Explore the collection
Searching for a great southern land
The Silentworld Foundation collection reflects a 35-year love affair with maritime history and the extraordinary achievements of the brave mariners, from many nations, who sailed from their home countries to expand contemporary knowledge of the world in the 15th to 19th centuries.
Despite the first Australians arriving some 40,000 years earlier, from the perspective of the rest of the known world, Australia remained an unknown and unvisited continent longer than any other substantive part of the world except Antarctica. The collection focuses on this late emergence of Australia into the understanding of the world’s geographers and mariners.
The collection comprises over 2,000 original objects including maps, paintings, manuscripts, shipwreck material, ephemera, coins and medallions, militaria and historical artefacts.
It highlights the interaction between both the Indigenous and colonial cultures during this period. Some of the earliest printed material and maps in the collection date back to the early 1500s and the collection’s focus ends in the early to mid 1800s when Australia started to be recognized as the nation that it has become today.
In particular, the collection focuses on the world’s emerging knowledge of Australia from the days when the great southern land was a mythological continent, imagined as necessary to balance the weight of the Northern Hemisphere, through to the golden period of European exploration when competing world powers were sailing the world’s oceans seeking military advantage, the conversion of souls, fame and fortune, and the pursuit of knowledge and scientific endeavour. The Portuguese, the Spanish, the British and the Dutch, in particular, were at the forefront of this exploration, and the Silentworld Collection contains original material from all of these nations’ activities, as well as that of the Indigenous populations they encountered.
The arid cliffs, coral reefs and treacherous shallows of the Australian coastline became the graveyard of countless vessels from many nations during the 17th to 19th centuries, and for over a decade the Silentworld Foundation has been mounting expeditions to look for some of the most historically significant shipwrecks of the period yet to be found.
The collection includes not just artefacts found on some of those expeditions, but also documents, paintings, and other memorabilia of the men and women that made these stories so fascinating and who created history through their bravery and quest for knowledge.
Explore by category
Date range: 1541-1836
Date range: 1629-1890
Date range: 1793-1849
Date range: 1768-c1850
Date range: 1619-1880
Date range: c1700-c1860
Curator’s corner
New acquisitions, staff favourites and curios
‘Emigrants to Australia’, Pearlware child’s mug
The mug is decorated with an underglaze and a blue transfer print. On the body, it is titled ‘Emigrants to Australia’. This type of body and glaze was discontinued by 1840. Comparison of the handle shape and the profile of the foot, point to the attribution of manufacture by the Davenport Factory.
Bronze bell from the Dutch ship DELTA
Delta was a ship-rigged vessel with two decks and three masts. It was built in Dordrecht, Netherlands in 1839 at the shipyard of Jan Schouten and registered in the same port. Its hull was constructed of oak and sheathed in ‘yellow metal’. Delta was owned by H. van der Sande at the time of its loss and was engaged as a cargo trader.
The Delta carried 29 crew and passengers, while sailing from Melbourne to Batavia in ballast when wrecked at Kenn Reefs on 30 May 1854 whilst under the command of Captain J.G. Kunst. This vessel loss supports the pattern of shipwrecks located on a well-travelled shipping route that was poorly charted until the mid-nineteenth century. The crew of the Delta could see four other shipwrecks at Kenn Reefs at the time of their vessel’s loss.
Portrait of the ship CATO
Important image of a ship associated with Matthew Flinders, that would shortly become one of the most famous early shipwrecks in eastern Australian waters. This is a fine ship’s portrait, by one of the great exponents of the art