Alex Ibels joined the volunteer team three years ago after relocating to Melbourne from Canberra during the Covid pandemic. He has an undergraduate degree in design with experience photography, digital media production, 3D computer modelling, and IT.
Alex also has a strong interest in history. His focus on maritime history stems from old family connections to shipbuilding and marine art. “I started research in marine art about 20 years ago. I had an ancestor who was a marine artist,” he said.
That early interest grew into a passion. Alex now maintains a comprehensive database of several key Australian artists and their works, and he has published articles on the topic.
When he arrived in Melbourne, Seaworks was one of the places he visited for research. During his first visit in 2022, Alex was impressed by the extent and importance of Seaworks’ photographs. “It has a surprisingly strong collection. It’s a very broad collection of twentieth-century material, with a handful of [important] early photos,” he said.
With prior experience in archive management, Alex was uniquely positioned to help Seaworks modernise its legacy catalogue while cataloguing new items and assisting with organisation, preservation, display and interpretation of the collection.
He also contributes to new knowledge in this field. Recently, he has explored the relationship between commercial photography and marine art in Australia. The cataloguing process has allowed him to compile a comprehensive list of prominent marine photographic publishers in Australia and New Zealand over the past 150 years. The collection consists of identified examples from almost a hundred of photographers, including Williamstown identity Allan C. Green.
“The Seaworks photo collection is fairly comprehensive,” Alex said. “In addition to items sourced from the Polly Woodside museum, there are segments donated by individual shipping enthusiasts. The Ralph Varnes ship photo collection is quite vast, and then there is the Paul Webb collection as well.”
The collection includes more than 30,000 prints and an extensive reference library, including Lloyd’s registers beginning from the nineteenth century. “So, we have information on [many] ships, even if we don’t have photos,” Alex said.
This collection will be of particular interest to family historians seeking images of vessels on which their ancestors arrived in Australia.
Alex helps with cataloguing at Seaworks one day a week and is readying its first digitally searchable catalogue, which he hopes will be initially available as a kiosk in the Museum. Visitors will be able to search the collection themselves – by individual ships, type of ship, or by shipping line – making it easier to access information in the Seaworks collection.
