Secret Mission #1 - City Museum

Before I get into today's adventures, I'd just like to say thank you to everyone who sent me a little note (or a long one!) after reading yesterday's entry. They meant a lot to me. After writing last night's blog, I realized that what I probably needed to do today was to get out of the house and do some more exploring, so I began plotting pretty much the moment I'd switched the computer off for the night. It started with me asking Jen if she'd be interested in going on an "adventure" if she wasn't working today, and she agreed. I figured this was a pretty safe bet, as Jen's not had any supply work since last Thursday (you can tell the end of the school year is coming!). And sure enough, by 8am this morning it was clear that she wouldn't be getting work for today either, and the game was on.

I told Jen that we'd be leaving at noon, so she had a few hours in the morning to do the email/video chat thing, which has become an important part of both of our days. In the meantime, I was frantically doing research on how to get to a variety of points of interest around the city that I'd already picked out in my mind for this little plot. I wrote down travel instructions for each of the destinations on separate slips of paper and folded them up. So when noon rolled around and it was time to leave, Jen had to pick one slip and lead us to where we were going. The slips didn't say WHERE we were going, only how to GET there.

So, for example, today's instructions read:

"Go to the Brunswick train station, take the train downtown to Parliament Station. Exit onto Nicholson Street. Follow Nicholson Street south to Spring Street. Continue along Spring Street. Turn left at Treasury Place."

This lead us to the City Museum, which is housed in the old Treasury Building. (OK, so I know I must be totally out of my mind to put this sort of game together, but it was fun and made for an added sense of intrigue as we headed out. So there.) Anyway. Back to the museum. The Treasury Building sits right next to Parliament House, which is where the Victorian state government rules from. In fact, there was a time in the early 1900's where the Treasury Building itself was used as the state parliament, since the national parliament had moved in next door! The building was originally constructed to hold the gold that was coming in from the gold rush in the 1850's - but shortly after it was built, the city's banks also built vaults of their own and the gold all moved out. Since then it's been a working government building, and even today it has an important function. The state governor, the Queen's representative in the state of Victoria (equivalent to Ontario's Lieutenant Governor), comes here once a week to sign off any new legislation that's been approved by the state parliament next door. We got to do a tour of the room where the signings take place, which was kinda neat.

I thought it was interesting that although most of the building had been turned into a museum, there were still working offices located on the top floor (where the Governor comes to sign documents is upstairs too). On the main floor there were several neat exhibitions: one on the history of Melbourne from about the 1800's - present, one on the evolution of amusement parks (focusing notably on Luna Park, an historic amusement park out by St. Kilda), and one on silver smithing. The most random fact of the day came from one of the main floor exhibitions - did you know that the Salvation Army was the first organization to produce moving pictures in Australia? Who knew? From the amusement park exhibit, we also liked the fortune-telling cards. It wasn't really explained well how they worked, but I think these were cards that you would purchase out of a fortune-telling machine or something. In any case, their fortunes were really funny (and had mostly to do with VERY adult themes!)

In the basement was the exhibit I really came to see, which was all about the gold vaults and the gold that used to be stored here. All the old vaults have been turned into interactive exhibits, whose aim is to transport you back to the mid-1800's so you could imagine you were in the middle of the gold rush. In one vault, we watched and listened as two video-screen renditions of 1850's men haggled over the price of gold. In another, we watched simulated news reports about "current events" of the time, such as the huge number of ships left abandoned in Port Phillip Bay as their crews deserted and went exploring for gold. What was so cool about these reports is that they were done with the news crew from today's Channel 7 newscasts - but all the photographic footage in the background was circa 1865! (Hmmm... I'm seeing a new project for my future students developing...) In another vault, they had a display of "gold" bars, and a ticker showing the current value of the gold represented in the display - and what we saw modeled there was less than a hundredth of the gold that was found during the gold rush. Wow.

So yeah, all in all, a pretty neat little museum. Once again, my "teacher-ness" came in handy and I got in to the museum for $5 (regular price was $8.50). Of course Jen and Irene got in for FREE since they're registered teachers here in Victoria. Sigh. Can't win 'em all, I guess! Anyhow, just you wait. There are still five other slips of paper sitting on my desk, all with directions to random interesting places around town... so the next time we're feeling bored, I'll challenge Jen with another one!