history.

There are a lot more interesting things to see in at the Shipwrecks Museum. They have an amazing collection of artifacts recovered from 17th century Dutch ships. (Yes, the Dutch "discovered" Australia first, I didn't know!) Then there's loads more stuff in Fremantle, such as the old prison (the city used to be a penal colony) and the Victorian architecture along the main shopping / dining streets.

Of course I also had to go to Rottnest (which I did yesterday because the weather was nicer), to fulfill my daughter's only souvenir request: a Quokka Selfie! (Don't worry, she got to see it first, before it went viral).