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Sweep away the sand to see what’s buried.
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What did you find?
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Can you use it to identify the wreck?
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If not, keep looking till you’ve found something that could only have come from one of the ships.
Archaeologists carefully remove sand to uncover wreck sites. What they find helps them identify wrecks. If several ships have been lost in the same area, it can be tricky to work out which wreck they’ve found.
Several ships have wrecked at Port Albert, Victoria. Here are just three of them:
- Blackbird was a three-masted barque made from iron, with a cargo of coal. It was wrecked by ‘reckless navigation’ during a storm in 1878. All 29 people on board made it safely to shore. They were helped by some local Indigenous youths, who got a fire going to warm up the soaked castaways.
- Ariel was a wooden two-masted schooner. It wrecked in 1846 after becoming becalmed and unable to sail while trying to cross the bar. It was carrying sheep and cattle to Tasmania. Sadly the cargo drowned.
- Thistle was an iron paddle steamer that wrecked on the bar in 1859. It was carrying general cargo and passengers from Melbourne, and battling a headwind when it ran out of coal to fuel its engines. They started burning the cargo and even the passengers’ belongings, but it wasn’t enough to beat the weather. All 57 on board were saved.