The WA Maritime Museum

When we learned that there is a maritime museum in Perth we were excited. When we arrived we learned that there is a visiting exhibition about Pompeii and the evacuation by sea after the eruption of Vesuvius. This was going to be great.



Included in the exhibit were small items showing details of life in Pompeii. Here is a marble fountain head with a dolphin squirting the water for the two pudgy cherubic fellows on his back.

A very delicate statue of a woman on a sea horse.

These decorative masks were also fountains. A larger fountain was a sign of affluence.

This chest was of the sort found in the main entry hallway of a house in Pompeii. It would hold the money of the house. The bigger your money box, the more prestige.

Of course, the economy was built on shipping goods, often in amphora.

Those that survived were taken away on boats commanded by Pliny the Elder.

This exhibit was very good and we learned quite a lot. In the permanent collection, however, we less impressed. The curators seem to have collected a large array of mostly unrelated items and put them on display. We could find no thread to guide us through the collection. The displays often had no explanatory text to tell you why you were looking at the artefact. There were many boats but little information to get us excited about them. One of the most colorful displays seemed to be about the sale of canned fish in Australia.

In spite of the shortcomings of the permanent collection, the visit to the museum was well worth the visit if only to see the Pompeii exhibit.