Under Southern Skies
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From the observation of the transit of Venus, to the importance of the night sky in Torres Strait Islander navigation and voyaging – planets and stars unite the long history of all navigators around Australia.
Incredible feats of navigation were not the sole preserve of the Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese or British, but were part of a global current of trade, migration and voyaging – all made possible by skills and technologies that understood wind, water and stars. This new gallery space tells the stories of all these navigators under the southern skies using more than 500 objects from the National Maritime Collection - many never shown publicly before.
John and Jacqui Mullen Collection
On display now.
Learn about early European interest in finding the ‘Great South Land’ through a collection of rare manuscripts, books, maps and instruments donated the Australian National Maritime Museum.
The exhibition includes some of the earliest maps and descriptions of ‘New Holland’ and its First Nations peoples, silver dinner plates that had once belonged to Viscount Sydney after whom our city is named, and lavishly illustrated accounts of two early 19th century French expeditions.
The collection was donated by John Mullen AM and Jacqui Mullen through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program and exhibited with the support of the Australian National Maritime Museum Foundation.
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Who is our Dutch Navigator?
One of the objects in this exhibition is a painting of a Dutch navigator, from around 1685 and attributed to Dutch artist Jan Verkolje.
Dr Nigel Erskine dug into the research to find out and published his findings in our Signals magazine.
