This book of colonial art's been sitting in storage, but that's about to change

Royal Society of Tasmania turning colonial maritime art album into a digital flip book Thu 25 Jun 2026 at 5:36am In short: The Royal Society of Tasmania is turning a unique collection of colonial maritime art into a digital flip book, to allow the public to see it in its entirety for the first time and extend on Tasmania's visual record. British sailor Owen Stanley used watercolours to depict his 19th century expeditions surveying the coasts of Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia. What's next? The work will be made available online to the public later this year. It was anxiety around the cultural impact of Australia's impending federation that led to the Royal Society of Tasmania obtaining a rare piece of maritime history in 1900. "The council, they were worried that Tasmania would be swallowed up in this big amorphous federated country and that Tasmanian heritage and history might be lost," Mary Koolhof, a council member at the Royal Society, said. "So they started a campaign to collect books, artworks and maps that were of cultural heritage importance to Tasmania." The society was donated an album of art by Owen Stanley — British sailor, captain and amateur painter — depicting what he saw as he surveyed the coasts of Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. "He was tasked with producing maps and charts for the Admiralty, but he was also quite a gifted artist," Ms Koolhof said. Despite the album being "extremely valuable" and "absolutely unique", it has been sitting in storage at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart due to the fragility of the watercolour paintings and the book itself. So the society applied for grant funding to conserve the album and turn it into a digitised flip book. "In the Royal Society, we think, well, we are the custodians of this history — we have to share it and get it out there,"Ms Koolhof said. Capturing rare glimpses of Tasmanian history The album depicts slices of life in the places Stanley visited in the 19th century, complete with handwritten explanations, that may otherwise have been lost to history. One work depicts a man struggling in the water after going overboard a ship. "A flock of albatrosses came and attacked him, and Owen Stanley captured that in his painting,"Ms Koolhof said. "There's this amazing painting of a man beating off the birds." Ms Koolhof said the beauty of the digital flip book was that people would be able to see Stanley's handwritten inscriptions next to the paintings. "If we didn't have Owen Stanley's handwritten explanation, we'd think, what are all those birds doing around that fellow in the water?" she said. Another of Ms Koolhof's favourites is a painting of a timber cutting station in the bush on the Tasman Peninsula. "Now, I would bet that there's no existing images of that," Ms Koolhof said. "He captured things of the time that are now gone and are of interest to Tasmanian history." Conserving, photographing and digitising the album Art coordinator Marley Large is in charge of the Royal Society's 950 catalogued works, which she said were worth several millions of dollars. She said Stanley's collection was unique because of his ability to tell a story, and because much of it was from the water. "He travelled inland as well — he went down to Port Arthur, he described visually the dogs who were guarding the peninsula to prevent prisoners from coming up," she said. "He also did several drawings of the coal mines at Saltwater River and how that operated, with the inclined tramway that went down to the jetty and straight onto the boats." When the society received a grant from the Maritime Museums of Australia Project Support Scheme, the first step was to conserve the album — which was in a state of disrepair with some pages removed, corners bent and the spine unstable — then have it professionally photographed. "Now we're in the process of having it made into a flip book so that people can access it online from anywhere," she said. She hopes the work will allow the public to gain a broader understanding of Australia's maritime history. "These images haven't been seen, outside of the museum, before,"Ms Large said. The work is expected to be available online later this year. [Image text:] fenalSellemenl VDl. end s inelind plane and Jelly