Today, Janet and I went to the Melbourne Museum. Seems that Janet suffers from the same museum issue as both me and Jen - we ran out of time and didn't see the whole place! But wow, what we did see was GREAT.Like the national museum in Canberra, the Melbourne Museum is housed in a brand-new, thoroughly modern building. We spent a good chunk of the morning in the Koorie cultural gallery, learning about the local Aboriginal culture. Unfortunately you're not allowed to take photography in any of the Aboriginal galleries in any museums anywhere in the country, so although the exhibit was wonderful, I can't share it with you pictorally. I am on the hunt for some quality Aboriginal artwork to bring home instead. They had a good display on the relationship between the early European naturalists and the local Aborigines, and how their collaboration led to a wealth of scientific discovery.
This museum has a number of displays which took me completely by surprise. For one, they've got a whole FOREST - a living one - for you to explore and discover! The enclosure is accessable from inside the museum building, but is screened and in and open to the air on two sides as well. In the enclosure there were all sorts of little birds and lizards running around freely. You could walk along a balcony at canopy level. You could follow another trail to get a close-up view of the stream and what lies beneath it. In another section they had trunks of ash trees which had been charred by fire, side-by-side with plots of seedlings which had started to grow after the ground had been scorched by flames. These seedlings would eventually be planted by schoolchildren. How cool is that?
Unsurprisingly, I *LOVED* the life galleries. There was a room called the Virtual Room, where you put on 3D glasses and watched movies play about all sorts of aspects of the living world. The biodiversity gallery was excellent, with mounted specimens of a huge variety of Australian plants and animals. I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of mounted snakes, lizards, birds, mammals, inverts - you name it, it was there. If I'd stood to take pictures of everything I wanted to, I would have been there for a week! They also had a GREAT bug gallery, which unfortunately we had to zip through because we were running out of time.
The Evolution gallery was a little disappointing. One thing I'm finding is in short supply here are good dinosaur fossils. In almost every museum I've been in, the dinosaur skeletons I've seen have been casts. I don't know enough about how fossils are formed... perhaps conditions just weren't right in Australia to get good fossils. Interestingly, many of the 'real' fossils I've seen on display, both here and elsehwere in OZ, are from Canada! At any rate, they did have one skeleton I've been wanting to see for a long time - an Apatasaurus (Brontosaurus). It was a cast, but it was still cool. The neck of the animal was posed in a manner that scientists now feel is likely inaccurate, but really, there wouldn't have been space in that gallery to stretch the neck out the way we currently think it must have sat.
And the surprises just kept coming! I originally hadn't been too interested in checking out the Human Body gallery, since the one at the Ontario Science Centre is pretty good. But at one point as we were walking from one gallery to another, I caught sight of the line of naked human sculptures that marked the entrance to the display, and that got my attention pretty quick! For obvious reasons, no photography was allowed in the Human Body display, but you'll have to take my word for it, they did a good job. Turns out that the sculptures we'd glimpsed from afar had been made to represent the span of the human lifetime - so there was a 2-month-old baby, a 3-year old, a 7-year old, a teenager, a young adult, a pregnant mother, and an elderly couple, to name a few. All naked. Left nothing to the imagination, let me tell you! But they were tasteful and thought-provoking. The rest of the exhibit was just as good... there were displays on the history of anatomical discovery, various real organs and organ systems, and an explanation of the Visible Human Project.
And that was where we ran out of time. We didn't get to see the marine sciences gallery, or the one about the human brain, or spend nearly enough time in the Virtual Room. I've already decided that if I have any time at all, I'm going back to the museum in April before I leave.
Janet and I ran out of time because I'd also arranged for us to go and visit a Guide unit and do some campfire songs with them, but this unit meets early (like 4:30!) and was a fair distance away from the museum. So we suddenly realized around 3pm that we needed to get our butts moving. After a mad dash home, a quick change into uniform, and another dash across town on the bus, we arrived just in time. We spent the next couple of hours with the 1st Aberfeldie Brownie Guides in Essendon. They were wonderful! We had a real campfire, including s'mores, and shared songs and games. The girls taught us a fun game called "Cup Up" which will be added to my website as soon as I find time to breathe. Trust me, this was a great game to play on a blazing hot day!
At the end of the meeting the girls thanked us and we exchanged gifts - they gave me some patches and a Guides Australia tea towel, and I handed out patches of my own and Girl Guide pencils. By the time Janet and I got back to the house, we were both definitely pooped. And it's supposed to be even hotter tomorrow than it was today! Gotta find another indoor venue to visit, that's for sure...
