Axel Stenross Maritime Museum

The man from Finby

In 1927 the four-masted barque Olivebank called at Port Lincoln in the dying days of the grain-ship era, and two Finnish sailors decided to stay. One of them, Axel Stenross — a ship's carpenter born in 1895 in Finby, Finland, into a family of boatbuilders — set up a slipway on the Boston Bay foreshore and spent the next half-century building and repairing the wooden boats of the tuna and trading fleets. He worked the slip almost until his death in 1980.

A museum that smells right

The museum that opened on his site in 1983 is that rare thing: a heritage attraction that still feels like a workplace. Axel's original living quarters and workshops survive intact, the blacksmith shop stands ready, the slipway still operates, and the sheds hold a dense, salty collection of relics from the windjammer days — tools, rigging, ship models, photographs and the accumulated gear of a working waterfront. Volunteers, many of them old seafarers themselves, fill in the stories.

On the foreshore

The museum sits on the Lincoln Highway along the northern foreshore, an easy stop on the Parnkalla Trail as it traces Boston Bay. For the larger story of how this town turned fish into fortunes, see A Tuna Town's Fortune — Axel's slipway serviced the very fleet that built modern Port Lincoln.