Transcript: International Museum Day - Museum of Geraldton

Hello, my name is Suzanne. I’m a host at the Museum of Geraldton.

Geraldton is a small city located 400 kilometres north of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia.

I’m standing outside our beautiful shipwrecks gallery and the object that we’ve chosen to celebrate International Museum Day is the stone portico at the far end of that gallery.

The stones were being carried as ballast on the retour ship Batavia, a vessel belonging to the VOC, the Dutch East India Company.

The ship was wrecked in 1629 on the Abrolhos Islands off our coast and these stones lay on the ocean floor for hundreds of years before maritime archaeologists raised them and assembled them much like a jigsaw puzzle to work out that they were in fact an archway.

If they had arrived in Jakarta as we call it today, Batavia it was known as then, the stones would have formed a facade or portico at one of the gateway of the castle or citadel of the city.

The stone itself is sandstone; it comes from the [inaudible] quarry in north-west Germany.

It would have been prefabricated there, cut to order and moved by small barges or ferries down the river and across the ocean to Amsterdam and then sent off on the ships from there.

Although it seems amazing to us to go to so much effort to cut ballast or building material from one side of the world to the other, it was actually a lot more common than we originally realised.

Firstly it fulfilled the need for ballast but also it provided European style buildings for the colonial cities that the Dutch were building at that time in the Far East.

We’ve shared one of our favourite objects here at the Museum of Geraldton, we’d love you to leave a comment, maybe visit us sometime and let us show you all of the other wonderful exhibitions we have here at the Museum.