Time for some Newman Nostalgia!
Meet Gerry Westenberg (1974)! He was one of our inaugural students at Marist College Junior School, Subiaco, from Year 4 in 1965, before coming on to Marist College Senior School, Churchlands, where he finished his schooling in 1974.
Gerry reckons he was always a bit of a nerd at school, but he excelled at sport, playing cricket and football, being one of the Best Players for Under-14 Football a few times.
He also won many events at the Athletics Carnivals, which saw him win the Lew Jones Trophy for Champion Athlete in 1974, and he contacted us recently to see if he could come in and see this trophy in our Archives.
Today was the day! We spent a few very enjoyable hours with Gerry, who used to be a maths teacher before becoming the lead auditor for RAAF training...
…but we were fascinated to find out what he’s up to these days and think you might find it as interesting as we did!
Gerry, you see, makes model ships! He started making them when he was a little tacker, and has now built more than 120 of them. A life’s passion!
Gerry's precise, exact models of the HMAS Perth, Kormoran and five submarines are on display down at the Maritime Museum on Victoria Quay in Fremantle, where he volunteers every Wednesday, and two of his models of HMAS Sydney are on display in the Innovations Gallery at Boola Bardip (Western Australian Museum). They feature the Sydney both before and after it was sunk, the latter forensically reconstructed from the image surveys so as to be as exact as possible.
He uses balsa wood, copper wire, cardboard, resin, tubing, fabric, an assortment of swear words, and myriad other materials to build each one from scratch. He does a great deal of research about each vessel, and uses plans - some of which are more accurate than others. They are always to the same scale (1/192), which he finds is large enough to show detail, but small enough so that storage isn't a huge problem.
“If I am building a ship from a class of ships, I will often choose one that sank, as a way of paying tribute to those who went down with the ship. Unfortunately, this can be quite challenging, as there is usually a small number of photographs that I can use as a reference. I use photos as much as I can to inform my model building, as I have found over the years that many plans are drawn incorrectly and this is usually only discovered when you are half-way through the build.”
(WA Shipwrecks Museum)
Gerry runs the occasional model making workshop too, and is having an exhibition of his model ships in April 2023 down at the Shipwrecks Museum - keep an eye out for it!
Gerry Westenberg (1974) with the Lew Jones Trophy for Champion Athlete, on the front of which Gerry's name is inscribed for winning the trophy in 1974.
L-R: Wes Olson, author of many great books including HMAS Sydney (II): in Peace and War (2016), and Bitter Victory: The Death of HMAS Sydney (2002) with Gerry Westenberg (1974). Courtesy Western Australian Museum.