Naval Sea Power in Miniature Sat 13 Feb 2021 – Mon 26 Apr 2021 9:30am – 5:00pm WA Shipwrecks Museum Naval Sea Power in Miniature is an exhibition of the handmade ship models built by Gerry Westenberg over the past 40 years including many British and Australian warships. The centre piece of the exhibition is a large diorama depicting Fremantle Harbour in 1944 when it was the main submarine base for the South West Pacific theatre of operations in World War Two. The exhibition is open to the public from 12pm, Saturday 13 February. About Gerry Westenberg I was born in 1957 in Perth, Western Australia and started modelling mainly aircraft interspersed with ships when I was 5. When I was 16, I wanted to build a model of HMAS Perth and decided to attack an Airfix 1/600 scale model of HMS Ajax. When completed, if you closed both eyes and squinted, it almost looked like HMAS Perth. I became a little more adept at remodelling Airfix kits until the day I discovered balsa wood! I started building warships to the 1/600 scale when I was in my early teens and then one day purchased a set of plans for the modified Leander Class cruiser HMAS Perth (I) that were drawn to 1/192 scale. This combined with the discovery of balsa wood set me on the path of accurate scale model scratch building that has seen me build well over 100 ships curing my career as a ship modeller. I have always kept to the same scale which has had its good and bad points. The scale is large enough to provide the opportunity for detail but small enough that I don’t have to house them in a huge shed. If building a ship from a class of ships, I will (where applicable) try and choose one that sank, this being my way of paying tribute to those who went down with the ship. Unfortunately, this can be quite challenging, as there is usually a dearth of photographs that I can use as a reference. I use photos as much as I can, as I have found over the years that many plans are drawn incorrectly and this is usually only discovered when you are half way through the build. My passion is mainly for British and Australian warships, but I also enjoy building ships that take my fancy, for example, I have a Roman bireme, RMS Queen Mary, Raleigh’s ship The Revenge and the two Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java involved in the Battle of Java Sea. The largest ship in my collection is the RMS Queen Mary, with the smallest being HMAS Acute. I also have HMS Victoria, a pre-dreadnought, HMS Fife, a County class destroyer, Kinabalu, a coastal trader from Borneo, HMAS Sydney (III), the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, HMS Monmouth sunk in World War Two to name but a few. My most challenging model has been that of the wreck of HMAS Sydney (II) depicted on 20th November 1941 a few days after she sank. Building this model and seeing the utter destruction of the ship made me realise how much punishment she received and how heroic the crew must have been.