AN online exhibition about the history of the Royal Australian Navy has been launched by the Australian War Memorial.

Described by the memorial’s Navy fellow commander, Andy Schroder, as “a digital deep dive”, the exhibition commemorates navy people through their own stories and shows how the navy has evolved over more than a century, covering the history of Australia’s navies, from the colonial navies, two world wars, recent conflicts in the Middle East and contemporary peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

“To navigate around the exhibition’s videos, photographs, artworks and three-dimensional images visitors can use a star map or the more traditional navigational tools to find out more about the navy,” Commander Schroder said.

The online exhibition features a new donation to the Australian War Memorial: an Iraqi Silkworm Missile captured by Navy Clearance Divers during the first Gulf War.

AWM senior curator David Pearson said of the Chinese-manufactured 7.48-metre-long HY-2 Silkworm Missile being shown in the show: “It was captured by the Royal Australian Navy during the first Gulf War in 1991 from Iraq and is an important insight to our recent history.”

The launch coincides with the 80th anniversary of the death of Ordinary Seaman Teddy Sheean VC, who was killed, aged 18, during an attack by Japanese aircraft which sank “HMAS Armidale” in the Arafura Sea on December 1, 1942, when he returned to his gun to fire on Japanese aircraft.

Sheean was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross in 2020 and and the exhibition pays tribute to his life.

The exhibition is accessible at navy.awm.gov.au