Large, possibly historic, anchor found at Bunbury breakwater build shocks construction workers

A large and possibly historic anchor has been uncovered by construction workers at the northern breakwater at Bunbury’s Casuarina Boat Harbour. The anchor was found on Monday morning at the construction site where a new breakwater is being built and is the first potentially historically significant item to be found by workers in the area. The senior project engineer at the Department of Transport’s maritime branch, Megan Willis, said given the history of the site, the team was aware heritage items may be on the seabed but the discovery was still a surprise. “The excavator operator was working in the water, moving the rocks into position, when he caught the chain, brought the chain ashore and the anchor came up on the end of it,” she said. “This is the first item like this we’ve found on site. We’re aware, given the history of the site with the Bunbury timber jetty, that there was the potential to find heritage items on the seabed. “Before the work started, we partnered with the WA Maritime Museum to do an archaeological survey of the old timber jetty footprint to see what might be down there. We’ve notified the museum researchers of the find today.” Ms Willis said they did not yet know the history of the unusual find or how old it was, but said it had been “definitely a different day on site”. Chief executive officer of the Western Australian Museum Alec Coles said the anchor was understood to have been “dragged out from under the jetty”. “Our team think it could have been a mooring anchor of some kind,” he said. “It is really difficult to date these things. We’d be looking at documentary records and what might have dropped an anchor there or even been wrecked there. “It’s pretty difficult to do that (date it) through any kind of chemical analysis.” Mr Coles said often with construction, buried history comes to light. “It’s a great way of identifying things from the past,” he said. “We believe there were an excess of probably 1600 or 1700 historic shipwrecks. “Whether this is related to one of them or not, we don’t know at this stage, but we certainly will be doing everything we can to establish that.” Ms Willis said it would be business as usual for construction staff, with more of the breakwater still to be built as contractors WA Limestone Contracting and Italia Stone Group team up to complete the works.