Indian Ocean Now

Western Australians are closely tied to the Indian Ocean. This ocean carries our iron ore, oil and gas and livestock across it. From the ocean comes much of the fish we eat. We play and relax in, and by the ocean’s waters.

This ocean also connects us to important changes across the wider world. Trade across this ocean continues to grow. The Indian Ocean region is growing in global strategic and military importance. Climate change, rising sea levels and over fishing will directly affect millions of people who live around this ocean.

The Indian Ocean continues to be an ocean where history will be made.  

A Cabinet of Curiosities

A cabinet of curiosity

A cabinet of curiosity
Image courtesy WA Museum

Recycled plastic bag chickens from South African township art (F2317, F2318)
Western Australian Museum, (F2317, F2318)

3D printed replica skull of Batavia (1629) victim

Plastic Hindu votive sculpture and artificial flowers from refugee boat
(SIE537, SIE544)

Corals:
Acropora tabletop
Goniastrea massive
Purple digitate
Jar of common reef building corals from Scott Reef, Western Australia including samples from the Genus Acropora, Echinopora and Montipora.

Fragments for a displaced people – after Giordano’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels 2016.
Artist: Robert Cleworth, 2016

Batavia skull
Artist: Paul Uhlmann, 2016

Shells:
Money cowries (Monetaria moneta)
Australian trumpet (Syrinx aruanus)
Chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilius)
Southern baler (Melo miltonis)
Bear claw clam (Hippopus hippopus)
Marbled cone shell (Conus marmoreus)
South sea pearlshell (Pinctada maxima)
Helmet shell (Cassis rufa)
Tiger cowrie (Cypraea tigris)
Western Australian Museum F2317, F2318, SIE537, SIE544

Cabinets of Curiosity or Wunderkammer have existed since the 1500s and are widely considered the pre-cursors to modern museums. These cabinets housed any range of objects from the historically important to the outright odd. Most were filled by individual collectors who hunted for objects that sparked curiosity and interest. The beauty of these Cabinets of Curiosity is how they serve as a place of intersection between disparate objects and areas of interest. Although seemingly unrelated, all the objects share the ability to awaken a sense of wonder and imaginative inquiry in the observer.

Inside this cabinet we have a selection of modern objects from the Western Australian Museum that could have been collected by a contemporary Indian Ocean traveller.

A Changing World

The painting depicts the effects of globalisation and climate change

The painting depicts the effects of globalisation and climate change
Image courtesy Larry Mitchell

Mentawai Islands
Larry Mitchell, Indonesia, 2016
Larry Mitchell private collection

This image is of an inundated forest adjacent to a small village in the Mentawai Islands, 100 km off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. This chain of islands lies on a major fault line and is subject to constant seismic activity. The combination of this activity and progressively rising sea levels due to climate change means that low-lying coastal areas can become flooded by the encroaching ocean. The skeletal remnants of a stand of terrestrial hardwood trees attest this phenomenon and the villagers constantly rebuild sea walls of dead coral to hold back the sea.

Among the village houses are two major religious buildings—a mosque and Christian church. Evidence of the penetration of monotheistic religious traditions into this remote region, these two worldly cosmologies seem to sit comfortably with the old beliefs of animism, ancestor worship, ghosts and souls.