Irini Malliaros/ Silentworld Foundation
The Barangaroo Boat was discovered in the vicinity of a shipyard on what is today reclaimed land. It is thought to have been pulled up on shore at the end of its life, where it remained until it was unearthed during the excavations by Sydney Metro for the new Barangaroo Station.
The late 1700s saw the onset of European colonisation in Australia, with the transportation of British convicts and free settlers to the largest land mass in the Pacific. While initially set to reduce overcrowding in British prisons, eventually it also led to European settlement with the construction of additional roads, buildings and farms.
More than 200 years later, people like Renee Malliaros – a marine archaeologist with Silentworld Foundation in Sydney – spend their days looking for remnants of that period to better understand and conserve colonial Australia’s story.
When Sydney Metro discovered a boat believed to date to the 1820s while excavating for a station box in the city, maritime archaeological firm Cosmos Archaeology was engaged to undertake the excavation. Once removed from the ground, Malliaros was brought in to assemble a team and quickly get to work conserving the timbers.
The Barangaroo Boat is potentially the oldest known colonial Australian-built craft ever to be excavated. Measuring 9x3 metres, it is believed the boat was used to carry out small ferrying jobs along rivers. It is not the most eye-catching find, or the most well-put-together craft, but that is exactly why Malliaros is interested in the discovery.
“It’s significant because it shows us not a very glamorous part of what it was like for the Europeans that came here early on,” she tells TCT. “They were trying to establish some sort of system here and that boat is like a little detail of that system. It’s not the big, flashy buildings. It’s not the jails. It’s not what you normally think of when you think early colonial stuff. It’s a detail but a very important detail because it gives us a picture that we would not normally get.”
Irini (Renee) Malliaros scanning parts of the Barangaroo Boat.
After the boat was excavated piece by piece, and before it was stored in tanks of clean water and treated with chemicals, Malliaros and her team commenced digitally recording the find. On the back of advice given by colleagues in the UK working on the Newport Medieval Ship, the team sought the expertise of Belgium-based 3D recording specialist Thomas Van Damme, whose Annotated Scans Method utilises the Artec Eva structured light scanner and Rhino software. Said to be easy to use and able to capture geometry and colour, the Eva was used to scan large and structural parts of the ship in as little as 15 minutes, while some of the thinner pieces were suspended to ensure scanning could be executed in one go. Altogether, the scanning and processing of the 300 pieces was completed in two months - compared with up to a year with former tracing processes - but it was not without its challenges.
“The challenges were to do with finding a balance between having a piece that you can scan and not having too much noise, while also keeping the piece wet. Any water on the surfaces creates noise and causes it to go a bit funky, but then on the other hand you want to dry it to get a good enough skin,” explained Malliaros, before highlighting a positive. “Structured light scanning captures the type of detail that we’re after in archaeological recording. So, we could see the nail holes, we could see the tree nails, we could even see saw marks.”
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Having scanned the pieces, Malliaros then processed the data in Artec Studio to clean up the surrounding geometry and supports, before aligning the scans. This information will be used to help reconstruct the boat, which is hoped to be exhibited in its full size at the Australian National Maritime Museum. But before that can happen, a scale model is to be 3D printed to ‘give us an idea of how to fit the pieces back together, where to rebend them if needed, and how it’s going to be supported so that no strain is placed on the timbers.’
Per Malliaros, there is nothing like the Barangaroo Boat – a 19th century ship that has been excavated, recorded in 3D and then conserved – in an Australian museum and so getting the digital recording of the boat right has been paramount. She recalls some colleagues in Western Australia who, when working on the conservation of the Dutch ship Batavia, used polyethylene sheets to record the timbers. Over 30+ years, those sheets shrunk and rendered the entire record dimensionally useless. As such, for Malliaros and her team, the benefit of 3D technologies cannot be understated.
“We’re in a massively better position than anybody else who undertook this sort of project in Australia has ever been, because [3D scanning and 3D printing] makes our work so much easier,” finishes Malliaros. “It makes the record that’s going to follow this boat around so much more accurate.”
