by Duncan McKay.

The mariners of Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) were amongst the first Europeans to encounter the Australian continent along its western and northern coasts. These Europeans were unimpressed by what they found here in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the west coast proved hazardous and inhospitable, leaving a long material record of wrecked ships that today make up the collections of the Shipwrecks Museum branch of the Western Australian Museum in Cliff Street, Fremantle.
        Over December 2025 and January 2026, the exhibition First Encounters: Artist Interventions with the VOC Shipwrecks was an artistic and historical initiative emerging from research and dialogue within the aesthetics team of a larger research project Mobilising Dutch East India collections for new global stories funded by the Australian Research Council. The exhibition was curated by Corioli Souter (Head of Maritime Heritage at the WA Museum) and Arvi Wattel (Lecturer in Art History at the University of Western Australia), and presented works inspired by collections of VOC materials held locally and internationally, created by four artists, Katie West (Australia), Diyan Achjadi (Canada), Beatrice Glow (USA) and Paul Uhlmann (Australia).
        Conceived as an intervention in the museum, curator Arvi Wattel explained to me that it had been intended that the artworks would be displayed among the artefacts and materials on display in the Shipwrecks Museum that had inspired them – in this way establishing a direct dialogue. But in fact this was achieved with only two artworks being displayed alongside artefacts in the Museum proper. Parts of one of Paul Uhlmann’s artist’s books were shown alongside the Museum’s display about Francisco Pelsaert’s journal from the Batavia, and one of Diyan Achjardi’s artworks was situated amongst the recovered examples of Batavia ware pottery in the upstairs gallery. The majority of the artworks were shown independently in a gallery through the Hartog to DeVlamingh displays on the ground floor, making the artistic lens on the VOC collections a valuable, but somewhat segregated first encounter between art and maritime archaeology, between history and creativity.
        What are the learnings from human history? Are they—should they be—limited to what can be gleaned with certainty from the material record, through triangulating and corroborating primary sources to arrive at a comparatively objective account? It has certainly been an important ambition for historians to aspire to the application of scientific method in the sourcing and presentation of evidence and defensible “proofs” for their conclusions. Increasingly science is also providing advanced technological tools that are used to observe the previously unobservable, and in the processes of extracting and conserving the material record.
        But it is interesting also that human myth-making and story-telling have also been key sources for understanding the material record, and indeed have often provided the impetus and sense of orientation for investigation. There are important questions to ask about the role of socio-cultural expression as a lens for engaging with the material record and as a vehicle for interrogation and interpretation of history. Indeed, there was a time when it was recognised that artists and scientists shared key observational and conceptual skills, and that the technical skills of artists were indispensable for scientific work. But as archaeology and museology have become more sophisticated and technological, is it the case that artists and story-tellers no longer have a meaningful role? Is there nothing they can bring to these fields of scholarship or to the museum context?
        Paul Uhlmann’s work in the exhibition consisted of a series of oil paintings and two artist’s books, all of which emerged from the artist’s extensive engagement with the story of the VOC ship Batavia’s wreck and mutiny in 1629 and the journal of Franciso Pelsaert, which is the primary historical account of these events. Fundamental to Uhlmann’s work is an underlying concern with presence and absence and the related ideas of witness and trace. In particular, Uhlmann focused upon the formal properties of the calligraphic hand in which Pelsaert’s journal was written, and the jarring incongruity of its beautiful penmanship with the horrors of the story that it tells. Uhlmann’s paintings, such as the series We saw smoke on Long Island (2025) develop the sinuous lines and calligraphic flourishes of the journal’s handwriting into wisps and plumes of smoke, surrounded by and through-written with the names of people who populate Pelsaert’s account of the Batavia story. Smoke and ink are tantalising, but insubstantial, traces of Dutch people drawn into a story as named characters, and elusive Aboriginal people who it was hoped may reveal a life-saving source of fresh water.



Uhlmann’s artist books imagined the documentation of other accounts. The Book of Wonders: Lost Journal of Francisco Pelsaert 1629 (2025) imagines Pelsaert’s encounter with the wondrous strangeness of Western Australia, and the Book of Vanitas: Lost Thoughts and Images of a Batavia Victim 1629 (2025) present an account of one of the victims of the Batavia mutiny, whose skeletal remains are on display in the museum. Both of these books were displayed unbound and draped on low plinths offering the viewer a non-linear and impressionistic vantage point on a collection of collaged, overlaid and intertwined imagery and text. The silhouetted forms of native animals highlighted the barely observed presence of other witnesses to these events, and other actors whose existence was disturbed by this violent human intervention and to whom the environment was ultimately restored. The grave-like display of the skeleton underlined the disjuncture between the material record of these nameless human remains and the missing story of this person.
        Yindjibarndi artist Katie West’s artwork Locus Melo amphora / Bailer shell (2025) consisted of a number of suspended, large format photographic prints on fabric depicting a Bailer shell (Melo amphora) simply displayed in front of a draped, magenta silk backdrop. The conspicuous opulence of the silk symbolised the commodity culture that was a source of Dutch wealth, one that ultimately landed Dutch ships on the Western Australian coast. Set amongst the silk, the Bailer shell was an exotic and beautiful item, the focal point for a European eye far from home. But the Bailer shell is a natural object, at home in Western Australia. Further, the Bailer Shell is a useful object for Aboriginal people, traditionally used to carry water. West’s artworks pointed to the ways in which these natural objects signalled the presence of the people who used them, without leaving the kind of trace—signs of culture out of place—left by the Dutch. In contrast to the apparent historical objectivity of hindsight, in West’s works it was the lens of cultural continuity that revealed what may not otherwise be seen and understood in the material record.
        Jakarta-born, Canadian artist Diyan Achjadi’s work in the exhibition, entitled Batavia tenggelam (Batavia sinks), looked at the material traces of the Dutch in the collection not primarily as evidence of one historical event, but rather as a single thread in a tangled skein of exchange, domination and mutual influence unravelling over centuries. Achjadi’s installations combined Dutch bricks recovered from the wreck of the Batavia, with delicate painted and folded artworks in paper and card. They set up a tension between the patinaed permanence of already centuries-old bricks, destined for conservation in perpetuity as collection items in the museum, with the aura of ephemerality and a light touch delivered by watercolours and paper. More than that, the bricks embodied a kind of imperialistic inevitability, destined to reproduce the colonial culture wherever the ships of the VOC asserted their monopoly. In contrast the paper artworks were colourfully and intricately articulated with imagery drawn from multiple cultural, historical and contemporary sources, whose presented form didn’t seem wholly predetermined. These playful, multi-valent, dynamic and hybrid objects talked about the complex reality of colonial and post-colonial cultures. In Achjadi’s decorated cardboard bowls (Mangkok), the artist merely highlighted the continuity of global commerce and economic imperialism already evident in the 17th century items of Batavia ware recovered from the seabed that they reference.
        Beatrice Glow’s video work, Textures of Time (2025) featured digital three-dimensional renders of items from the museum’s collection presented as if the viewer were swimming through a submerged Dutch still life composition. The artwork was inspired by the concretions that form around artefacts on the seabed as a result of corrosion, moving sediment, living organisms and other natural processes producing objects whose stories include the action of environmental conditions over many centuries. Glow’s video treated the 3D digital scans as ‘digifacts’ in which the aim was not to achieve a seamless illusion of ‘virtual reality,’ but rather to leave exposed the digital architecture of vectors, pixels and code that is the environment in which so many contemporary visual illusions are suspended. Like the accretions which contain, preserve and alter the material record on the sea-bed, this artwork spoke about the ways that the digital environment interacts with interpretive approaches to the material record. Visual technologies such as lidar and photogrammetry have greatly transformed archaeological work in recent years, but it is interesting also to remember that these are not completely neutral tools and that the picture they create of the past is maintained, like the material record, in a fragile and contingent suspension.
        Conceived initially as an artistic ‘intervention’ within the museum’s collection of objects, with a few exceptions, the exhibition was largely isolated by its very separate visual identity and spatial presentation from the collection. The spatial hierarchies—while undoubtedly a product of practical circumstances—reinforced the message that the museum offers an objective presentation of artefacts and their contextual history, while the exhibited artworks offered something else, something subjective and peripheral to the work that is at the core of the museum’s purpose. So there remained an underlying sense of unrealised potential in the exhibition, inhibited by the somewhat tentative exploration of the bleeding edge between bodies of knowledge and practice.
        Unsurprisingly, what emerged from the exhibition as a whole is a sense of the gaps that remain in our understanding where the material record and scientific method fail us. Equally importantly, the artworks gently draw attention to the notion that all knowledge exists in a state of suspension within prevailing systems of thought and method that, through their pervasiveness, appear natural. In a world increasingly mediated through science and technological tools, this raises questions about methodological and mechanical subjectivities (or arbitrariness) that may be shaping our knowledge and contributing to interpretations of the past and present based on contemporary mythologies.

First Encounters: Artist Interventions with the VOC Shipwrecks, WA Shipwrecks Museum, 28 November 2025 – 1 February 2026.

---

Header images: Installation documentation of First Encounters: Artist Interventions with the VOC Shipwrecks. Photo: UWA Media.