Transcript: International Museum Day - WA Shipwrecks Museum

Hi, for this International Museum Day we are here at the Shipwreck Galleries for the Western Australian Museum, and we are in the Xantho gallery and I’m the bloke responsible for all of this.

Michael McCarthy is my name, the Irish John Smith, and we are here to talk about the paintings to do with the SS Xantho.

In the background here we have the Broadhurst family who owned the SS Xantho, Western Australia’s first coastal steamer and we have a man here who is one of the Malay divers who Broadhurst brought out, 120 boys aged 12 to 14 on the Xantho for the pearling industry.

Called Malays though they are from all the islands North of Australia, including present day Malaysia.

What’s really important to International Museum Day are these indigenous images of the Xantho.

It proved such a failure under Broadhurst that he and his family never kept any images, and in following his failings all the time, we are actually led to his wife, a feminist, a real polymath, musician and so on and their daughter a suffragette, trying to understand this crazy man who brings the ship out here for use in the pearling industry, sinks 6 months after it got here.

The amazing thing is, he didn’t keep any images, but we think the Aboriginal people did.

Images here and in the Indanoona Station North of Cossack which we’ve got showing a ship, we believe to be the Xantho, with a ship being lifted off one of the yards to go ashore.

But the one for today, for International Museum Day is this one here.

This one is the Walga rock inland of Meekatharra, it’s often been thought to be a Dutch East India Ship but anthropologist asked me “Could this be a funnel? And did your ship have guns?” and I said “No, but it could have had false gun ports which were used in those days as a decoration”.

We also know that the Xantho was built as a paddle steamer based on the Loch Lomond which had square scuttles, which is square portholes and we believe this here to be an image of the Xantho done by a man called Sammy Malay or Sammy Hassan around about 1917 and we believe these to be either false gun ports or the square scuttles, this to be the funnel, this to be a mizzen sail not of the lateen type that the Dutch East India had, but of more modern period, and these here four lines of writing.

Now, people from Malaysia came in the other day and they looked at this and said, they think it might Jawi, a Malay-Arabic script, which fits nicely the idea of Sammy Malay or Sammy Hassan who’s known to Walga Rock in 1917, possibly being one of the Malays brought out on Xantho, possibly telling the Aboriginal people of his voyage and what he did, they then putting it in the extraordinary gallery at Walga Rock.

It’s amazing; this Muslim man comes out for the pearling industry, and joined our first artists the Aboriginal people, thousands and thousands of years old and is allowed, maybe the Aboriginal people themselves put in on the gallery after he showed it to them in the sand.

I think this is a wonderful story of culture, of technology, this is our Xantho one of our most important ships, first mass produced engines in the world were on this ship, but most importantly to me, apart from this extraordinary engineering feat that we have here, a Crimean War gunboat engine, we can now turn over by hand thanks to our conservators.

But to me one of the greatest things is the link to the indigenous people and to the possibly to Sammy Malay or Sammy Hassan.

I hope you enjoy it, International Museum Day, this is about our cultures and thank you, and do send notes back on YouTube and ask some questions and let us know whether you enjoyed our show here.

Thank you.