Dazzle-Painted Ship Models in Australia

Dazzle-painted ship models AU National Maritime Museum

There is a selection of wonderful blog posts from 2014 that we've only recently happened upon. They were posted on the blog of the Australian National Maritime Museum, which is in Sydney Harbor, and in fact we've actually visited there. 

One of the posts, titled When in doubt, Razzle Dazzle them, includes a wonderful WWI photograph of the HMT Zealandia, adorned in striped dazzle paint. 

Two other posts, called Dazzle ship models and A dazzling connection with WWI, feature the work of museum model maker Col Gibson, who rebuilt models of some of the ships, and whose father actually served on a dazzle-painted transport ship during that war. See above models in process. 

As discussed in four blog posts, including a longer, more recent one on WWI dazzle, art and fashion, dazzle-painting was widely adopted, not only for ship camouflage, but throughout popular culture as well. All this is also featured in an ongoing exhibition, titled War at Sea: The Navy in WWI, which is touring through Australia until March 2018. Wish we had seen it while visiting there.

Blog post detail from AU National Maritime Museum