Overview
An historic Claremont boat building shed is now housed in a purpose built new shed on the edge of Freshwater Bay as part of Claremont Museum. It is in the popular Mrs Herbert’s Park, which receives large numbers of visitors to swim, barbeque, picnic and use the playground facilities. Many visitors to Mrs Herbert’s Park are not aware that the boat shed and Claremont Museum are here.
Project Aims
This project aims to undertake the following:
- Provide visibility from outside the boat shed to engage visitors to Mrs Herbert’s Park. This may be achieved through replacing parts of the outer shed with clear walls so the inside of the shed is visible at all times.
- Enable visitors to independently enter the boat shed during museum open hours without need for supervision by museum staff. This should also provide wheelchair accessibility.
- Provide new, updated interpretation of the boat shed.
- Address conservation needs in the boat shed.
Background
The boat shed was built in about 1905 at 8 Victoria Avenue in Claremont. It was used for boat building and repairs.
The boat shed and its contents were moved to Claremont Museum in 1996. They were housed in a new shed in Mrs Herbert’s Park close to the river. This saved the shed from demolition and made the shed and its contents accessible for interpretation at the museum.
The Swan River adjoining the museum is important to Noongar people and is a registered site under the Aboriginal Heritage Act (1972). Until at least the 1940s the grounds adjoining the museum were an occasional camping site for local Nyungar families. The museum itself is on the State Heritage Register but is not a registered Aboriginal site.
Currently the boat shed has interpretation that was installed in 1996. This project will update that interpretation as well as addressing access and conservation needs.
Museum staff currently spend considerable time with visitors in the new boat shed looking at the historic boat shed as the artefacts are vulnerable to theft and if people go through the barriers and walk inside the historic boat shed the floor is dangerously uneven. This project will enable the public to safely visit the boat shed unaccompanied.
Design
We approached the boat building tools and process through building an actual boat in the interactive. Selecting a tool takes you to an indicative phase in the boat building process while it gives you summary information about the tool.
Each tool then has a second and third level of detail, further explaining the uses and giving supporting photographs.
We modeled each tool and the entire boat, giving us the ability to strip it down to 10 stages. Each stage was rendered out into 10 movie clips and then displayed so that visitors can:
- rotate the boat by dragging their finger across the screen, or
- select the tool that they are interested in and the boat automatically rotates as necessary
Superb content was written for this project by Mike Lefroy and invaluable boat model consulting by Ross Anderson. Thanks guys!
