THE MARITIME MUSEUM AT PORT ADELAIDE with Keith Conlon

Fair weather or foul, the Gawler Reach at Port Adelaide is still a welcome sight for sailors of the seven seas, and even on a gloomy winter's day, the almost dockside Maritime Museum is a warm, dry and very interesting haven for a traveller. Lipson Street gleams in the grey as a heritage jewel with its monuments to high finance for the high seas - four fine Victorian era bank buildings. And the old bondstore that houses one of our most enduring Jubilee 150 projects, the Maritime Museum, holds its own. It was built in the 1850's when you could store your hogshead of wine for four pence per week. We can't offer you a claret anymore, but there is a heady brew of matters briny inside.

The landmark lighthouse at Port Adelaide has been a part of the museum since its inception in 1986. The view from the top over the old port precinct makes the spiral climb worthwhile. It's worth calling into the bondstore too for its new "Life's A Beach" exhibition, because it playfully symbolises our long and continuing love affair with our sandy shoreline. There's a short "jetty walk" for instance; they've been a drawcard along our suburban beaches for more than a century.

There are shades of the old amusement parks too - they all had a penny arcade and some of the old machines are in good working nick - as long as you have a few twenty cent pieces to spare. That's inflation for you!

"Life's A Beach" also brings home to young school groups and weekend families that surfing wasn't always the way it is now. A legendary board maker's early creations conjure up the legendary breaks on our coast, from Middleton to Chinaman's Hat on the Yorke Peninsula and all the way to the West Coast.

Leave some time to ponder the significance of the Maritime Museum's most historic piece, an anchor from Captain Matthew Flinders' "Investigator". It was lost at memory Cove near Port Lincoln in 1802. Eight of his drew perished when they set off to look for water in a cutter, and part of the etched copper plate in their memory that Flinders left there is enclosed in glass next to the giant iron anchor. The historic meeting soon after between the French navigator Captain Baudin and Flinders will soon be celebrated at the museum with their coming Encounter 1802 exhibition.

Come the September holidays and the Maritime Museum will again be running tours down the Port River to detour at the Torrens Island PowerStation into the North Arm and the ships graveyard. The grand old lady of this collection in the mangroves is the "Santiago", built in the 1850's in Scotland and scuttled here in the 1940's. Further in, the "Dorothy H Stirling" was a six masted wooden ship that's so silted up that it's become an island in the stream.

Upstairs in the massive bondstore in the Port's historic precinct, there are all sorts of remnants of a rich nautical past round out shores in the old Nautical Museum collection. Amidst the models and bridge "furniture", there's a tribute to the "Star of Greece". Seventeen of her crew were lost as it was wrecked at Port Willunga in 1888. Miniatures there are aplenty, great examples of the model maker's craft. The Museum has more than three hundred in its collection, and many of them will fill the upstairs hall with memories over the next few months.

Downstairs, the "Active II" is a real full-size ketch, built within the old stone walls. There were once three hundred or so in "the mosquito fleet", serving dozens of ports. Just over a century ago, there were the semi-trailers of the sea. We watched an interstate group of primary schoolkids clamber over every inch of the boat and under instruction, work the loading boom.

Down one side of the ketch hall, several magnificent figureheads hang. A whaler with a harpoon, a Scotsman wielding a sword, and innocent maidens, they all tell a story of the sea. You'll just have to come and hear them at the Maritime Museum of South Australia.

Details:
South Australian Maritime Museum
126 Lipson Street, Port Adelaide SA 5015
Ph: 08-8207-6255
Fax: 08-8207-6266
Open Daily 10.00am to 5.00pm
Email: maritime@history.sa.gov.au