From 1971 the Western Australian Museum carried out a series of successful excavations on all four wrecks and the ANCODS collection grew to over 28,000 records including over 125,000 individual objects and coins. The majority of these are in the care of the Western Australian Museum and have been published in ANCODS catalogues.

Both the Australian Commonwealth and the Netherlands government have been allocated portions of the collection since 1974. Parts of the Australian Commonwealth allocation are now housed in the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. The Dutch assignments are held by the Geldmuseum (Money Museum) in Utrecht (800 records) and the Nederlands Scheepvaartsmuseum (Netherlands Maritime Museum) in Amsterdam (300 records).

In January 1997 a three-day ANCODS colloquium was held Fremantle instigating the formulation of two ANCODS resolutions.

1) To promote the physical integrity of the collection under a single administration in Australia at the Western Australian Museum, and
2) To expand the existing agreement to include joint Australian and Netherlands scientific research (JANSR)

The ANCODS Web Site

In 2006, during the 400-year celebrations in Sydney which were held to commemorate the Dutch landing of Janszoon on the Cape York Peninsula, the Dutch Minister for Education, Culture and Science announced that the Netherlands government planned to repatriate its part of the ANCODS collection. This was in line with the first 1997 resolution concerning modern archaeological practice of non-dispersal of collections.

Currently, the Netherlands ANCODS stakeholders are taking this opportunity to register their ANCODS collections anew, according to best international practice and develop a high quality online database. This database will enable online access for Dutch, Australian and other international researchers to the ANCODS collection once it has been repatriated to Australia. This is done in accordance with the second 1997 resolution, which aims at fostering education, scholarly research, dissemination of information and community access to the ANCODS collection.

Similarly, the Australian ANCODS collection is being audited at the Western Australian Museum at the moment. Once this process is complete it will be combined with the Dutch database.

The future aim is to make the ANCODS database publicly available online through this Web site.

Diving on the Batavia Images courtesy
WA Maritime Museum