In the 50 years since the seminal shipwreck excavations of Australia’s early European shipwrecks Trial (1622), Batavia (1629), Vergulde Draak (1656), and HMS Pandora (1791), maritime archaeologists have constantly been refining their approaches and research directions to investigating the Australian connection to the sea. Last year, their professional organization, the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology (AIMA), celebrated its 40-year anniversary, while the Flinders University Maritime Archaeology Program celebrated 20 years since its establishment by Mark Staniforth in 2002. Flinders is still the only university in the southern hemisphere to offer a named maritime archaeology degree, and the university has the highest ranked archaeology program worldwide with a dedicated maritime postgraduate course (according to Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings for 2021). This year marks the 40th anniversary of the commonwealth government’s Australian Underwater Cultural Heritage Program (1983–2023). All these milestones mark the maturing of maritime archaeology as a subdiscipline of archaeology in Australasia, and nearly all the authors in this collection can claim affiliation with AIMA or Flinders University, or in many cases both.

Over the past 50 years, maritime archaeology in Australasia has provided significant evidence and insights into Indigenous, domestic, and international seafaring contexts. Recent studies of Australasia’s diverse maritime cultural heritage focus on ships and seafaring through detailed recording, study, and interpretation of extant hull remains, ship construction, and iconography. This work goes beyond single-site approaches of limited temporal and geographical dimensions, and instead inquires into vernacular and industrial technology and the socioeconomic complexity of seafaring and watercraft in general. The authors in this collection describe recent Australasian projects that contribute to our understanding of seafaring and shipbuilding, and that offer future regional directions for maritime archaeology in an internationally relevant thematic context.

Many of the articles in this collection were originally presented in a session at the Society for Historical Archaeology’s annual meeting held virtually in 2021, when such things were still relatively new experiences for most of us. The articles collected here include later additions and represent the most recent research in maritime archaeology in Australasia, broadly covering Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Nine research articles and one associated technical brief address a range of watercraft or their representations, as well as methods used to investigate and understand them, all in Australasian contexts, yet directly relevant to global practice of the discipline of maritime archaeology.

This global relevance is demonstrated by the diversity of watercraft involved, where only one can be described as solely Australian built and operated. “Wrecked All Over the Place: The Identification of Disarticulated Context-Free Ship Remains from the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia” (van Duivenvoorde et al., this issue) addresses the remains of a small working vessel operating on the same stretch of coast on which it was built. While the vessel itself may be regionally specific, the approach taken by the authors to identify it from its disarticulated and distributed remains is broadly applicable to any watercraft wrecked within reach of cultural site formation processes. “Unearthing South Australia’s Oldest Known Shipwreck: The Bark South Australian (1837)” (Hunter et al., this issue) tells of a British-built vessel operated by the nascent South Australian Company that brought British and German migrants to the new colony, was fitted for whaling, and in which Aboriginal Australians were incarcerated. “Moluccan Fighting Craft on Australian Shores: Contact Rock Art from Awunbarna, Arnhem Land” (de Ruyter et al., this issue) examines two Aboriginal Australian depictions of regional outsiders’ watercraft. “Examining Nineteenth-Century British Colonial-Built Ships, HMS Buffalo and Edwin Fox: Two Case Studies from New Zealand” (Bennett, this issue) looks at two of the many ships built in India that were essential to European colonization of Australasia, and at how in turn their study can inform understanding of shipwrightery in India. These four articles together show how the study of watercraft or their depictions that are relatively obscure in a global sense can enlighten stories of cultural contact, entanglement, reliance, and identity from an Australasian perspective.

Arguably Australia’s best-known European shipwreck, the Dutch East Indiaman Batavia, which was wrecked on a remote reef on the continent’s west coast in dramatic circumstances in 1629, provides the perspective for two articles that apply landscape approaches. “The Unlucky Voyage: Batavia’s (1629) Landscape of Survival on the Houtman Abrolhos Islands in Western Australia” (Paterson et al., this issue) considers the violent aftermath of the ship’s wrecking from the perspectives afforded by the discovery of remains of eleven victims. “A Virtual Reconstruction of the Batavia Shipwreck in its Landscape” (McCarthy and van Duivenvoorde, this issue) offers a unique synthesis of digital spatial data to illuminate this already heavily studied site in a fascinating new way.

“An Immersive Digital Commemoration of the Japanese Submarine I-124 Sunk in 1942 outside Darwin Harbor, Australia” (McCarthy et al., this issue) offers a different virtual perspective on a far more modern shipwreck. World War I and World War II brought the ships of several combatant nations to Australasian waters, yet the submarine I-124 is one of the lesser known. The ability to engage with the shipwreck in virtual reality now makes it far more accessible to Australasian and global audiences than many better-known sites. The cruiser HMAS Perth, sunk in Sunda Strait in Indonesia in 1942, is one of Australia’s more prominent wartime losses. Pearson’s consideration of the legacy of sunken military watercraft adopts a similarly “perspective challenging” approach. “Too Little, Too Late? Redefining the Legacy of HMAS Perth (I), an Australian Warship Sunk in Indonesian Waters” (Pearson, this issue) shows that worthwhile Australasian maritime archaeology is not restricted to sites only in Australasian waters.

“Application of Parametric Sub-Bottom Profilers for Responsible in Situ Management of Underwater Shallow-Buried Archaeological Materials” (Winton, this issue) examines an approach with broadly applicable potential, as does the Technical Brief “Connecting Sunken Actors: Social-Network Analysis in Maritime Archaeology” (Aragon, this issue), although the cases offered might be more familiar to Australasian readers. These articles round out a collection, that, while billed as “Australasian,” extends far beyond this limited context. By bringing together articles that quite deliberately possess significance outside the geographical bounds of Australasia, or further than the limited scope of Australasian watercraft, this thematic collection contributes to maritime archaeology in an internationally relevant context.