ABC News writer Jessica Hayes writes about Michael Stoddart’s passion to build a ship in a bottle. Here’s an excerpt from it.
All that you need
Michael Stoddart says, building a ship in a bottle all comes down to finding the right vessel. “My experience is that you need to have a bottle that inspires you,” he said.
“A nice, clean bottle which doesn’t distort the image when you look through it. Modern gin bottles are quite good, so you could start off by getting a bottle of gin, and that will give you lots and lots of ideas.”
About Stoddart
Professor Stoddart, former chief scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division, is a new student of building ships in bottles, but has been constructing model ships for years.
He started his latest passion late last year, and has made eight since September.
He can’t put an hour figure on how long they take to make, but he estimates it’s weeks rather than months.
For a longer project he often puts in “10 minutes here, 10 minutes there”. What it does take, Professor Stoddart says, is “patience”.
“You have to be prepared to get up and go and have a cup of coffee or walk the dog or something like that,” he said.
“It’s fiddly — it’s not difficult, but it’s fiddly because all the parts are very small. You’ve got to be prepared to breathe deeply, hold your breath and just do what you need to do.”
It is therapeutic
Once you’re in the swing of it, Professor Stoddart says it’s “therapeutic”.
“It’s very nice to be able to sit down and work with your fingers, work with your hands. Especially if your day job is sitting behind a computer all the time. You could spend 10 minutes or half an hour and you actually see something done, and I find that very satisfying.”
World record attempt
Professor Stoddart is behind a world record attempt being staged in Hobart this weekend as part of the Australian Wooden Boat Festival, and is hoping to gather the greatest number of ships in bottles together in one place at one time.
Attendees have been asked to bring along their own pieces to help reach the target of 1,000.
“There’s a museum in Norway that’s got 655, and they’re on permanent display,” he said.
“We’re going to establish the record by people bringing their own ships in.”
Model boat aficionado and Hobartian Gary Roberts says he’s proud to contribute to the inaugural collection.
“I’ve just got a couple of boats that my parents gave me, and I just hope that it boosts up the numbers and we might make a record out of it,” Mr Roberts said.
It’s appreciating Maritime art
“We’ll build on it [the ship-in-a-bottle collection] again next year so hopefully it gets bigger and bigger.”
For Professor Stoddart, it’s about appreciating “maritime art”.
“Every boat that you put in a bottle is different, and you can find something really, really good in every model,” he said.
“Whether it’s an amateur model or someone who’s been doing it for years and years, there are bits of it you can look at and think ‘that’s really, really lovely’. “I just like to look at them and pick up ideas.”
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Source: abc
