Perth- Maritime Museum

The Western Australia Maritime Museum, Fremantle, had some interesting exhibits. They do have a modern Oberon class submarine you can tour (for an extra fee, naturally) but we elected to skip that.

We had some trouble finding this place. It's fairly far from the train station in Fremantle --way out at the end of the Harbour and the route to walk is confusing.  We finally found it, but are convinced it is easier to find by car rather than on foot.

That's it, way down at the end.

A lot of folks came to Australia through this area so there is a statue commemorating the travelers. Unfortunately, at this time of day the photographer was taking the photo facing the sun.

We did learn an interesting tidbit- Australia shares an "external terrestrial border" with France in the Antarctic. Who knew?

Lighthouse lens...

Whole, preserved megamouth shark. The megamouth shark is one of 3 species of filter feeding sharks which also also includes the basking shark and whale shark. The megamouth can grow to 6 m (nearly 20 feet) in length. This one wasn't quite that large.

Some more modern examples of mines and antisubmarine weapons used by the Australian Navy.

For me, the most interesting item in the Museum was something that recently made news all over the world- the world's oldest, recovered, message in a bottle. In 1886, the bottle was tossed overboard from a German ship off the Western Australia coastline as part of an official study of ocean currents. Between 1864 and 1933, thousands of these bottles were tossed off ships. Each contained data about its origin along with a plea to return the bottle. On January 21, 2018, the bottle was found in the sand on Wedge Island, 180 km (112 miles) north of Perth. Due to the excellent condition of the bottle and its contents, experts believe the bottle probably washed ashore within 6-12 months after leaving the ship and had been buried in the sand ever since. Of the thousands tossed overboard from ships, 662 messages were returned to the study participants but none of the bottles were returned.  This is the only known bottle.

This is so interesting and I think is comparable to a bottle of ash from the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 in the Sunda Strait. Both, for me, really commanded my attention. We saw a bottle of Krakatoa ash in a small maritime museum in New England years ago. It had been collected by the captain of a trade vessel I believe. His ship had been in the waters near Krakatoa at the time and he'd collected some of the ash in the small bottle.  Little did we know then that we would eventually end up living here and be able to see the remnants of that historic volcano from the resort where B stays near the new plant site.