HMAS Castlemaine, Melbourne

HMAS Castlemaine is a corvette naval ship of the Royal Australian Navy from the world war 2, it is one of the only remaining ships from WW2 in Victoria and remains afloat at the gem pier in Williamstown, VIC. The museum ship is definitely worth a visit as shows the history of the ship itself, the voyages it did around Australia, New Guinea & Timor during WW2. The staff cabins, engine room, radar room & boiler room is well preserved and gives you great insight about the ship. It also has lots of information about the crew on board this ship during WW2. It’s open only of weekends and public holidays.

All is good until I saw the displays talking about the western invasion to China in 1900. As a Chinese, I can say the contents in the museum are very offensive and inaccurate. First of all, the boxers are not the reason that China was invaded by 8 western nations. The real reason was money. The European colonial empires such as UK robbed nearly every nation that wasn’t a European colony back then. China was simply one of them. Even without the boxers, the war would still happen. Secondly, the boxers were not the villains. Before the 1900’s war, the western nations had started dozens of wars against China. Before 1900, they had raided astronomical amount of money out of the Chinese government and its people. And the war reparations directly caused millions of Chinese families to die of starvation, and indirectly killed over 50 million people in the civil wars triggered by them. Imagine living as a civilian in 1900, you had wonderful kids and a happy life until a few pirates came. People around you died one by one because of them, but the police was too afraid to do anything. What would you do? I’m not arguing their method was right. Some of them did kill innocent European civilians. But when a man was placed into a desperate situation like this, it’s understandable. Thirdly, I don’t understand why modern Australians want to be proud of this history. The western nations were nothing but bandits in this war. I bet that the so-called “souvenirs” were actually robbed from the bodies of an innocent Chinese family. There isn’t anything to be proud of. Additionally, the text made it clear that only 6 Australians tried to join the raid (but failed to arrive in time). So it’s really not related to Australians. Lastly, I have completely no idea why this history is displayed on a WW2 warship. The ship didn’t even exist back then!