Collections

MV palaeontologist Tom Rich, along with colleagues Roger Benson, Patricia Vickers-Rich, and Mike Hall, today published a review of all the theropod dinosaurs known from early Cretaceous period deposits in southern Australia. In doing so, they present the first complete snapshot of local theropod diversity around 120-105 million years ago.

Theropods are a group of mostly carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs and had three-toed feet. Included among the theropods are the infamous T.rex, the small and agile Deinonychus, the feathered Archaeopteryx and modern birds. Tom and his colleagues have been pulling theropod fossils out of Victoria's coastline deposits since the 1970s and in this review, they considered 37 bones and over 90 individual teeth. They conclude that the local Cretaceous theropod fauna comprised nine major groups (or taxa), including allosauroids, tyrannosauroids, spinosauroids and the recently-discovered ceratosaur.

Some of the fossils reviewed in this examination of southern therapod diversity. These are large theropod manual phalanges, or bones from the 'hands' of these dinosaurs.
Source: Benson et al.  

A summary cladogram (evolutionary tree) of the therapod dinosaurs, showing the relationships between the major groups within the suborder Therapoda.
Source: Benson et al.  

Like the unique fauna of Australia living today, our prehistoric fauna was distinctive too, with some groups dominating the fossil record and others seemingly absent. In the past, palaeontologists have considered several explanations why the types of dinosaurs that lived in Australia were so different to the types found in other continents, even our nearby Gondwanan neighbours. Did certain groups evolve in other continents after Gondwana had split up, so those groups never dispersed to Australia? Or were there patterns of regional extinctions reflecting the differences in climate between the continents as they drifted apart?

As more fossils are uncovered and studied, the picture gets a little clearer. It now appears that many high-level dinosaur taxa, such as the tyrannosauroids and allosauroids, emereged earlier than previously estimated and were distributed all over the world during the Jurassic. This suggests they've been missing from Australian records simply because our dinosaur fauna is poorly known. The Australian fossil record is patchy – whether it's because the fossils have not been preserved or simply not discovered or properly interpreted yet – and often only one or two bones represent an entire group of animals.

However the isolation of Gondwana and Australia from the rest of the world, and the unique conditions here, did help shape a unique assemblage at the species level. During the early Cretaceous, Australia was still attached to Antarctica and was much closer to the South Pole than it is now. Earth's climate was much warmer, the poles were free of icecaps and Victoria and Antarctica were covered in lush, ferny temperate forests. Long periods of winter darkness and extended summer daylight influenced the evolution of endemic dinosaurs whereas in other parts of the world, their distant relatives were contending with quite different environments.

Approximate position of Australia 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous era.
Image: Ron Blakey. Altered by Cally Bennet and Fons VandenBerg
Source: Colorado Plateau Geosystems  

The possibility remains that some dinosaurs, such as the long-necked quadrupedal sauropods, which were present in Queensland but have not been found in Victoria, could not survive in cool, dark Cretaceous southern Australia and and so they did not enter this area.

Links:

Benson RBJ, Rich TH, Vickers-Rich P, Hall M (2012) Theropod Fauna from Southern Australia Indicates High Polar Diversity and Climate-Driven Dinosaur Provinciality. PLoS ONE 7(5): e37122.doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037122

Monash University: The killer dinosaurs of south-eastern Australia

600 Million Years: Victoria evolves

Dinosaur Walk

MV News: Victorian tyrannosauroid found

Mel helps manage MV's Marine Invertebrates collections. In her spare time she works with honorary associate Mark O’Loughlin and others to develop her specialist knowledge of holothuroids, or sea cucumbers.

Ice was what I saw from my porthole each morning as I’d wake yet again to the realisation... Woohoo! I’m in Antarctica!

What a wonderful realisation it was. For nearly two months this summer my home was the British ice-strengthened research vessel the RSS James Clark Ross, and I loved every minute of my freezing, rolling, ice-crunching scientific voyage. On board at the invitation of the British Antarctic Survey and with the support of Museum Victoria, I was part of the biological research team tasked with collecting marine benthinc invertebrates from the shelf and slopes of the Weddell Sea in Western Antarctica.

View from the top of the RSS James Clark Ross
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

My regular work in the museum's Marine Invertebrate Collections held me in good stead to assist the biological team with our daily work of collecting, sorting, identifying, preserving, and DNA-sampling specimens as we brought these bottom-dwelling 'beasties' up in nets and sleds from the ocean floor. Our aim was to assess the biodiversity and evolutionary history of the area, and my particular focus was on sea cucumbers (holothuroids) which I have studied for a number of years now under the mentorship of Museum Victoria honorary associate Mark O'Loughlin.

The biology team
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: British Antarctic Survey

Relatives of animals such as the sea star, many sea cucumbers actually look more like sausages with tentacles (which explains their name), and have developed a variety of different feeding and reproductive methods to adapt to environments worldwide. They are diverse in Antarctic waters with over 180 species (including many undescribed) recorded south of the Antarctic Convergence, and as such, they make a good group for evolutionary study. Often coming up squashed in trawls they can be tricky to identify, but the key lies in a variety of identifiers from tentacle shape and number, to tube-foot arrangement and the tiny little skeletal remnants known as 'ossicles' which can be viewed in dissolved tissue under a microscope.

Sea cucumbers and bivalves clinging to urchin spines.
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

With my previous experience of Antarctic sea cucumbers limited to pickled museum specimens, I was very excited to finally see these animals in living colour! They were amazingly diverse, from the tiny Psolids which clung to sea-urchin spines, to my favourite football-shaped 'sea-pigs' which the ship crew were delighted to see. We even got some footage (from cameras lashed to one of our collecting sleds) of different species feeding and moving about on the sea floor.

Along with sea cucumbers we saw many other amazing critters, from nets crawling with sea spiders to beautiful glass sponges filled with brittle stars and deep-sea fish with 'lights' attached to their heads... and that was just from below the water! On top we saw breaching Minke whales, majestic Emperors and curious (and chatty) chin-strap penguins against the always gorgeous background of floating icebergs. Stopping in the sub-Antarctic British Base at Signey to help close up for winter, we even had the chance to see (while firmly holding our noses) the huge elephant seals which roll their way around the camp.

Emperor penguin (left), Elephant seals at the UK’s Signy base
Image: Mel Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

Skeletons of sea cucumbers, MV Blog post, April 2011

Your Question: What does the word megafauna mean?

The name megafauna means ‘big animals’, generally animals with a body mass of over 40 kilograms. Much of the time, megafauna is general term used to describe a particular group of large land animals that evolved millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct. The extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago left a void of large land animals worldwide. Over millions of years, the surviving mammals, birds and reptiles evolved to include some very large animals. This group of megafauna was at their largest and most widespread during the Quaternary Period, in the last 2.5 million years.

  The skull and upper body of Diprotodon, the largest marsupial to have lived
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria  

Australia’s Quaternary megafauna were unique, and included giant marsupials such as Diprotodon, huge flightless birds such as Genyornis (a distant relative to today’s ducks and geese) and giant reptiles such as Varanus ‘Megalania’ (related closely to living goannas and the Komodo Dragon), all three of which are displayed in Melbourne Museum’s Dinosaur Walk exhibition - despite the fact these animals are not dinosaurs at all.

The skeleton of Thylacoleo, the so-called marsupial 'lion'
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some more examples of Australian megafauna are also on display in the adjoining exhibition at Melbourne Museum called 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves, such as the curious-looking Zygomaturus and Palorchestes (both relatives of Diprotodon), the carnivorous Thylacoleo (sometimes called a marsupial ‘lion’), and some megafaunal relatives of kangaroos and wallabies such as Protemnodon.

  The skeleton of Zygomaturus, a Rhinoceros-like marsupial
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria  

It is worth noting that not all megafauna are extinct – Australia has living megafauna in the form of Red and Eastern Grey Kangaroos and Saltwater Crocodiles, some of which are on display in the Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world exhibition, which is also in the Melbourne Museum Science and Life Gallery.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Video, Studying Megafauna Fossils

Book, Prehistoric Giants: The Megafauna of Australia, published by Museum Victoria

It's Earth Day on 22 April 2012 and the Earth Day Network is seeking a billion pledges for 'acts of green' – individuals and organisations to commit to an act or activity, large or small, to contribute to conservation and environmental awareness.

One of the museum's customer service staff, Ella, is passionate about protecting the Southern Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius johnsonii). She's inspired MV Blog's act of green: to highlight this amazing flightless bird and the efforts to conserve its Queensland rainforest habitat. The species is listed as endangered in Queensland, and vulnerable on the IUCN Redlist.

Museum Victoria's Southern Cassowary. It is exhibition in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Southern Cassowary in the Wild exhibition has been in the museum's collection for over 100 years. Our records note that it was collected on 26 March 1885 in Queensland by an unknown collector and that we acquired it in 1887 from the Acclimitization Society of Victoria. In the 1880s, cassowaries were far more common; an estimated 1000 individuals are all that are left in the wild today.

Australian Cassowary, reproduced from The Birds of Australia, supplements by John Gould, London 1851, vol. 1 (5parts)
Image: Artist John Gould / Lithographer H. C. Richter
Source: Museum Victoria  

The name cassowary stems from a Malay word meaning needle, after the bird's the needle-like wing feathers. With its brilliant-coloured neck and glossy black plumage, the Southern Cassowary is Australia's heaviest bird. Its large body is fuelled by the fruits of over 200 species of rainforest trees and it has an important ecological role in spreading seeds. It's estimated that 70-100 plant species will only germinate once their seeds have travelled through the gut of a cassowary.

As humans have cleared Queensland forests for timber, agriculture and housing developments, we have removed and fragmented the birds' habitat. Fewer trees mean less food for cassowaries. The birds roam between forest patches that are now criss-crossed by roads and many are killed by cars each year. Domestic dogs are another cause of cassowary population decline. In 2011, Cyclone Yasi hit the Far North Queensland coast and severely damaged the remaining habitat occupied by a cassowary population at Mission Beach.

Preserving and regenerating suitable habitat is critical for the survival of this species. Rainforest Rescue is an organisation that purchases land in the Daintree River valley to turn into permanent conservation reserves. They also reconnect remnant forest patches by revegetating cleared land between them, forming continuous tracts of habitat full of cassowary food plants. Since 2007, Rainforest Rescue has planted over 26,000 native plants in the Daintree. It is a very long-term project because these plantings take many years to mature. Their hope is that one day the fruits of those trees will fill the bellies of a stable and thriving cassowary population.

Links:

Rainforest Rescue

Cassowary in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world 

Tucked away from public view, kept in unlit, climate-controlled storage, the museum has millions of zoological specimens. Most of these are insects and other invertebrates but thousands are fish, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. On top of that, we have huge tissue collection: tiny pieces of animal tissue preserved in a sort of genetic library.

Learning this, you might ponder: why do we collect and keep so many specimens, and often, multiple specimens of the same species? As Victoria's official repository for examples of our state's fauna, wouldn't one of each species be enough? And why would we want specimens from outside Victoria?

These are very good questions and there are several reasons why.

Defining a species

Let's say you were out hiking and you found a hidden canyon that wasn't on your map. Within the canyon, you spot an unusual butterfly that's not in your field guide. In fact, it's not like anything you have ever seen before. How would you verify that it is species new to science? You would need to compare it with properly identified examples of other species. You'd probably find those examples in a museum.

There are strict rules for describing and naming new species; the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature oversees the process worldwide. To describe a new animal species you must lodge a holotype – the irreplaceable, single specimen that stands as the official representative of that species. It might take a few specimens, called a type series, to properly describe the species but there is only ever one holotype. Museum Victoria counts several thousand holotypes among our collections, including the Leadbeater's Possum, the Baw Baw Frog, and numerous invertebrates.

However one specimen can't possibly represent a whole species: what about the other sex? What if males and females are very different? Or the animal changes over its life cycle? Or the individuals from over here are slightly different to the individuals from over there? To get a full picture of all the variation within a species, we need many examples of that species.

Multiple examples of a few species of butterfly. Each individual specimen records the variation within a species.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Changes through time

Preserving five individuals of our hypothetical new butterfly that you caught during your hike is a good start. You might have examples of slightly different sizes or varying wing patterns. But what about next month or next year? How early do the butterflies emerge in spring, and when do they disappear in winter? Maybe next year the canyon receives lots of rain, the butterfly's food plant is plentiful, and the population is twice as large and each individual butterfly is fatter. You'll need some examples of this, too.

Collecting specimens over time records all sorts of useful information. It can indicate the incoming wave of an invasive species or the decline of a rare one. Physical changes in the animals themselves – their size, colour, pattern – can reflect changes in their environment but it requires a large number of data points over many years to detect patterns and work out why those changes might be occurring.

The museum's wet collection contains specimens in alcohol. These are marine crustaceans.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Future research

Natural history collectors of a century ago could not have imagined how we would use their specimens today. They didn't even know that DNA existed, let alone that it would one day help define and analyse species. Emerging technologies mean that we can return to old specimens again and again and keep learning new things. So-called 'next generation sequencing' means we can now look at the entire genome of an individual, every gene in their cells, where just a decade ago we could only look at a few marker genes. Genetic analysis can identify cryptic species – ones that can't otherwise be distinguished from closely-related species – and is useful for forensic questions such as determining the origin of smuggled wildlife. Museum collections are the source of tissue and reference specimens for these activities.

The museum's banks of freezers contain thousands of tissue samples.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Just like those collectors of old, we can only guess at the importance of today's collecting. Perhaps our hypothetical butterfly might experience a population explosion in the changing climate and become an important indicator of local conditions. That data set begins with those five specimens you collected on your weekend hike.

Links:

Lyman Entomological Museum: Why so many specimens?

The John Curtis British Insects Collection

The Field Museum: From Finches to Ostriches

Leo Joseph, 2011. Museum collections in ornithology: today's record of avianbiodiversity for tomorrow's world, Emu 111, i–xii  (PDF, 417 KB)

We are very excited to announce our participation in the Google Art Project.

At Museum Victoria we aim to give as many people as possible access to our rich and wonderful collections. The internet provides ways to do that far beyond the walls of our public exhibition venues. We provide access to over 72,000 items from our History and Technology Collections through our own Collections Online site. But we also contribute to other projects, which might attract new visitors to our collections; people who come with different interests – or even just different search terms.

Museum Victoria's collection on Google Art Project.
Source: Google / Museum Victoria  

Originally launched in February 2011, the Art Project has now expanded its reach and scope to include 151 institutions across 40 different countries. Museum Victoria has contributed 185 high resolution images into the site, along with detailed descriptive information about each work and biographies of the artists where they are known. The items range from Aboriginal bark paintings, beautiful pencil illustrations, historic photographs depicting early Victorian history, to scientific illustrations and works on display at Melbourne Museum.

The project has been interesting and challenging for museum staff as we have had to think about objects in the collection through the lens of 'art'. Our collections are made for their scientific, cultural or personal significance, so it has been fascinating to look again at the items we hold and to tell their story through art.

To go along with the Art Project website, the Museum has also made thirteen videos about the stories of the objects we've included. These videos are all available in a special playlist at Museum Victoria's YouTube channel. One of the videos, about photographer and naturalist A J Campbell can be seen below, as a taster to explore the others.

We are very excited to join just a handful of other galleries and museums in Australia, including our friends at the NGV, but many others around the world, to showcase extraordinary and beautiful works of art. We hope you will enjoy exploring some our rich treasures in this quite new light.

Links:

Museum Victoria's collection on Google Art Project

Google Art Project playlist on YouTube

Ely is responsible for publishing information about the museum’s collections online – on our own website and on websites run by others. Originally trained as a zoologist, she dropped into the relatively new field of museum informatics several years ago and has never looked back.

We're excited to announce the launch of Museum Victoria's channel on Historypin, joining other museums, historical societies, libraries, galleries, archives and individuals all sharing historic photographs online.

Screenshot of Museum Victoria's Historypin channel.
Source: Museum Victoria / Historypin  

Participants 'pin' their images to a place on a map and a point in time, and can record their stories about the photos. In doing so, the community creates together a rich resource for exploring history through space and time. To learn more about Historypin, watch this video, A Short Introduction to Historypin.

We have initially put up 500 images from the Biggest Family Album in Australia collection. There are fascinating images, from hailstones the size of tennis balls that fell in Charlton in 1914, to boys on tricycles in Corobimilla at Christmas in 1925. And all the photographs we've put on Historypin have a link back to our Collections Online site, so visitors can find out more about them.

In another part of the Historypin website, we have also included four images of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Melbourne in 1954. Pinning the Queen's History celebrates Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee in 2012 with photographs taken throughout her long reign. Queen Elizabeth attended a State Reception at the Exhibition Buildings during her extensive 1954 tour of Commonwealth countries. You can follow her trip through the photograph archive, and even track the hats and outfits she wore right around the world!

More images will go up as we continue to generate latitudes and longitudes for the places photographed. We are excited to be a part of this rich new resource.

In their previous video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts reported the results of their mammal surveys of Wilsons Prom. They joined other MV scientists and Parks Victoria staff for the the rapid biodiversity survey, Prom Bioscan, of October 2011.

In this video, Karen and Karen talk about their work with the Mammology Collection at Museum Victoria and why the museum collects mammal specimens.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

View all Prom Bioscan blog posts

MV Animal Ethics Procedures

Mammalogy Collection

Your Question: What did Caroline Chisholm do behind the Shelter Shed?

A bit of scrapbooking apparently...

Having such a large online presence, as Museum Victoria has, we in the Discovery Centre are always asked if we can provide copies of the brochures, passenger lists, workshop manuals, etc, that feature in our massive Internet Empire. In order to satisfy this demand, we have to apply subtle pressure on a variety of curators, collection managers and photographers, in order to have these articles scanned.

A page from Caroline Chisholm's scrapbook.
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

However, in the case of Caroline Chisholm’s scrapbook, we can casually point out to the inquisitive enquirer, that by scrolling down the webpage, they will see the heading ‘Downloads’ followed by ‘Caroline Chisholm’s Scrapbook PDF 129.3 Mb’. Eureka! This unique piece of Australia’s history can be all yours at the click of a button. Now, at your leisure, you can peruse the pages of Caroline’s life and works.

Caroline Chisholm scrapbook, circa 1844-1861
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

Who attended the ‘Soiree to Mrs. Chisholm’? Prince Albert did, that’s who. As did ‘The Ladies who have honoured us with their company’. Is one of your ancestors on ‘Mrs. Chisholm’s List of Missing Friends’? Margaret Lyons was looking for her brother Luck Lyons; Mrs. Tipple couldn’t find her husband Thomas Tipple and Mr. Wright could not be found which left his ‘Wife in great distress with six children’. And what did Charles Dickens say about Mrs. Chisholm? The answer can be found on ‘page 12’.

Caroline Chisholm scrapbook, circa 1844-1861
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

Caroline Chisholm’s scrapbook is not the only scanned item available for download on our website, but it is a particular favourite of mine. Thanks to the unsung heroes of the museum – the MV Studios folk who scan these wonderful items, all your questions can now be answered. We salute you!

Got a question? Ask us!

Links 

Caroline Chisolm's scrapbook

Australian Dictionary of Biography Online

Your Question: Why are bird eggs so variable in their colours and patterns?

The colour and colour pattern of bird eggs vary enormously from species to species (and often between individuals of the same species, and sometimes between the eggs of the same mother).

  A tray of eggs from Museum Victoria's H.L White egg collection, showing the diversity of patterns and colours for a single species, the Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen.
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria  

Eggs are made of calcium carbonate, which is white. White is therefore the default colour for bird eggs, but many birds lay coloured or colourfully-patterned eggs. Why?

The colouration of bird eggs can often be explained by the animal's biology and behaviour. The eggs of ground-nesting birds, for example, need to be well-camouflaged to avoid discovery by predators. They are usually coloured and patterned to match the substrate they are laid upon.

The highly-camouflaged eggs of the American Golden Plover Pluvialis dominica, which nests on the ground.
Image: MeegsC
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Tree-nesters, on the other hand, usually have blue or green eggs.

The American Robin, Turdus migratorius, which nests in trees, lays bright blue eggs.
Image: Laslovarga
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Birds whose eggs are hidden from view (in hollows, burrows or deep nests), or who sit on their eggs continuously throughout incubation, tend to have white eggs.

  The now extinct Paradise Parrot Psephotus pulcherrimus, which laid its eggs in termite mounds, had white, unpatterned eggs.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The patterns on eggs have developed over eons via natural selection – the better the camouflage, the more likely the eggs are to survive and pass on the genes for well-camouflaged eggs to the next generation. Ornithologists have classified egg patterns and given each "style" a name in order to distinguish them: splashed, blotched, spotted, dotted, marbled, streaked, scrawled, overlaid, capped, and wreathed.

Eggs from Museum Victoria's Ornithology Collection
Image: John Broomfield
Source: Museum Victoria

Colour also provides another form of protection: it is thought to act as a sunscreen, protecting the developing foetus from UV light. The addition of colour also strengthens the eggshell. Birds that are calcium-deficient lay thin-shelled eggs, which are more likely to break. Scientists have found that birds that have multiple clutches in a single season have more highly-coloured eggs in the second and subsequent clutches (when the mother's calcium supplies are reduced). Patterned colouration is also more common in areas with calcium-deficient soils.

The specific colours are incorporated into the shell in the final stage of egg development. Blue and green colour comes from a pigment called biliverdin (which is the same pigment that causes green bruises in humans). In egg colouration, biliverdin comes from bile; the red and brown colour on eggs comes from protoporphyrins, which comes from blood.

The Red-vented Bulbul Pycnonotus cafer lays red eggs.
Image: J. M. Garg
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Australia's native birds are protected. It is illegal to collect eggs or to interfere with birds' nests without a permit. Details of regulations and permits can be obtained from the Department of Sustainability and Environment.

Links:

Museum Victoria's Ornithology Collection

H.L. White Collection of Australian Birds’ Eggs

The evolution of egg colour and patterning in birds

Australian Magpie Eggs

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."

This remarkably ordinary sentence, spoken by Alexander Graham Bell 136 years ago on 10 March 1876, comprises the first clear bi-directional transmission of speech via telephone. One of Bell's original experimental phones is set to go on display at Scienceworks in the upcoming Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention exhibition.

  Bell Double-Pole Magneto receiver (ST 035633).
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

This Bell Double-Pole Magneto receiver is not the one Bell used when uttering that famous first sentence but it is very similar. It too was made in 1876 prior to Bell's first public demonstration of the telephone at Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition in July of that year. It was used with the transmitter also in the museum's collection.

"These highly significant objects were originally brought to Melbourne by Bell's uncle, Edward Symonds, who visited his nephew's Boston laboratory in August 1876. Bell remained in contact with his uncle afterwards, and Symonds went on to assist in administering Bell's Australian patents," said curator David Demant. The transmitter, receiver and other Bell material were eventually donated to Museum Victoria in 1974 by Symonds' descendants.

"It is nowadays very hard to imagine life before the telephone, so deep has been its social and technological influence," said David.

Bec is working on the history of Museum Victoria's Science Collections and all the people who have been part of them since the museum's origin in 1854.

Last night, twenty extraordinary women were inducted into the Victorian Women's Honour Roll at a ceremony in Parliament House. I was lucky enough to be invited to witness Curator Emeritus Hope Black join this group.

Hope Macpherson receiving her award at the Victorian Women's Honour Roll ceremony on 6 March 2012.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

Each year, the Honour Roll recognises and celebrates inspirational women across Victoria who, through their vision, leadership, commitment and hard work, have made an exceptional contribution to their communities or areas of expertise.

Minister for Women’s Affairs the Hon Mary Wooldridge opened the events with this quote: "If your dreams do not scare you they are not big enough." These women, without exception, had big dreams.

Hope says she wasn't sure what she wanted to do "but it had to be zoology". In 1937, then 18-year-old Hope Macpherson successfully applied for a job at the museum. Initially, her role was to make biology cases and dioramas. Driven to progress further, she studied science part-time at Melbourne University. Shortly after she graduated in 1946, was promoted to Curator of Shells and, simultaneously, the museum's first female curator.

Hope Macpherson identifying shells at the National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 1948 (MM 118931).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Her fieldwork as curator took her to remote parts of the Australian coast and she was part of the first group of female scientists permitted to research in the sub-Antarctic.

Hope also led ground-breaking surveys of Port Phillip Bay from 1957-1963. That data is still used today by environmental scientists, managers and planners, providing a benchmark against which to monitor change.

Hope Macpherson and Dan Lynch sorting material on the jetty at yjr Quarantine Station, Port Phillip Survey, Victoria, 1959 (MM 118931).
Source: Museum Victoria  

In addition to her scientific pursuits, Hope also pioneered specialist education programs by establishing a biology course for blind children held at the museum, using collection material.

Hope was required to resign from the Public Service when she married in 1965, as married women were excluded from employment in the service at that time. The forced change did not quell her drive. She retrained as a science teacher, passing on her passion for science to girls for 13 years.

Photograph that captures Hope Macpherson mid-air while running, Wilsons Promontory, Victoria, 1950. (MM 118929)
Image: Charles Brazenor
Source: Museum Victoria  

I have been privileged to work with Hope over the past couple of years, recording her history and acquiring personal working papers and images for the museum collection. After hearing her story and that of the other inductees I can only hope to be as fearless.

Links:

Victorian Women's Honour Roll

Hope Black nee Macpherson, Curator of Molluscs (1919 - )

Like many organisations, MV has an internal website where staff can post information and notices about various things. Recently I saw this wonderful posting on the museum's intranet:

Anyone want a free goat?

I need to find a good home for my pet goat Sebastian. He is a 7yr old desexed male Toggenburg with horns.

He loves to go jogging, nibble on the neighbours' roses, sleep all day & then bleat & bash things in the evening. He'd make a great pet. Not suitable for small children.

Hi, I am Sebastian the Goat, and I have my own Facebook page.
Image: Shane Hughes
Source: Shane Hughes  

I would love to go jogging with Sebastian and watch his evening Hulk moments, but alas, my flat's balcony is too small for even my pot plants. But it did get me thinking that goats are amazing animals. Here are five reasons why.

1. You can eat them, drink them, wear them... and wash, and knit with them.

Evidence suggests goats were domesticated in Eastern Turkey around 10,000 years ago. They were kept for their meat, their hide, milk and wool. Think luxurious cashmere, smooth goat's cheese, and gentle goat's milk soap.

I found some stylish kid (young goat) leather shoes in the MV collection. No doubt the collection managers handle them with kid gloves: figuratively and perhaps literally speaking.

Pair of shoes, blue kid leather with Louis heel, circa 1905-1910. (SH 880814.)
Source: Museum Victoria  

2. You can take a goat ride or use a goat freight service.

Historical images from the MV collection show harnessed goats at work and at play.

Lantern slide labelled ‘Old Ned and goats, hands blown off’. (MM 034986)
Source: Museum Victoria  

Glass negative, circa 1900.
Image: A.J. Campbell
Source: Museum Victoria  

3. Mythology combines goats with humans to become devilishly naughty characters.

Mythological depictions of the half-human, half-goat are often naughty types. Among the Greek gods was Pan the faun who was into partying with nymphs. Puck was mischievous fairy from English folklore. On the other hand, Satyrs, which are human-like beasts with goat bits, were often evil creatures.

This faun from the collection is a horse brass , which is a decoration, souvenir or amulet hung on a horse's harness. This faun appears to be seated in a lotus position!

Horse Brass - Faun, 1825-1939 (ST 034497)
Source: Museum Victoria  

4. Goats are great for playtime.

People often kept goats to keep the grass down and for a bit of milk. That's why Mitzy the goat (pictured below) lived at Janet's place in Springvale in 1957.

Girl Playing with Goat, in Field, Springvale South, 1957MM 110927).
Source: Museum Victoria  

I remember as a kid I used to love to play jacks; mine were coloured plastic. I remember being quite grossed out when I learnt that real jacks were actually knuckle bones from a sheep or a goat.

Knuckle bones found during the Casselden Place archaeological dig, circa 1880 (LL 32184 2)
Source: Museum Victoria  

5. Goats are not only sure-footed rock climbers but you can take them jogging.

Flick book with a climbing billy goat by 'Cinematograph Living Pictures', circa 1920 (HT 25043.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Flick books were a popular optical toys created in the 19th century. See our goat-inspired flick book in action in this video:

Sebastian the Goat's present owner Shane says Sebastian enjoys a bit of a jog and meeting new people. We wish him all the best in becoming an 'old goat' in his new home.

Cheers and bleats, Dr Andi

Your Question: Which Museum Victoria exhibition is going to Paris this year?

The stunning Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art exhibition, a collaboration between the National Gallery of Victoria and Museum Victoria in partnership with Papunya Tula Pty Ltd, is off to France. This exhibition was on show at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia and is now being carefully packed to be sent to Paris for display at the Musée du quai Branly in October this year.

Anatjari Tjakamarra, Big Pintupi Dreaming ceremony 1972
Image: NGV
Source: National Gallery of Victoria © artists and their estates 2011, licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited and Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd  

It is a wonderful example of cooperation between public institutions and generous private lenders to bring together and showcase over 200 paintings completed between 1971 and 1972 from the Papunya region of the Western Desert. This initial production of paintings represented the founding of the Western Desert art movement and led to an explosive growth in the Aboriginal art movement. Museum Victoria has loaned numerous artefacts for this exhibition from its extensive collections. Tjukurrtjanu also presents 150 objects, including 78 painted and incised shields, spear throwers, pearl shell pendants, stone knives, head bands and ephemeral body ornaments, that establish the paintings pre-existing Western Desert iconography.

Group of decorated shields from Central Australia
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Musée du quai Branly is a recent addition to the museum scene in Paris, opening near the base of the Eiffel Tower in 2006. It has a collection of some 300,000 objects and is well known for its beautiful external ‘living walls’ featuring a variety of living plants and mosses. The museum exists to display and promote the indigenous cultures of Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas. It already holds collections of Aboriginal art from the north and central desert regions of Australia; bark paintings from Arnhem Land collected in the 1960s, contemporary acrylic paintings and a ceiling spectacularly painted by Indigenous artists.

Charlie Wartuma Tjungurrayi, Old Man’s Dreaming at Mitukatjirri
Image: NGV
Source: National Gallery of Victoria © artists and their estates 2011, licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited and Papunya Tula Artists Pty Ltd  

The Tjukurrtjanu exhibition will show a Parisian and European audience how Aboriginal people use art to tell their stories and to ensure the continuation of their culture.

  Exterior of Musee du quai Branly, Paris
Image: Andreas Praefcke
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

Australian artists have had huge success in overseas markets over the years, the Tate Gallery in London holds works by Sidney Nolan; Russell Drysdale enjoyed overseas acclaim as do current Australian artists such as Ron Mueck with his hyper-real sculptures. Yet it can be argued that Australia’s Indigenous artists and their art are currently the best known examples of Australian art in the rest of the world. Indeed, this is the first time that an art exhibition solely developed by the NGV and Museum Victoria has been accepted in a major European venue.

Links:

National Gallery of Victoria - Tjukurrtjanu

Museum Victoria: Collections and Research – Indigenous Cultures

Papunya Tula Artists

MV Blog: Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art

Most workers on a smoko break shoot the breeze or maybe have a cuppa, but on rare occasions, smoko engenders creative genius. In the railyards of Newport in the late 1920s, a new sport emerged as workers improvised a game played with bits and pieces around the workshop. This uniquely Melburnian game, attributed to a Mr. Thomas Grieves of Yarraville, is called trugo.

Workers at the Newport Workshops, circa 1925. Perhaps a champion trugo player stands among them. (MM 8099).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Every aspect of trugo is linked inextricably to its railyard origins. The thirty-yard field of play is the ength of a railway carriage. Teams of players hit a rubber ring – a buffer from a train –backwards through their legs with a wooden mallet. If the ring makes it through the goal, which is as wide as the distance between train seats, it's a 'true go'.

Trugo clubs sprang up all over the blue-collar suburbs of Melbourne. The first were in the west – Yarraville and Footscray – but it spread to Brunswick, Preston, Prahran, South Melbourne and beyond. By 1938, the social pages of the Healesville and Yarra Glen Guardian were raving about the game that was "like croquet, only different". From boom times in the 1940s, many clubs have struggled to remain open in recent years. Preston Trugo Club is shuttered up and looking grim, while the second-oldest club at Footscray is gone and replaced with a housing development.

Trugo equipment from the MV collection is on display in the Sportsworks exhibition. A group of History and Technology Department staff decided it was time to learn first-hand how it was used, so at the end of last year, they visited Brunswick Trugo Club to meet club president (and trugo champion) Gerald Strachan. Curator Bec Carland was among the MV guests and loved every minute of it – the history, the community, and the game itself.

Ben ‘get outta the way’ Thomas with his strident trugo technique.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

She described the set-up of the game as a "beautiful ritual of measuring out. It takes about half an hour to set up each pitch and they measure them out painstakingly as everyone stands around chatting. You can see how workers set up this process that's a little bit drawn out to make the break go longer."

Michelle Stevenson and David Crotty attempting a 'true go'.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

"The rules are simple but they flew out the window after a little while because we were all having a go. There were some standout performances – it's really quite difficult." Bec said. "No one could get three for three yet Richard arrived late, picked up a mallet, hit three for three straight away."

Richard ‘4 for 4’ Gillespie and ‘Liza ‘strongarm’ Dale-Hallett on the trugo field.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

The clubhouse is carefully maintained by the club members and is filled with memorabilia, trophies, and a rack of hand-made mallets. There's even a vegie patch out the back and a club dog. "Gerald's got this beautiful dog that chases the buffers that go off straight," according to Bec. "He says, 'don't worry, if it's on track he won't go near it'. Every time he'd follow it half-way down and if the dog veered away, you knew it was true. And if he stayed with it, you knew it 's not going to go in."

Left: Brunswick Trugo Club's prizes are on display inside the clubhouse. Right: Hand-made wooden trugo mallets on racks at Brunswick Trugo Club.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

In January, Gerald put out a call for new players in the Melbourne Times. He and other long-time members are worried that the game won't survive unless younger people start playing. Said Bec, "there wasn't a point in the day when the club members weren't discussing its past and its threatened present."

If you'd like to try trugo, Gerald would love to hear from you.

Links:

Victorian Trugo Association

YouTube video: Trugo

Your Question: What exactly is the role of the Discovery Centre within Museum Victoria?

We play a very important role in making sure that you can access your state collection and this happens with requests made in person over the desk in the Discovery Centre, via the telephone, by snail mail and of course by email, and sometimes even by fax!

Visitors using the resources in the Discovery Centre
Image: Jo Philo
Source: Museum Victoria  

Every day when we come into the Discovery Centre we don’t know what the day will hold. Our inbox is jam packed with enquiries sent to us via our online enquiry form sent from many different people, with many different requests. The Discovery Centre is also responsible for responding to the various questions and comments that are posted on the different sections of the Museum Victoria website, the information sheets, the blog posts and the Collections Online webpages.

Visitors meeting Murray, the Murray Darling Carpet Python, in the Discovery Centre
Image: Jo Philo
Source: Museum Victoria  

We are responsible for handling and responding to your research based enquiries for access to Museum Victoria collections and experts. This could be anything from an identification request along the lines of 'what is this spider?' or 'what type of bird made this nest?', or I’d like to find out more about dinosaurs, or CSIRAC - we handle them all. We can also help you with accessing the collection; perhaps your grandfather donated a camera to the collection and you would like to see it. Well, we can help. And of course, we can help with the donation process if you have a significant item that you would like the museum to consider acquiring.

Jo and a visitor checking out the frogs in the Discovery Centre
Image: Kate Brereton
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Discovery Centre also assists academic researchers with access to the collection for study and learning. We can also help you with getting copies of images from the collection, maybe to add to a family album or your family history research. Of course, there are also the requests we receive from publishers for copyright requests, or other state museums for object loans and historical societies for conservation advice. 

If you would like to know more about the Discovery Centre Team, we are all blog authors so you can read a few lines about us, and of course see a happy snap too!

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Melbourne Museum Discovery Centre

Immigration Discovery Centre

Curator Michael Gregg, of the Maritime History department of the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle, recently visited the Scienceworks collection store to take highly specialised photographs of a model ship in our Transport Collection.

Michael Gregg with the model of pearling lugger Mary.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The model is an exact replica of the pearling lugger Mary that operated out of Broome and Darwin in the 1920s and 30s. It was commissioned and partly constructed by Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Ingleton RAN in the 1930s to document a uniquely Australian type of vessel that was rapidly disappearing.

In 1913, the pearling industry was worth a fortune to Western Australia in exports. As Michael puts it, "Australia didn't ride on sheep's back, it was on the pearl oyster's back." In one year alone, 300 new luggers were registered. "At one stage, the guy who built this boat was turning out a new lugger every 14 days."

Michael is interested in the model because it captures details of design and construction that have been lost with the demise of the pearling lugger. "There are no Fremantle-built pearling luggers still in existence in their original form," explains Michael. This is in part due to mechanisation; the original Mary was herself fitted with an engine by the 1930s. But more significant was the illegal rebuilding of luggers and recycling of registration numbers by unscrupulous operators. World War II took a toll on the lugger fleet also, as boats were requisitioned by the Navy or destroyed ahead of a feared Japanese invasion..

"There were all sorts of shenanigans that went on with the pearling industry," Michael says. "The best way to run the industry economically was to import Malay and Japanese labour. Come the early 1900s, the White Australia Policy meant you could bring in indentured seamen to work on ships for up to two years but they were only allowed to work as crew, not boatbuilders." Pearling masters got around this technicality by signing up imported labour as crew, but quietly issuing them boatbuilding tasks as 'maintenance'.

There were three distinct types of pearling lugger built to cope with the different conditions in Broome, the Torres Strait and Shark Bay. The nature of these vessels – rapidly built to a standard pattern and considered reasonably expendable – means they were rarely preserved in model form. It was only Ingleton's interest in recording history that inspired the construction of this model, and it's being used now exactly as Ingleton intended.

Detail of the Mary model showing its beautifully detailed rigging and fittings.
Source: Museum Victoria  

"We were just gobsmacked when we discovered this model because we thought we knew of all the significant lugger material in Australia," says Michael. "We regularly trawl the net looking for references to pearling luggers. Because there was sufficient information in your Collections Online and it's searchable, it popped up in Google." One of the most exciting prospects for the model, and the reason for Michael's visit, is that he's using it to help develop photogrammetric software and techniques that will conserve Australia's maritime technology.

Michael Gregg at work taking photos of the pearling lugger model in the Scienceworks collection store, experimenting with a 3D camera.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Photogrammetry uses a series of photos analysed by a computer to build a 3D virtual model of an object. According to Michael, it's commonly used by police to help reconstruct road crashes. "It's great for working out the distance between two points in space, but we're really pushing the boundaries of what it can do." While the process will be most useful in recording full-sized ships, the Mary model invites some experimentation; he was using a 3D camera see if it would help simplify the laborious process of matching target points between different photographs. "It's much easier to work on a full-sized boat because you can stick targets all over it and nobody minds. With a museum-quality model, we can't do that. This is the first time I've recorded rigging simultaneously, too."

Michael sees photogrammetry as an incredibly useful tool for museums and more. Ultimately he hopes the software and techniques he and his colleagues are developing can do something absolutely extraordinary: use historical photographs to create something you can hold in your hand. The craze for stereoscopic photographs around the turn of the century produced countless images of one view from two slightly different angles, and these might one day allow 3D recreations of long-gone ships, buildings, artefacts and more. "It's very, very exciting."

Links:

Western Australian Museum - Maritime

Pearl lugger Mary on Collections Online

Your Question: What was the Lloyd Triestino Trio?  

Austrian Lloyd was founded as an insurance company in 1833 and when Trieste became part of Italy in 1919 the company name was changed to Lloyd Triestino. A shipping section was established in 1936, and Lloyd Triestino became one of the world's biggest shipping companies.

After World War II Lloyd Triestino re-established its Australian service with existing ships and began a rebuilding programme ordering seven new liners. Of these new liners three were for the Australian service, launched in 1950 these three ships became known as the Treistino Trio.

Pamphlet Express Service Fares to Italy Australia, Oceania & Neptunia Lloyd Triestino Line Jun 1955 (HT 2610).
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

The first to be built was the Australia launched on 21 May 1950, departing Trieste on 19 April 1951 and arriving in Melbourne on 17 May. The second ship Oceania launched on 30 July 1950, departed Genoa for its maiden voyage on 18 August 1951.The third, Neptunia, launched on 1 October 1950, departing on its maiden voyage on 14 September 1951 and arriving in Brisbane on 18 October.

In 1958 all three ships were withdrawn from service for a refit – air-conditioning was extended throughout the entire ship and accommodation altered to be suitable for 136 first class passengers and 536 tourist class passengers. From October 1960 Neptunia began operating as a single tourist-class ship; however the Australia and Oceania were not altered in this way.

Postcards - Lloyd Triestino Line, circa 1950s (HT1497).
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

In 1960 Lloyd Triestino placed orders for two new liners which would be twice the size of the existing Australian fleet and were built to replace the Triestino trio. When these new ships entered the trade in 1963, Australia, Oceania and Neptunia were withdrawn from the Australian trade and transferred to the Italia line. The Australia was renamed the Donizetti, Oceania renamed Rossini and Neptunia renamed Verdi.

The Triestino Trio had all emerged from the same shipyard in the 1950s and spent their entire careers operating together; they ended their careers in La Spezia, Italy within months of each other. Donizetti and Rossini were laid up in late 1976 joined by Verdi in January of 1977. All three ships were offered for sale with Donizetti and Verdi purchased by shipbreakers in June 1977. Rossini was moved to another Italian company, Tirrenia, but with no use for her she was also sold to shipbreakers in September 1977.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Triestino in MV Collections

Museum Victoria Migration Collection

Picture Australia

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

February 12th is Charles Darwin's birthday, now celebrated at institutions around the world as Darwin Day. Darwin's work is obviously relevant to a lot of the research that goes on at Museum Victoria today, but we also have a direct link with him through some specimens housed in the Palaeontology Department.

Charles Darwin in 1854
Source: Out of copyright, via Wikipedia.  

Darwin's best-known work is The Origin of Species, and if you had to name the animals he was particularly interested in, you'd probably think finches, or perhaps tortoises. But these are just the tip of the iceberg; before, and after publishing The Origin, Darwin also published prolifically across a breadth of natural history subjects, including geology, zoology, ornithology, entomology and botany. All of this work was vital, both in developing his theory of evolution by natural selection, and in gaining him a wide and interested audience.

One of the lynchpins of Darwin's theory was homology, the sharing of characters due to common descent (meaning that if two species share a feature we assume, until we can show otherwise, that they both inherited it from their common ancestor). Much of Darwin's thinking about homology was developed through his detailed study of the humble barnacle. He published the first full treatment of barnacles in the early 1850s with four monographs on modern and fossil barnacles.

Over 100 years later in the 1960s, the then Curator of Palaeontology at Museum Victoria, Thomas Darragh, noticed that some of the specimen labels in the palaeontology collection had handwritten notes saying "Original figured by Darwin".

Specimen label written by Kranz.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Going back to Darwin's original descriptions and illustrations, Dr. Darragh confirmed that these specimens matched Darwin's material. For instance, looking at this photo of Scalpellum simplex and the original illustration, it's clear that the illustration is of this specimen – they share the same broken tip even though the figure shows the specimen free of the rock. Similarly, the other specimens are close matches to those in Darwin's monographs.

  Left: Extract of plate from Darwin's original monograph. | Right:Fossil barnacle Scalpellum simplex Darwin 1854. Scale bar = 1cm. (NMV P133334).
Image: Charles Darwin | Thomas Watson
Source: Out of copyright | Museum Victoria  

A little more investigation showed that all of the specimens Dr. Darragh had found had been declared lost by Thomas Henry Withers in the 1930s when he compiled a catalogue of the barnacle material at the Natural History Museum in London (then the Natural History section of the British Museum). So the specimens that had been thought lost for over 30 years were now found, but how had they come to be in Melbourne instead of London?

In 1854 when his work on barnacles was complete, Darwin donated all the material that he had collected himself to the British Museum, where, 80 years later, Withers made his catalogue. However, Darwin also borrowed from other collectors. One of these was John Morris, a mollusc specialist possibly best known for The Catalogue of British Fossils and who went on to become professor of Geology at University College London. When he donated his own collection, Darwin returned Morris' material to him. Morris later sold his collection to the German fossil dealer, August Krantz who, for some reason, discarded all of the original labels and re-wrote them.

In 1863, Frederick McCoy, the first director of Museum Victoria (then known as the National Museum of History and Geology) bought a collection of fossils from Krantz for the museum.

This was just one of many purchases of fossils and minerals that McCoy made from Krantz, but this one happened to include at least part of Morris' collection, including the barnacles that Darwin had worked on. Since nobody was actively working on barnacles, it took 100 years for anyone to realise the importance of these specimens, but since we did the specimens have been housed safely in the museum's type collection accessible for researchers around the world.

Happy Darwin Day!

Links:

Darwin Online Project 

Darwin's barnacle studies (Darwin Online Project)

Invertebrate Palaeonology Collections

Infosheet: How do barnacles cement themselves to rocks?

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

This cabinet contains parts of the skeleton of a fossil whale collected at Bells Beach, on the Surf Coast southwest of Melbourne.

Vertebrate Palaeontology Collection storage cabinet full of fossils.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This story is only indirectly about that whale, but it does start with one of its bones:

Fossilised whale bone.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This is a metacarpal – a bone from one of the whale's flippers (forelimbs). Here, it's being held by Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Harold Mitchell Fellow at Museum Victoria, which gives you an idea of the size – it's about 7cm long. The equivalent bone in a human hand (the bone that runs between your middle finger and your wrist) is about the same length, though not as chunky.

At the top of the bone, you can see two grooves that make an inverted 'V'. While they might not look particularly impressive, to Erich's eye that chevron shape was an immediate clue to something that's quite rare to find in the fossil record: it's a classic example of the marks left on bone by shark teeth. We know what a modern shark bite looks like from observing modern sharks and their prey, and the marks on this bone look just like the sorts of marks a modern shark bite makes. In the next photo, Erich is re-enacting the way a shark's tooth would make this sort of mark, (though obviously when a shark bites there are many more teeth involved).

Erich demonstrates how a shark tooth probably struck the whale bone.
Source: Museum Victoria  

While it's not absolutely conclusive evidence – this sort of palaeo-behaviour trace fossil rarely is – this, and other marks on other bones from the same specimen, is enough for us to be fairly certain that this whale was bitten by a shark. We also know that this happened very close to the whale's death because the bone shows no sign of healing. This tells us that either the whale was killed by the shark that attacked it or that the shark was scavenging the whale carcass after it died – we can't be sure which but we know that the whale wasn't bitten and then got away.

Even with this uncertainty, though, this is more information than palaeontologists usually have about interactions between animals in the fossil record. Information modern ecologists take for granted, such as who's eating who, is extremely rare to find for fossils. Bite marks like these are one of the few ways palaeontologists have any idea of how food webs may have been constructed way back when. But what's really cool about this particular whale/shark palaeo-interaction, is that rather than just being satisfied with 'this whale was attacked by a shark' we can actually figure out who the culprit was. A lot of work has been done on the geological unit that this specimen was collected from so we know what was sharing the waters with our luckless whale. Of the list of sharks known from the same unit, only one has teeth big enough to have made these marks:

Fossil shark tooth.
Source: Museum Victoria  

This tooth comes from the shark Carcharocles angustidens, known from relatively abundant fossils around the stretch of coast our whale was collected from. C. angustidens is a close relative of the rather more famous Carcharocles megalodon which has the largest teeth of any known shark, living or extinct (some are over 18cm long!) You can see the sharp little serrations along the edge of the tooth which would have effectively sawed into the bone of its victim, leaving the grooves we see in the whale's bones today.

So we think that somewhere in the Late Oligocene, 24-27 million years ago, in a sea that covered what is now part of Victoria, a shark, Carcharocles angustidens, bit a Mammalodon whale and perhaps even killed it. It's amazing what we can infer from just a few scratches on bone.

Links:

MV Blog: Evolving the biggest mouth in history

Footage of tiger sharks scavenging a whale carcass in Queensland

Footage of sharks eating a blue whale alive

Your Question: Does Museum Victoria have the only working Australian-made traction engine?

It is believed that in 1916, Cowley’s Eureka Ironworks of Ballarat built one of Australia’s last steam traction engines. The Cowley Traction Engine, acquired by the Museum in 1985, was restored with the help of about 30 staff and volunteers over 16 years with a total of 10,000 paid hours and 6,000 voluntary hours.

Cowley Steam Traction Engine (1916) at Lake Goldsmith.
Image: Matthew Churchwood
Source: Museum Victoria  

It was dismantled and major mechanical repairs were carried out. New parts were manufactured when the old parts were found to not be restorable or could not be repaired in a way that could be reversed at a later time. Such parts included the steam boiler, the boiler fittings, tender, roof, crankshaft, feed pump, and many of the gears. All components that were replaced have been retained in storage for future reference and research.
 
Scienceworks 10th Birthday Celebration - Cowley steam engine from 1916 in action on the arena.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Cowley was used to move houses and other timber-framed buildings, as well as hauling logs for the Sawmilling industry in Western Victoria and is unusual in that it has solid sided wheels, rather than spoked ones. This design serves the dual purpose of not only being cheaper to produce, but the wheels can then double as extra water tanks – a handy advantage in the dry Australian bush.

Detail of Cowley Steam Traction Engine at Machinery in Action show
Image: Paoli Smith Photography
Source: Museum Victoria  

In 2001 the Cowley was fully restored and ready to go. It made its debut at the Lake Goldsmith steam Rally and can now be seen at Scienceworks on Machines in Action Days.
Men in the boiler shop at Cowley 's Eureka Ironworks, Ballarat, Victoria, circa 1910
Source: Museum Victoria  

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Podcast: Roll out the Steam Engines!

MV News: Roller returns

Lindy Allen curates the Northern Australian Collections at Museum Victoria. These collections include important historical ethnographic, manuscript and image collections of Baldwin Spencer and Donald Thomson.

On Thursday 26 January, Laurie Baymarrwangga was announced as 2012 Senior Australian of the Year. There wasn't much coverage about this extraordinary Australian in the press; the only report I saw was on the ABC on the morning of Australia Day that showed a segment of film of this grand old lady on Murrunga, a tiny island in the Arafura Sea of northern Australia that can only be reached by charter plane or by boat.

Laurie Baymarrwangga, Senior Australian of the Year 2012.
Image: Mari Ekkje
Source: Mari Ekkje at Broken Yellow  

From her biography on the Australian of the Year website:

...Laurie Baymarrwangga has seen the arrival of missionaries, exploitation by Japanese and European fishermen, war and tumultuous change. Undaunted, she has almost single-handedly nurtured the inter-generational transmission of local ecological knowledge through a lifelong commitment to caring for kin, culture and country. In the 1960s Laurie established a housing project on her homelands that has benefitted generations of kin. Speaking no English, with no access to funding, resources or expertise she initiated the Yan-nhangu dictionary project. Her cultural maintenance projects include the Crocodile Islands Rangers, a junior rangers group and an online Yan-nhangu dictionary for school children. In 2010, after a struggle stretching back to 1945, Laurie finally received back payments for rents owed to her as the land and sea owner of her father's estate. She donated it all, around $400,000, to improve education and employment opportunities on the island and to establish a 1,000 square kilometre turtle sanctuary on her marine estate. In the face of many obstacles, this great, great grandmother has shown extraordinary leadership and courage in caring for the cultural and biological integrity of her beloved Crocodile Islands.

Baymarrwangga is at least 90 years of age because she was about 13 years old when a young anthropologist called Donald Thomson sailed to the island and stayed for a few days in 1935 taking photographs of her and other family members. He also photographed the sophisticated system of barriers constructed to trap fish.

I first met Baymarrwangga in 2004 on my very first field trip to Milingimbi, the largest of the Crocodile Island group, the preservation of the culture and environment of which Baymarrwangga has been deservedly recognised by the award. Fortunately I had a 4WD (taken in by barge), which meant that I could drive out to Bordeya, an outstation in the middle of the island, to find the old lady that everyone told me I needed to talk to. Baymarrwangga was still there after a funeral days earlier, and I talked to her about the photographs taken by Thomson at Murrunga and at Milingimbi. She recognised herself and the close relative who had just died in some of the images, and because I had a printer with me was able to provide copies of these and others including her father and grandfather also photographed by Thomson. During discussions at Bordeya, Baymarrwangga also identified each of the five Burarra men from Cape Stewart (on the mainland to the west of the Crocodile Islands) painted up for ceremony in another of Thomson's photographs. This proved to be of immense importance to the descendants of these men when I met them a few weeks later on my way back to Darwin via Maningrida.

The following year I travelled by charter plane to her home at Murrunga and spent a week working with this remarkable woman. While the island has no power and few facilities that one would expect to be available to a 2012 Senior Australia of the Year, it is a community led by this strong old lady and is alive with a thirst to teach and nurture the young in the ways of their country and culture. I have encountered few people in Arnhem Land with her extraordinary capacity for language (she speaks eight languages and understands at least another four) and cultural knowledge as there are very few Yolngu who survive to such an age.

Fish fence made in 2003 from undyed vegetable fibre by Laurie Baymarrwangga, Arnhem Land. Size: 610 (h) x 1135 (w) x 130 (d) mm. Registration number X101208.
Source: Museum Victoria  

In late 2004 a gift for the museum's collection arrived from Baymarrwangga. She had made a section of a fish fence from sedge, just as it would have been made in 1935 when Donald Thomson was at Murrunga. She had given it to Gupapuyngu elder Joe Neparrnga Gumbula when he was coming down to the museum to work with me in the collections. And then in 2006 Baymarrwangga herself travelled all the way to Melbourne to see the Donald Thomson Collection. Members of her family who were to come abandoned the trip, but Baymarrwangga spent a week with me at the museum and at my house. It is only through her generosity and patience in sharing her knowledge and teaching me that I am able to understand the importance of what is here at Museum Victoria in the Indigenous collections.

Links:

Australian of the Year Awards

Donald Thomson Collection

Crocodile Island Rangers

Your Question: What is the history of our national holiday?

The tradition of celebrating Australia Day as a national public holiday was established in Australia's first colony, Sydney, and has persevered since the early nineteenth century.

Medal - Australia's 150th Anniversary, 1938: Raising the British flag at Sydney Cove after the landing by Captain Arthur Phillip, January 26, 1788.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Sydney almanacs originally referred to it as First Landing Day or Foundation Day, in celebration of the arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip in Sydney on January 26, 1788. It was not until the thirtieth anniversary of European settlement, in 1818, that Governor Lachlan Macquarie officially created a public holiday in New South Wales. During this time other newly founded colonies were also celebrating their own beginnings, through sporting events, picnics and anniversary dinners.

Australia Day celebrations in Melbourne, 1916: the car in the foreground won first prize for the most decorated car.
Image: Mrs C.M. Chisholm
Source: Museum Victoria  

January 26 in 1888 marked the centenary of European settlement, however attitudes towards the celebration were mixed. The date was primarily associated with New South Wales rather than all the colonies. Nevertheless, the celebrations across Australia assisted to create a greater sense of cohesion between the separate colonies as they attempted to forget Australia's 'convict stain' and focus on the future. From the 1880s this was signified with a movement towards a national holiday, perhaps made easier by the achievement of Federation in 1901. However it was not until 1935 that all Australian states and territories used the name 'Australia Day' to mark the date.

Badge – South Australia Public Service Australia Day, 26 July 1918.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

For Indigenous Australians, for whom the date represented invasion and an irrevocable impact upon their culture, land and population, there was no cause for celebration. During the sesquicentenary events in 1938, approximately 100 Aboriginal protesters gathered in Sydney to present a different view of the celebrations. For the protestors and those represented, Australia Day was instead 'a day of mourning', highlighting the loss of life, land and language that was a cause of the European occupation of Australia.

Badge – ‘White Australia has a Black History,’ Australia, 1988
Image: Heath Warwick (photographer)
Source: Museum Victoria  

The protest demanded new laws that would ensure equality for Aboriginal people in the wider Australian community, such as citizenship rights. From this time, new voices were arising to question the celebratory status of Australia Day. This gained impetus during the 1988 Bicentenary with numerous protests staged across Australia including both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people declaring Australia Day a commemoration rather than a celebration of Australia's history.

Bicentenary display, Windows on Victoria exhibition, Melbourne Museum, 2000-2007.
Image: Benjamin Heally
Source: Museum Victoria  

Material objects, such as badges, coins and t-shirts, have often been disseminated to commemorate Australia Day. Many of these are in Museum Victoria's collection and can be viewed on Collections Online. These items remind us of the different meanings that Australia Day can have for Australia's diverse population. They also provide us with an understanding of the various circumstances leading up to Australia Day's consistent recognition by all States and Territories on January 26 for the first time in 1994, and as we know it today.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Australia Day: History

Australia Day Student Resources: Indigenous Australians

Happy Chinese New Year! In 2012 it's the Year of the Dragon. I've been stalking Wally the Gippsland Water Dragon in the Forest Gallery for days but couldn't get decent photo. I figured he should be the notional poster boy for this year's Chinese horoscope. Alas I am hopeless paparazzo because every time a customer service officer called me to say he was out and about and ready for his close-up, he would flee at the sight of me.

So I wandered down to the Live Exhibits lab to try get some tips on reptile whispering or to see if Wally had a stunt double, dead or alive. The staff responded by saying things like "oh, here I have a picture of Wally on my phone," and another said "here is a snap of another type of water dragon I took while bushwalking." You gotta love our museum staff.

1. Wally the Water Dragon only poses for visitors and Live Exhibits staff.

Wally's scientific name, Phisygnathus lesueurii howittii, has a connection to Museum Victoria. Our founding director Frederick McCoy named this species after "that excellent geologist, magistrate, and bushman, my accomplished friend Mr. A. Howitt... willing to aid in any scientific investigation of the natural products of Gippsland, and who with infinite difficulty succeeded in procuring three specimens for me of this River-Lizard."

McCoy also reported that that these lizards must have given rise to the rumours of crocodiles in Gippsland.

Wally the Gippsland Water Dragon.
Image: Caitlyn Henderson
Source: Caitlyn Henderson  

Wally's stunt double cousin, Eastern Water Dragon Physignathus lesueurii lesueurii.
Image: David Holmes
Source: David Holmes  

2. Chinese dragons have four claws and Japanese dragons have three.

Next time you find yourself in a dragon-slaying situation, take a moment to count the claws on the foot of the dragon. That way you will know the its origin; if it has four claws it is Chinese but if it has three claws it is characteristically Japanese.

Japanese dragon carving in wood with articulated body, limbs and tongue. (ST 018385)
Source: Museum Victoria  

3. Some dragons have fire in their bellies that sounds the passage of time.

Some dragons may breathe fire, but this Chinese dragon has fire in its belly; it's a reproduction of a Chinese fire clock. The dragon is boat-shaped with wires that support a burning incense stick or taper. This gradually ignites cords that then drop metal balls into a brass dish below.

Chinese fire clock replica, made by J. Bishop, Melbourne, 1959. (ST 024869)
Source: Museum Victoria  

4. Dragon's blood was once used to stain violins and treat diarrhoea.

Dragon's blood is a red resin prepared from the fruits of a climbing palm (Daemonorops draco). It is used for colouring mahogany, varnishes, for staining marble and in the preparation of lacquers and dentifrices. It was also used medicinally for the treatment of diarrhoea and severe syphilis!

Glass jar containing Dragon's Blood used in the pharmacy of a mental health hospital, Victoria, Australia, circa 1900 (SH 850502).
Source: Museum Victoria  

5. Dragons are from mythical lands and Victorian coastlines.

The Victorian marine emblem is the Weedy Sea Dragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus). These wonderful fish are residents of Westernport and Hobsons Bays as well as Geelong and Portland.

Like most fish, sea dragons swim horizontally rather than in a vertical position, like seahorses. However, like seahorses, male seal dragons do the egg-carrying duty.

  Seagrass habitat with two sea dragons.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

So in the tradition of Chinese New Year, forget all grudges, wish peace and happiness to all, and sweep away ill fortune to make way for incoming good luck.

Links:

Gippsland Water Dragon

Frederick McCoy's debunking of the Gippsland crocodile myth

Question of the Week: Dragon's den

Karen Rowe is a Research Associate at MV where she studies evolutionary ecology and behaviour in birds and mammals.

January 20th is an auspicious day for birding enthusiasts, marking Penguin Awareness Day. With 17 species currently recognised, members of the family Spheniscidae (pronounced sfen-IS-kuh-dee) are found only within the southern hemisphere. While most of us think of penguins as cold-adapted animals, surviving long treks over ice to breed and raise their young in the middle of winter, many species live further north, among the islands off of Antarctica, along the coasts of New Zealand and Australia, and one species is found on the Galapagos Islands (the aptly named Galapagos Penguin).

Royal Penguins (Eudyptes schlegeli) – among Elephant Seals on Macquarie Island.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

As a group, penguins possess an amazing array of adaptations, uniquely suited to their predominately marine existence. Unlike other birds, penguins have solid, rather than air-filled bones, to help them dive in the water. They have highly modified feathers that form a thick insulating layer that cover the body, rather than growing in the well-defined feather tract found in other birds. They also have unique eyes that allow them to see clearly both on land and in the sea. And while their short legs and feet make them seem awkward on land, many species actually travel tremendous distances over land and rocks to reach their breeding sites – some even traveling as far as three kilometres from water.

Captive Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus) floating in the water. The coloured flipper band allows zoo keepers to distinguish between individuals.
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

Extant species show a wide range of body sizes, from our own Little (or Fairy) Penguins, weighing 1.1 kg and standing 40 cm tall, to the largest species, the Emperor Penguin, at a whopping 30 kg and up to 115 cm tall.

Little Penguins (Eudyptyla minor) in captivity. These coloured leg bands are another way to tell individuals apart.
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

But even the Emperor Penguin is dwarfed in size by some of the extinct fossil penguins, including a 15-million-year-old giant penguin (Anthropodyptes gilli) from Victoria that may have approached twice its size. Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Dr. Erich Fitzgerald studies fossil penguins here at Museum Victoria. "Victoria was home to a remarkable diversity of penguins over the last 20 million years," says Dr. Fitzgerald. "The tiny Little Penguin living in Australia today is an oddity on a geologic timescale. The fossil record tells us that most penguins that have lived in Australia were large to huge in size and that at any one time there were perhaps two or more species coexisting here." Currently, Dr. Fitzgerald and his student, Travis Park, are working on six-million-year-old fossil penguins found in Melbourne on the shores of Port Philip Bay that are thought to be the size of the living Gentoo and Emperor Penguins.

The upper wing bone (humerus) of living penguins compared with their fossil counterparts from Victoria. From left to right: the 18-million-year-old fossil Anthropodyptes gilli; the living emperor penguin Aptenodytes forsteri; the living fairy penguin Eudyptula minor; the living gentoo penguin Pygoscelis papua; and the 6-million-year-old fossil Pseudaptenodytes. Credit: Photograph by Erich Fitzgerald
Image: Erich Fitzgerald
Source: Museum Victoria  

Emperor Penguin and chick, Antarctica.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

The unique ecology of penguins makes them particularly susceptible to a variety of human-induced threats. In particular, commercial fishing, often leading to death through by-catch or competition for prey items (which include fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods), directly impacts their survival. Penguins are also dependent on breeding grounds close to the shore and habitat loss is a major source of population declines. Smaller and fewer breeding grounds also promotes disease, as most species of penguins breed in large colonies.

Royal Penguin colony. This species is endemic to Macquarie Island and this is the largest Royal Penguin colony with over 180,000 breeding pairs. The fluffy young penguin in the front on the right is in moult.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

Although little research has been done looking at the impact of climate change on penguins, their specialised lifestyle suggests that climate change could have dramatic impacts on their distribution and abundance. "Penguins are an ancient group of birds, with a history stretching back some 65 million years to the extinction of the dinosaurs," says Dr. Fitzgerald. "In southern Australia they have persisted through the last 20 million years of major climatic changes, but it is unknown how they will respond to the current human-exacerbated wave of environmental upheaval. It would be a terrible shame to see this ancient and superbly successful group of birds become threatened with extinction within our lifetime."

Adelie Penguin, Bechervaise Island, Antarctica.
Image: Julie McInnes
Source: Julie McInnes  

Links:

Emperor Penguins in the Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world

Penguins on Atlas of Living Australia

Happy Feet Two at IMAX Melbourne

1. Summer means getting to a century... in cricket, in the old Fahrenheit, and for a beer break.

As a little kid, I remember summer was celebrated by the number 100. It was a big deal when cricketers hit a century (as it still is) and being able to say "it's going to be (or was) 100 today!" to whomever you met that day. I also remember some outdoor workers used to stop work if it got to a hundred.

One hundred degrees Fahrenheit is 38° Celsius; it's marked as 'blood heat' (body temperature) on this old thermometer from our collection. According to Mr Myles Whelan, this advertising thermometer "had hung inside the office of Whelan the Wrecker since the 1920s." He donated the sign to Museum Victoria after the company went into receivership in 1991. I wonder... did they go for beers when it got to 100°F?

Sign - 'Stephens Inks', Thermometer, Metal & Enamel, 1920s. (SH 930886)
Source: Museum Victoria   

2. Summer means water worship... sun worship is too dangerous.

Mr Hogan from the council pool was a fit muscular chap like the Roman god Neptune; he was god of water, sea and master of the chlorinated pond. For summer after summer, Mr Hogan tried to teach me to swim. He eventually got me to swim half the length of the pool but I was never able to repeat it. Swimming is a skill that still eludes me.

Nevertheless summertime does call for a bit of water worship and don't we all miss the days of wonderful garden sprinkler action.

These floatation aids were used by Margaret Daws at the beach around 1930 when she was about four years old. The Daws family lived in Coburg and rented the same Aspendale house every year for their annual two-month summer holiday at Mordialloc and Aspendale (Long Beach).

Water Wings - Father Neptune's Safe Float, circa 1930 (HT 21431).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Here's Gerald Brocklesby jumping over the sprinkler in the back garden of his family home at Blackburn, on 17 January 1953. The Brocklesby children often played in the sprinkler in the backyard for relief from the summer heat.

Digital Photograph - Boy Jumping Over Rotating Sprinkler, Backyard, Blackburn, 1953 (MM 110316).
Source: Museum Victoria  

3. Summer cool is a short queue at the Gelato van.

When I saw this toy ice-cream truck I thought I could hear the distant sound of a slow paced, slightly off tune - the electronic xylophone version of Für Elise. It is part of the William Boyd Childhood Collection of post-World War II country Victorian toys that belonged to Bill Boyd.

Toy Ice Cream Truck - Metal, circa 1950s (HT 18771)
Source: Museum Victoria  

4. Summer is all thanks to 23.5. The answer to the universe and everything is not 42, it is 23.5. The seasons of the year are a consequence of the 23.5° tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbital alignment with the Sun. The summer solstice (longest day) has been celebrated in a myriad of pagan, religious, humanitarian, commercial, and family rituals.

This orrery was made by Benjamin Martin in London, England circa 1770. An orrery is a mechanical model of the Solar System. Generally they were intended to be schematic representations for educational purposes rather than strictly accurate ones. This orrery contains a mechanism that can actually produce elliptical orbits around the Sun and is pictured in the winter position for Australia.

  Orrery, Tellurium & Lunarium - Benjamin Martin, London, circa 1770. (ST 023770).
Source: Museum Victoria  

5. Summer in Melbourne is parasol one day, umbrella the next. When I started writing this blog it was a hot 35°C day. The day I was checking the final draft, it was 19°C and a hailstorm had just subsided. By the time I went for lunch the skies were clear and the sun was out.

Many years ago an overseas friend emailed me and asked me what the weather was like; instead of taking a photo outside my office window I saw this t-shirt in a souvenir shop – so I sent her a photo of that instead.

Photo of a Melbourne 'Four Seasons in One Day' souvenir t-shirt taken many years ago at a city souvenir store.  

Oh by the way... at the moment our award-winning Planetarium at Scienceworks is running a great show about the reasons for the seasons called Tilt.

And...if you visit Melbourne Museum in the next month don't forget to check out the Summer Holiday Snaps display in the foyer. It features 40 images from our image collection depicting summer holidays around 100 years ago. We are so used to looking at people from the early 20th century in austere portraits that it's wonderful to see these relaxed, leisure-time snaps with their candid, smiling faces. Some things haven't changed so much in 100 years, after all.

Summer Holiday Snaps display in the Melbourne Museum foyer.
Image: Andi Horvath
Source: Museum Victoria  

In October 2011, 50 scientists and volunteers performed a rapid biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory in partnership with Parks Victoria. In this video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts talk about the mammals of Wilsons Prom, particularly the small mammals: native rats and antechinus.

 

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Prom Bioscan

Paradise Valley

Historian at the Prom

Hunting for herpetiles

Crayfish climbing trees

A beautiful cloak woven from flax and kiwi feathers might seem like an unusual piece of sports memorabilia, but in 1889 this is exactly what the museum acquired from the visiting New Zealand Native rugby team. This team toured Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles as a money-making venture at the height of international fascination in the exotic colonies, giving the world their first glimpse of New Zealand's now-renowned rugby talent.

ANU scholar Keren Ruki recently completed a one-month internship in MV's Indigenous Cultures department examining and researching the cloak and other collection objects from New Zealand. The cloak is exquisitely made and in beautiful condition but was largely undocumented. Keren's research means we now know much more about the cloak and its story.

Keren Ruki with the kiwi feather cloak housed for more than a century in Museum Victoria's collection.
Image: Rod Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Keren first visited Museum Victoria several years ago when she was researching Māori cloak construction for her own art practice. Born in New Zealand but raised in Australia, Keren describes feeling somewhere between the two cultures and drawn to the weaving techniques of her ancestors. "I felt a big urge to go home to find out who I was," she says, explaining her trips back to New Zealand to learn how to weave. Some weaving techniques have been lost in time but keen detective work helps to recover them and keep them alive. "Cloaks in collections teach me how things are made. If you've got an object, it's never dead. You can relearn how to make it."

Now embarking upon a master's degree in liberal arts, an 1854 Student Scholarship helped bring her back to Melbourne for a closer look at this cloak in particular. It was woven top to bottom using an off-loom weaving technique that is unique to Māori weavers called whatu. In a laborious process, the maker(s) used mussel shells to extract fibre from the native flax plants, drew the fibre out into string, and wove the string across the warp, locking each kiwi feather in place. It would have been highly prized when it was made and thus chosen to accompany the New Zealand Native team on their tour.

This kiwi feather cloak was purchased by the museum in June 1889.
Image: Rod Start
Source: Museum Victoria.  

The 1888-1889 rugby tour was a triumph for the New Zealanders. They won 78 of their 107 games. As Keren puts it, "They took the game back to the masters and flogged them at it. The rugby field was one of those places where we could have a fair go. It was a great equaliser in a sense, even though it was a colonial game." The players wore black shirts with a fern motif, later adopted as the national team colours and still used today. It was also the first time that the haka was performed at the rugby, perhaps even while wearing this cloak.

The tour coincided with the Great Exhibition movement when the world was hungry for objects from faraway places. "Cloaks and the Māori were such a novelty, that's why the team came here – there was a market for them," explains Keren. However the tour was not as lucrative as the captain and organiser Joseph Warbrick had hoped. It was expensive to feed and transport 26 players and there were injuries due to the gruelling schedule of games. Cultural items were sold off to museums as the team returned to New Zealand. This cloak was bought by the (then) National Museum of Victoria on 10 June 1889, the day before the New Zealand Natives slaughtered the Victorian team in a rugby match. Another cloak was purchased by the Australian Museum.

1888-1889 New Zealand Natives football team before playing Queensland in July 1889.
Source: In the public doman, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.  

Keren's research is not complete; she's still hoping to uncover the whakapapa or ancestry of the cloak – who made it and where it came from. "It's from the Ngati Kahungunu tribe from the Kaimanawa Ranges in the North Island. There might be other ways to follow the threads of cloak through cloaks in other collections. The maker might be a Warbrick relative."

It's wonderful to hear that she will continue seeking the stories behind the Māori treasures in Australian Museums. "To have a look at my own cultural material is really important and it's very significant to the Māori community in Australia. It's been an amazing journey for me because everyone's opened up their doors."

This year's round of 1854 Student Scholarships is open for applications until 31 March 2012.

Links:

Pacific Island Ethnographic Collection

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

Today is the birthday of Alfred Russel Wallace, who was born on 8 January, 1823. While he isn't terribly well known today, at the end of the 19th century he was one of England's best-known naturalists – which is saying something considering that he was a contemporary of people such as Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker. In fact, Wallace’s famous letter to Darwin prompted the latter to write On the Origin of Species after a joint presentation of their work to the Linnean Society. This post, however, is about another of Wallace’s important contributions to biology.

Photograph of Alfred Russel Wallace, taken in Singapore, 1862.
Source: In the public domain, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.  

After trying his hands at a few trades, Wallace became a field collector – a career that combined his desire to travel with his passion for natural history. After four years collecting along the Amazon River (and an eventful return voyage to England in which he spent 26 days in a lifeboat after his ship caught fire and sank!), Wallace set off for the Malay Archipelago – what is now Malaysia and Indonesia – and spent nearly eight years collecting shells, insects, reptiles mammals and birds for sale in England. The book he published about this trip, The Malay Archipelago, the land of the orang-utan and the bird of paradise; a narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature, was one of the best selling travel books of the nineteenth century.

Museum Victoria has around 200 bird specimens collected by Wallace on this trip that were sold to John Gould and then donated to the museum. Birds are very important in Wallace's story - not only was he looking specifically for the highly sought after birds of paradise on his trip so he could sell them to collectors in England, but his observations about the distribution of birds amongst the islands he visited were highly important in allowing him to develop the theory we today call biogeography – the science of where animals live and why.

A shelf of bird mounts collected by AR Wallace in the Museum Victoria collection.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

In June of 1859 Wallace made an unscheduled trip between the islands of Bali and Lombok when he couldn't find a direct boat from Singapore to Makassar (at the south end of the island of Sulawesi, then called Celebes). He noticed that even though the islands are within sight of each other and very similar in size, elevation and climate, the bird species on Lombok were very different from those he'd seen on Bali. Wallace came to the conclusion that the two islands belonged to distinct Zoological provinces. He wrote in The Malay Archipelago:

I may mention that during a few days' stay in the island of Bali I found birds of the genera Copsychus, Megalaima, Tiga, Plocus, and Sturnopastor, all characteristic of the Indian region and abundant in Malacca, Java, and Borneo; while on crossing over to Lombock, during three months collecting there, not one of them was ever seen; neither have they occurred in Celebes nor any of the more eastern islands I have visited. Taking this in connexion with the fact of Cacatua, Tropidorhynchus, and Megepodius having their western limit in Lombock, we may consider it established that the Strait of Lombock (only 15 miles wide) marks the limits and abruptly separates two of the great Zoological regions of the globe.

In a paper about the distribution of birds in 1868 T.H. Huxley labelled this boundary that Wallace had described between the Asian and Australian biological regions as 'Wallace's Line', the name by which we still know it today. Since then we've discovered that there are other boundaries passing through the archipelago that are relevant to groups other than birds, but Wallace's Line remains the best known and the area is still an important location for research today.

Bird specimen, an adult female Eclectus Parrot, in the MV collection that was collected by AR Wallace.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Meet Me at the Museum: Birds of Paradise

Capturing Paradise: Alfred Russel Wallace's Red Bird of Paradise

Ornithology Collection

Entomology Collection

Wallace's books available as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg

Liza Dale-Hallett is a senior curator in the History and Technology Department. She is responsible for the Sustainable Futures Collection, which includes historical agricultural machinery.

Ken Porter, a former Transport Manager at agricultural machinery manufacturer Massey Ferguson, accidentally stumbled into heritage conservation when he rescued a wooden box from a dumpster in 1991. He thought the box might be some use to him at home, but noticed that a square of cardboard was nailed to it, reading: The plaster cast of H.V. McKay. Not to be opened until another one needed.

Ken Porter, Volunteer at Scienceworks, with the mysterious crate he rescued from a dumpster.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

For another five years Ken secretly rescued nearly 100 years of history of the McKay manufacturing enterprise. This 'rubbish' was squirreled away and subsequently offered to Museum Victoria where it now forms one of Australia's most significant industrial heritage collections.

'No one thinks of history. Until I found that box I didn't either. It takes a quirk of fate that keeps these things,' recalls Ken, now an Honorary Associate of Museum Victoria. Since 1996, Ken and 20 other ex-employees (with many more from around Australia) have been busy identifying and documenting the collection of 15,000 images, over 700 films, numerous objects, and over 5,000 trade publications.

Left: Portrait of Hugh Victor McKay. 1912. | Right: Seedtime and Harvest Shall Never Cease: H. V. McKay, General Implement Catalogue, Sunshine Harvester Works
Source: Museum Victoria  

From humble beginnings, H.V. McKay created the largest industrial enterprise in the southern hemisphere. His equipment was widely used on farms across Australia and was exported to over 150 countries. Following McKay's death, his legacy to Australian agriculture continued through McKay Massey Harris, and later Massey Ferguson (Australia). In 1986, after a period of over 80 years of manufacturing in Sunshine, the company ceased production. This period of major change also included a significant 'clean up' of old company records, which is when Ken's rescue efforts began.

After so many years documenting the McKay Collection, the crate remained a mystery waiting to be revealed. What was inside? How could we open it without damaging the contents?

Michael Varcoe-Cocks, Conservator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), volunteered his expertise in radiography to help examine the construction and content of the crate before it was opened. Radiography reveals physical features not otherwise visible to the naked eye. It is often employed to better understand the condition and method of manufacture of a work of art, and doesn't harm the object.

Examining the x-ray films at NGV.
Image: Justin Schooneman
Source: NGV  

The x-ray was performed in the NGV's Technical Examination Room. Michael enclosed the crate in lead then passed a beam of x-rays through it. Film sensitive to x-rays recorded an image of the crate, inside and out, which provided useful information for MV Conservator Karen Fisher about how to open the crate. Karen used a Japanese Cat's Paw (mini crow bar) to gently lift the rear panels; inside were two profile reliefs of H.V. McKay, both in plaster, not a 'bust' as indicated on the outside of the crate.

MV Conservator Karen Fisher opening the crate with a Japanese Cat's Paw.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The two profile reliefs of H.V. McKay.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Karen then turned to the letter secured by drawing pins to the front of the crate. She used humidification and a heated spatula to make the paper more flexible and break the seal. The letter confirmed that Wallace Anderson was the sculptor commissioned to create the relief profiles. Anderson worked as an artist for the Australian War Museum, the Australian War Memorial and as an independent sculptor. Anderson's most famous works are 'Simpson and his Donkey' (1935), and busts of nine former Australian prime ministers located in the Ballarat Botanic Gardens (1939-45). He also created the bust of H.V. McKay now on display in The Melbourne Story.

We still don't know why the profiles were created or whose initials are represented on the lower edge of one of the plaster moulds... but after 20 years, the crate's contents are finally free.

Links:

H.V. McKay Sunshine Collection

Here is episode two of 'Meet Me at the Museum', a video series about our collection.

We marvel at how particular specimens made it into our collection.

Let us know what you think in the comments section. And be sure to see our previous episodes if you haven't already.

Watch this video with a transcript.

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

I’ve been asking the people who work with MV collections what some of their favourite items are, starting with Dermot Henry, the Manager of the Natural Sciences Collections.

Dermot's speciality is geology and he’s looked after the geosciences collections for many years. When asked what his favourite item was he took care to tell me that he didn’t have a favourite because there are so many fascinating objects, but when pressed he picked the Murchison meteorite as "probably the most famous and scientifically important rock in the collections."

The Murchison meteorite is one of 16 meteorites known from Victoria, and is rare in that it was actually observed falling, rather than just being found on the ground, so it came to scientists fresh (other than some surface dirt from falling into mud and cowpats and the like). It exploded in the atmosphere over Murchison, Victoria, about 160km north of Melbourne, on 28 September, 1969 and fell over an area around 35km². So when we talk about 'it' we’re really talking about lots of broken pieces of a single object.

  Display in Dynamic Earth.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

These pieces are on display in Dynamic Earth and are just a very small portion of what was collected. The largest piece found weighed nearly 7kg though many more were just a few grams each. In total, around 100kg was collected and over 80kg of that made it into science collections. While a lot of the material went overseas (mostly to the Field Museum in Chicago who have nearly 52kg and the Smithsonian in Washington DC who have nearly 20kg) some remained in Australia. Over 7kg stayed at the University of Melbourne and much of this was later donated to Museum Victoria. We have about 3.5kg and only the largest pieces that are on display; we also have lots of smaller pieces.

Drawer containing pieces of Murchison meteorite.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

Most of the pieces of rock in this drawer are parts of the Murchison meteorite (though not the big rock on the right – that’s actually a different meteorite of a similar type called Rainbow that was found in Victoria in 1994). Opening the sealed tubes, you can still smell, very faintly, what Dr. John Lovering from the University of Melbourne who organised the collection of the meteorite pieces in 1969 described as "just like methylated spirits – very strong". This was the first indication that the meteorite he was looking at was a rare type called a carbonaceous chondrite. Unlike more common rocky meteorites, a carbonaceous chondrite is packed full of organic molecules and a lot of water; this one is eight per cent water.

The year after it was collected, papers began to appear in scientific journals describing the chemical composition of the meteorite and excitement about its scientific significance began to grow. A paper in the journal Nature describing the discovery of amino acids of extra-terrestrial origin in the meteorite made, if you’ll pardon the pun, quite an impact, and was widely covered in the press, even making it into Time Magazine. Papers are still being published on it – one came out in August this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and a new chromium sulfide mineral, Murchisite (Cr₅S₆), was just reported in American Mineralogist.

To date over 70 amino acids have been identified from the meteorite, only 19 of which are known from Earth. These, and the many other chemicals that have been identified, suggest there could be thousands of complex organic chemicals present. What’s so interesting about these molecules is that they demonstrate that the simple chemical building blocks necessary for life on Earth seem to form quite easily in other places.

It isn’t just the origins of life that the Murchison meteorite may tell us about. It contains tiny pre-solar grains – nano-diamonds and silicon carbides, among others, that formed in supernovas long before our own sun appeared – which tell us a lot about how our own, and other, solar systems formed. But not only that, information from the pre-solar grains in the Murchison meteorite has been fundamental in figuring out a lot about how elements are originally produced and a lot about the structure and mechanics of stars.

So the Murchison meteorite is definitely pretty cool – biologists, chemists, astrophysicists and those of us who just think rocks that fall out of the sky are fascinating all agree on that. As Dermot says, "it’s so unusual and it’s yielded so much information about cosmology, element formation and how the universe works – it’s probably generated more publications than any other meteorite. And it’s Victorian!"

Two pieces of the Murchison meteorite in Dynamic Earth.
Image: Ursula Smith
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Infosheet: Meteorites

Video: The Murchison meteorite story

Dermot A. Henry, 'Star Dust Memories - a Brief History of the Murchison Carbonaceous Chondrite'. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 2003. 20: vii-ix (PDF, 1 MB)

Each year, the MV library develops a particular area of the book collection. This year it's the Indigenous section receiving attention, which will assist the team working on the redevelopment of Bunjilaka and the researchers of the Indigenous Cultures Department. Over 50 books, many of them out-of-print and very rare, were purchased from Grants Bookshop for an average price of less than a modern day paperback. With increasing costs for interlibrary loans, purchasing our own copies for MV makes sound financial sense, too.

Display in the MV Library of the newly-aquired books about Indigenous culture and history.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Research associate Jason Gibson talked about the nature of these books, some of which date back to the 1940s. "They often take a classical anthropological perspective, that you don't see much of any more. There were problems with this approach but in terms of the detail captured, it's fantastic." He explained that these books were largely written by non-Indigenous anthropologists attempting an objective, scientific analysis of Indigenous people. "It was often the first time Indigenous languages, traditions and cultural practices had been documented in written form and therefore these texts have become very important for Native Title research as well as museum studies."

Librarian Leonie Cash laments the closure of many of Melbourne's second-hand bookshops that makes these books even harder to obtain. Even now when books are becoming available in electronic form, physical books are still popular for researchers who spend much of their day looking at a computer screen and would prefer to read from paper.

L-R: Jason Gibson, Hayley Webster and Rose Bollen looking at the new books.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The books are on display in the MV Library for staff to peruse and borrow. Of particular interest is the acquisition of the first edition of an American Philosophical Society publication of 1941 Aboriginal Australian String Figures, including string figure illustrations of the bandicoot, python, boomerang, and canoe.

Links:

Indigenous Cultures collections

MV Blog: Following the travelling Tjitingalla

Ursula Smith works in the natural sciences collections at Museum Victoria. Though a palaeontologist by training she finds all the collections fascinating and swings between excitement at all the cool stuff in them and despair at the lack of time to look at it all.

Given that they're the subject of some major research at the museum there's been a lot of talk about blue-ringed octopuses around the Sciences Department at the museum recently. As I grew up in the UK, I've never seen one so when I heard that there was one on display in Melbourne Museum I headed down to find it so I could see what these fearsome beasts I'd heard so much about look like in the flesh. But to my surprise it didn't look as exciting as I had expected - there was not a blue ring to be seen.

So now I know what any Victorian schoolchild should be able to tell you: a blue-ringed octopus only displays those eponymous blue rings when it feels threatened or disturbed and most of the time it's just a plain brown or greyish colour.

Blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) specimen in a jar on display.
Image: Genevieve Ooms
Source: Museum Victoria  

Despite this specimen's disappointing colouration though, it does have a fascinating story attached to it. Look closely at the label in the picture and you can just see that it bears the slightly ominous "...bit and caused paralysis" which is a transcription of the note made in the museum registration book when this specimen was donated: "This specimen bit and caused paralysis in its captor". As it happens, this is the actual individual, collected on Christmas Day, 1962, that lead to much of the public awareness about the dangers of the blue-ringed octopus.

It perhaps seems a little strange that it wasn't known that this species is so dangerous until so recently - despite the southern species being described in 1883, it wasn't until 1954 that the bite of any blue-ringed octopus was discovered to be deadly. The first recorded fatality – one of only two in Australia to date – was in spring 1954 near East Point, Darwin, but the culprit was originally misidentified because it got away and was then identified based on another octopus the victim's friend pointed out as looking the same. The victim, a 21 year old seaman, Kirk Dyson-Holland, died within two hours of being bitten after picking up an octopus while spearfishing.

For a while, it was largely assumed that the danger of death-by-octopus was restricted to the north or perhaps to people with specific allergies, but then nearly a decade later, on Christmas Day 1962, Arthur Thompson, then 33, was bitten on the hand by a southern blue-ringed octopus at Ricketts Point, Beaumaris in Port Phillip Bay just round the coastline from Melbourne (where they are still found – there was a report in a local paper of one being picked up by a 4 year old just this May). The Registrar of the Alfred Hospital Clinical Research Unit where Mr. Thompson was taken reported:

The patient held it on the back of the hand for a minute of two, and after putting it down noticed a speck of blood on his hand, there had been no sensation of sting or bite. A few minutes later he felt a prickling sensation around his mouth which rapidly became generalized and within fifteen minutes was almost completely paralysed.....Just after admission spontaneous respiration ceased and he was respired for about an hour. Thereafter he made a steady and uneventful recovery of his muscle power. He was well the next day, chest X-ray was clear and he was discharged.

Happily, Mr. Thompson recovered after an hour of artificial ventilation while the poison wore off and nobody has actually been killed by one in Victoria, but the story of this octopus, reported widely in the news, lead to a much greater awareness of the danger of disturbing the blue-ringed octopus. There has only been one reported fatality in Australia since, near Sydney in 1967, partly due to better understanding of the dangers and partly because the blue-ringed octopus is, fortunately, really quite laid back and won't bite unless provoked.

Mr. Thompson's brush with death obviously wasn't the first time someone was bitten by one of these octopuses and it is likely that there have been other deaths before and after, many of which would have been reported as unexplained. In fact, there was an incident a year earlier in December 1961 at Cowes, Phillip Island, with almost identical results: the victim was bitten, felt gradual paralysis until he stopped breathing, was given artificial respiration for a couple of hours and then recovered to be discharged from the hospital on Christmas day exactly a year before Mr. Thompson was admitted. That octopus wasn't kept so we don't know for sure what species it was, but it seems likely that it was also our friend the blue-ringed octopus.

So next time you visit the museum, keep an eye out for this specimen in the Port Phillip Bay cabinet on the ground floor – just turn left as you come past the ticket desk. It won't bite!

Blue-ringed octopus, Hapalochlaena maculosa.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria  

References:

Report of the first fatality in Australia: Flecker H, Cotton BC (1955). Fatal bite from an octopus. Med J Aust 2:329-331.

Injuries to man from marine invertebrates in the Australian Region. Cleland, J. B. and Southcott, R. V. 1965. National Health and Medical Research Council, Canberra, pp282.

Links:

Australian Women's Weekly article from 1967

Report from the Moorabbin Leader from May 2011

MV Blog post about Julian's research

Marine Life exhibition

(Warning: this blog contains graphic images and bad puns.)

On 19 October I heard exciting news leaking down the underground corridors of Melbourne Museum and into the Live Exhibits Lab. Word that a Humpback Whale had beached itself on the western end of the Ninety Mile Beach in eastern Victoria, set my plan in motion to become involved in its subsequent recovery. I bailed up (approached) the Preparations Department manager Peter Swinkels in one of the corridors and offered my assistance. Fortunately he said yes and that if I could handle a tight squeeze in the car, I was welcome to come along and help out.

So we left the Museum the following Monday and headed for McGaurens Beach, a small stretch of coast located between Yarram and Sale. The car ride down was a bit of a squeeze with Peter Swinkels, Steven Sparrey (Preparation), Brendon Taylor (Preparation), Michael Pennell (Image Management & Copyright) and I (Live Exhibits) all stuffed into the Hilux for the three hour trip down to McGaurens Beach. We arrived around lunchtime, and started to inspect the dead whale and the surrounding conditions (such as the tide) to plan our course of action.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) belong to the suborder Mysticeti, the group known as the baleen whales. Baleen is the keratin (the same material your fingernails) plates that the whales use to filter their food (krill, other zooplankton and small fish) with. Adult humpback whales can measure between 12-16 metres, and can weigh over 30 tonnes!

When we arrived at McGaurens Beach the whale sat just above the low tide mark. It would make it very hard to work on the whale when the tide came in, so we decided to move it higher up the beach and out of reach of the tide. This way we could work on it all day.

The Humpback Whale 6 days after it had died.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

To avoid damage to the flippers we removed them before the excavator dragged the whale up past the high tide mark. Although the excavator weighed 25 tonnes, it still struggled to pull the whale 50m up the beach.

Cutting off the flippers to enable easy movement up the beach.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

To cut off the flippers and through the flesh we used very large sharp knives and a special knife shaped like a hockey stick, called a flensing tool. Flensing tools were what whalers used to use to cut the blubber off whales before commercial whaling was banned in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Some legal whaling still continues today in indigenous communities as traditional hunting, and through exploiting legal loopholes under the guise of scientific research.

Manager of Preparation, Peter Swinkels, with a traditional flensing tool.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

After dragging the body past the high tide mark we took measurements of different parts of the whale. These measurements will be added to a big database full of information that helps us understand these wonderful creatures of the sea.

Measuring the width of the tail flukes.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

After all the measurements had been recorded it was time to remove the skeleton. Firstly, we needed to find some small vestigial bones that are the remnants of the whale's hip and hind legs. Millions of years ago the ancestors of the modern whales we see today had front and rear limbs, and while the forelimbs slowly evolved into flippers, the hind limbs slowly disappeared and all that is left is a few tiny bones.

Peter Swinkels holding the vestigial hind limbs.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

After cutting away most of the flesh and blubber we removed the vertebrae (the backbone). Slowly and carefully, we removed the ribs, the skull, and the mandible (the jawbone). All the fleshy waste was returned to sea, where it would be eaten and broken down by scavenging animals and bacteria.

The pile of blubber we made after removing it from the carcass.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

Once we had all the bones, we dug a big hole and put the bones into it. We bury the bones so that bacteria and other flesh eating organisms can clean the bones for us. In about six months, we will return to where the bones are buried and bring them back to the museum for a few touch ups and further measurement. Perhaps one day they will be put on display at Melbourne Museum for you to see.

All the bones about to be buried in order to let the flesh decompose before taking them to Melbourne Museum.
Image: Colin Silvey
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

ABC Gippsland: radio interview with Erich Fitzgerald

ABC Gippsland: photos and story about whale recovery

Infosheet: Blue Whale

MV News: Rare whale retrieved (2008)

MV Blog: What's that smell?

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

October is an important time of year for bird migration. In the southern hemisphere birds head for their summer breeding grounds. Most species of cuckoo are migratory and the Long-tailed Cuckoo (Eudynamys taitensis) is the greatest traveller of the southern hemisphere cuckoos. It is added to the Australian list owing to its seasonal presence on Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands. Museum Victoria has several specimens of this species, mostly from New Zealand.

Long-tailed Cuckoo skins in their drawer.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some of the specimens are over a hundred years old. Not unusually one of the skins is from John Gould, acquired around 1860, another from James Cockerell, a pioneering nineteenth century collector who gained his specimen in the Solomon Islands in 1879; others are of more recent origin. They almost radiate with a sense of history, and perhaps some mystery too.

Long-tailed Cuckoos spend the winter months in the more tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, mainly in Polynesia. Their spring migration takes them to New Zealand and its surrounding islands. From French Polynesia, the islands around Tahiti, the distance is over 3000 kilometres, a route over open ocean. It is in this group that it is thought the New Zealand Maoris had their ancestral home, the paradisiacal land of Hawaiki.

Some students of Polynesian voyaging have theorised that the original discovery of New Zealand was made by following cuckoo migration. But it is a controversial idea. Maori mythology is replete with stories of ancestral voyaging. The mythology also acknowledges the existence and character of the Long-tailed Cuckoo, 'a lazy parent'. But there does not appear to be any definitive link between them and the voyaging.

Nevertheless, it is a persuasive idea. Long-tailed cuckoos are land birds. Individual Pacific Islands hold relatively few bird species, especially land birds. However unpopulated New Zealand was heavily forested, with a bountiful range of host species which cuckoos could parasitise; the result – lots of cuckoos. Their presence and movements in the islands would have been prominent. Also they migrate over a period of two or three weeks, usually in October. They fly day and night, low over the ocean, calling loudly to each other as they go in a way that can be heard on the water in the dark.

A remarkable Australian, Harold Gatty, was probably the most prominent proponent of the bird migration theory. As a young man he had gained a thorough knowledge of navigation. He emigrated to the United States and rose to fame in 1931 as the navigator on a historic flight around the world in eight days. Along with the pilot, he was given a ticker tape parade in New York and a medal by President Herbert Hoover. Later he served with Macarthur's headquarters in the South Pacific.

In 1943 Gatty published The Raft Book, a survival guide for airmen at sea. It was standard issue in the life rafts aboard all Allied aircraft in the Pacific. The book includes Gatty's ideas about how to navigate using the techniques of 'the greatest pathfinders in history', the Polynesians. As Gatty says, they understood bird migration long before Europeans, understood there was land where the birds were seen to go to, and then return from. They were an adventurous people and brave sailors in canoes that they said 'dared the clouds of heaven'.

Just imagine you are far out from any known land at night, the infinite starry sky above and a seemingly infinite world of water around you, your next landfall an unknown distance away -and nothing but a bunch of cuckoos to guide you on your way. Brave sailors indeed.

Two Long-tailed Cuckoo specimens mounted for exhibition.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Whatever the truth about Maori migration, it is certain that the adult birds in the Museum Victoria collection would have made great voyages across the South Pacific. There is a Long-tailed Cuckoo in the Amazing Animals of Australasia, Oceania and Antarctica in Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world.

Further reading:

Harold Gatty, Nature is Your Guide: how to find your way on land and sea, Collins, London, 1958

David Lewis, We, the Navigators: the ancient art of landfinding in the Pacific, ANU Press, Canberra, 1972

For the sceptical view:

Andrew Sharp Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1963

Bec is working on the history of Museum Victoria's Science Collections and all the people who have been part of them since the museum's origin in 1854.

As a history curator, the dizziest height I usually get to is the top shelf of the archive. So flying over Wilsons Promontory with the Prom Bioscan team last week was a true adventure. 

My job, History of Science Collections Curator, often involves following the archive trail of past scientists to establish the what, where and how behind the specimens in our collections. The history of Wilsons Prom is interwoven with the history of Museum Victoria. Three former directors were instrumental in the establishment and ongoing development of the park. In the 1960s Charlie Brazenor led a museum team survey whose report initiated many of the park's innovations such as a permanent ranger/manager, proper signage and even a small museum at Tidal River.

Charles Brazenor, Curator of Mammals and later Director (second from right) oversaw the museum survey in 1950.
Image: Hope McPherson
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Prom Bioscan represents the next phase of the museum's work at the Prom so I just had to be there to document it. We hold some magnificent historic images of the Prom and it was also a great opportunity to re-shoot some of those locations to get a sense of how the park has changed over time.

Jim Whelan, former chief ranger at the Prom and local keeper of Prom history, has been gleefully working with me on a short history of field surveys at the Prom and was the ultimate guide on my travels.

Jim Whelan, Operations Manager, Wilsons Prom Centre for Excellence sharing his knowledge of the Prom.
Image: Rebecca Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

We flew by helicopter from Tidal River over most of the park, skirting the coastline looking for the rock formations in the historic images I had brought with me. Some locations were simply too difficult to land so we had to hover over the trees and take the photos through the little window of the chopper. Other locations, like Mt Oberon car park, which can't be accessed by road since the floods, were the perfect spot to land the chopper and walk or bushbash to the spots we needed. Jim has every tree; every rock imprinted in his memory and the journey through his memories was as interesting as the chopper ride.

Our longest stop was at Sealers Cove. Having been there many times on foot it was spectacular to see the cove open up before us as we rounded the coastline.

Pilot Ed parked the chopper next to iconic Whale Rock on Sealers Cove beach.
Image: Rebecca Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

I wanted to find remnants of the old wooden tramway used by the mill in 1800s but the terrain was impenetrable. I did, however, find a couple of little wooden posts sticking out of the sand where the massive jetty that serviced the mill once stood. The jetty was built by King and McCulloch in 1903 and extended 800 metres into the cove.

The Sealer's Cove jetty in the 1920s.
Source: Jan Phelan  

Bec Carland getting down and dirty photographing the remnants of Sealers Cove jetty.
Image: Anna McCallum
Source: Museum Victoria  

The last remnants of the Sealers Cove jetty.
Image: Rebecca Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

So today, back at my desk staring out at the Royal Exhibition Building I can still hear the sea and the echo of the radio calls from the chopper headphones buzzing in my ears and if I squint a bit, the cream REB against the blue sky looks a little like the sands of Sealers Cove. The recreated photos are looking good and some truly fascinating moments in the Prom's history are coming together as a series of videos for Collections Online.

This post is by Simon Sherrin, the programmer behind MV's field guide app. He blogs at the Field Guide to the Field Guide.

Like so many, I was saddened yesterday to hear of the death of Steve Jobs. Due to the generosity of a number of donors, we are fortunate to have over 240 examples of hardware, software and trade literature relating to the history of the Apple Computer Company in our Information and Communication Collection.

Apple II computer system, circa 1978. The Apple II was the first commercially successful mass market personal computer to be designed and sold as a household or small business item (HT 13336).
Source: Museum Victoria  

From a beige Apple II to a Bondi Blue iMac, from a 2001 iPod to a first generation iPhone, the company that the two Steves started in a garage in Silicon Valley has made a huge impact on computing.

The 8 GB Apple iPhone from 2007, the most recent acquisition into MV's Apple collection. (HT 25320).
Source: Museum Victoria  

It was the experience of playing with the iPad that led to the development of Museum Victoria's Field Guide to Victorian Fauna. There will always be debate around whether the 1977 Apple I was the first "personal computer", but with the iPhone and iPad, Jobs and his team have made computers that, to me, truly feel personal.

R.I.P Steve, you'll be missed.

Links:

Collections Online: Apple I replica

Original Apple I, Powerhouse Museum collection

Smithsonian Institution interview with Steve Jobs, 1995

ABC Lateline interview with Mike Daisey

Artist Joceline Lee has spent her last few Wednesdays in the basement of the Royal Exhibition Building among the palaeontologists, geologists, rocks and fossils. She is working on drawings for her first solo exhibition, Rendered Bones.

Joceline draws skeletons and anatomical forms in pen and ink which makes palaeontological specimens the ideal material for her. When I visited her at work, she was drawing an echidna skeleton that she'd selected from the collection. She was accompanied by her mentor Rob Delves, a sculptor who has worked with Joceline for seven years at Art Day South. This project is run by Arts Access Victoria in Melbourne's south-east to give artists with disabilities opportunities to develop their artwork through workshops, mentorships, collaborations and exhibitions.

  Joceline Lee and Rob Delves working on an echidna skeleton in the Museum Victoria Palaeontology Department.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Rob said that when she first came to Art Day South, her drawings were intricate and very tiny. "Her linework was amazing in these little drawings and they just said 'skeletons'." He started bringing her photographs and models of animal skeletons about three years ago, and Joceline was hooked. "Then we brought in bigger things and it's grown from there." In July this year, MV's Discovery Program visited Art Day South bringing a tortoise shell, a huge model dinosaur leg, fossils and more for the artists to explore.

Joceline works slowly but steadily for hours at a time, with each drawing taking two to three weeks to complete. Rob loves her unique style of drawing. "She goes off in beautiful directions, with all this contrast... dark and fine lines."

Rendered Bones is part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival program from 4 to 9 October in the No Vacancy Project Space in the Federation Square Atrium. Be sure to visit the exhibition if you'd like to see Joceline's distinctive interpretation of fossils, bones and skeletons.

Flyer for Rendered Bones exhibition.
Image: Arts Access Victoria
Source: Arts Access Victoria

Links:

Melbourne Fringe Festival: Rendered Bones

No Vacancy Gallery: Rendered Bones

On 30 September, the exhibition Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art opens at the National Gallery of Victoria. It features 200 early paintings from the artists of Papunya Tula, recognised as the founders of the Western Desert art movement forty years ago.

The exhibition is co-curated by NGV's Judith Ryan and Dr Philip Batty, Senior Curator of Anthropology in MV's Indigenous Cultures Department. He spent three years at Papunya (about 240 km north-west of Alice Springs) as an art teacher at Papunya School and a community development officer. He got to know many of the original Papunya Tula artists in the late 1970s.

Central Australian decorated Stone Knives. Quartzite Stone Blade with Decorated Wooden Handle. Museum Victoria. These set of knives were produced by the Warumangu people (Tennant Creek) and collected by Baldwin Spencer in the early 1900s.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Philip has lots of stories from this time, including the tale of a two-week trip across the desert with Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, one of the most prominent Papunya Tula artists with a unique style of painting layers of dots. Tjupurrula grew up in the bush and first encountered European people when he was eight or nine years old.

"We were going on a trip to his traditional Country... he hadn't been back there for a number of years.

"We were driving off into the desert in the middle of nowhere, right off any roads, with no maps and not much food or water. We were relying on his knowledge of Country to take us to waterholes.

"He'd say we drive this way for a while then he'd clamber up on the back of the truck look around and as he looked around he'd sing a traditional chant. And after 5 or 10 minutes of singing, he'd say right, now we go this way. We'd drive for a while, and then he'd do the same thing. Each evening we'd end up at a little waterhole, often only a metre or so across.

"In his head he had this map of all these different songlines going across his part of the Country. The songs name geographical sites through the journey of a particular ancestor. When he was singing he was reminding himself where he was. It was a very practical business."

Their final destination was Tjupurrula's ancestral home, Tjikari. "It was a small mountain and we had to climb up in silence, carrying particular bushes. As we were coming up the mountain, Warangkula was shouting out to the ancestor in a cave, swearing at the ancestor in his language, Pintupi Luritja. I'm not quite sure what was going on but think he was trying to scare the ancestor away."

Tjukurrtjanu includes a wall full of shields from the Museum Victoria collection decorated with iconographic designs; artefacts such as these are the origins of Western Desert art, but the story is not quite so simple as transferring traditional ceremonial symbols to the new mediums of boards, canvases and acrylic paints.

Central Australian Decorated Shields. Carved and fluted beanwood (Erythrina vespertilio) with applied earth pigments.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Says Philip, "I see it as cross-cultural form of art, as a result of Aboriginal-European collision. Long before the 1970s, Aboriginal people were manufacturing artefacts and paintings for sale to tourists, missionaries and museums. In the days before social security it was an important source of cash."

"Papunya Tula artists were addressing a market, but that doesn't diminish the complexity and interest of their paintings. They drew heavily on traditions and they also expanded that of iconographic language to create new approaches, particularly in those early paintings."

Links:

Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art

Central Australia Collections at MV

Papunya Tula Artists

When Natural Sciences Collection Manager Dermot Henry heard a radio report about efforts to salvage gold from the Royal Charter shipwreck, the story rang a bell. "I had recollections of seeing a little gold specimen that had come from a shipwreck." Sure enough, in the Geology Collection he located a small nugget with a curious label explaining that it was a survivor of the Royal Charter, which was lost off the coast of Wales in 1859. The typed label probably accompanied the nugget on display at the former Industry and Technology Museum. It reads in part:

One of the passengers had a part of his property in a belt round his waist, and in swimming ashore was dashed against the rocks and the belt burst where this was picked up but his life was saved after being three times washed back into the sea off the rock. Name of above passenger W. J. Ferris.

The ship was just three hours from its destination in Liverpool when a terrible storm drove it onto rocks. Carrying over four hundred people and gold worth millions in today's money, the loss was a terrible one for Australia and England. Many of the passengers were returning home after striking it rich in the central Victorian goldfields. Just a handful of people survived including the man on the label – William J. Ferris, a Ballarat shopkeeper.

The gold nugget that survived the Royal Charter shipwreck. It is 17mm long and weighs about 4g.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dermot tracked the specimen back to a donation to the Public Library, Melbourne, from Mr Gordon Thomson, reported in the Argus in 1874. "We don't know how Thompson ended up with the gold," says Dermot. The report says that the two men met in Ireland but the nature of their transaction is not recorded.

Thomson himself was quite a character with a habit of collecting curious things. Irish-born into a wealthy family, he spent much of his life travelling the world and amassing ethnographic objects. His "very fine mansion" in Belfast called 'Bedeque-house' held "rich stores of curiosities and relics gathered from many lands." Among the relics were at least two treasures from Victorian history from his first visit to Melbourne in 1835, when the city was in its wattle-and-daub infancy. There he befriended William Buckley, who absconded from imprisonment to live with the Aboriginal people of Port Phillip Bay for more than 20 years. Buckley gave Thomson a greenstone axe-head that had "passed 20 years of its life of usefulness in Buckley's belt." The axe head and the Royal Charter gold specimen ended up in the Belfast museum along with hundreds of other objects Thomson collected on his travels.

When Thomson decided to return to Melbourne to live, he requested that the Belfast museum return the colonial objects, believing that they rightly belonged in their home country. Thus, in 1874, they travelled back over the oceans and were deposited in Melbourne public collections. We still have the gold but Buckley's axe has been missing for many years, its whereabouts unknown. Thomson built another 'Bedeque-house' in Dudley Street, West Melbourne. His 1886 obituary mourned the "death of one of the oldest Melbourne residents."

Links:

'Gold rush ship yields its treasures' - The Age, 18 July 2011

Report of Thomson's donations, The Argus, 23 Octopber 1874

Thomson's obituary, 'Death of one of Melbourne's Oldest Residents' - The Argus, 8 Jun 1886

William Buckley on Australian Biography

Further reading:

Winifred Glover, In the Wake of Captain Cook: The Travels of Gordon Augustus Thomson (1799 - 1886) Ulster Historical Foundation, 1993

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

13 September this year marks the 150th anniversary of the day that Alfred Howitt and his party reached the dig tree at Fort Wills, where the missing explorers Burke and Wills and their party had made their base for the trek to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Two days later a member of Howitt’s party, Edwin Welch, found John King alive and being cared for by the local Aboriginal people. The remains of both Burke and Wills, who had died around the end of June, were found and buried a few days later.

As noted in a previous post, Museum Victoria holds a small but interesting group of specimens that Howitt collected on two expeditions to Cooper Creek.

The bird specimens Howitt dispatched to Melbourne are shown here in taxonomic order.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Howitt's specimens include two specimens of the Spinifex Pigeon, Geophaps plumifera. The species had been described as the Plumed Pigeon by John Gould as early as 1842, from a specimen collected by Benjamin Bynoe, the ship’s surgeon on the Beagle, a man who had treated Darwin for illness on its historic voyage. However it was known to the explorers of the 1860s as ‘Sturt’s Pigeon’.

Howitt's two specimens of the Spinifex Pigeon Geophaps plumifera.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Some years later, Howitt wrote that when he reached the dig tree he found 'the loose sandy soil was so run over by the tracks of birds and small animals that no traces of footprints could be seen'. He and Welch both noted in their journals the presence of ‘crested pigeons’ in the area. Howitt says they were 'numerous', Welch that they were in 'immense numbers'. The Crested Pigeon Ocyphaps lophotes was certainly present; there are two in the upper right corner of the collection pictured. But Howitt specifically states that it was the 'small crested pigeon, spoken of by Sturt' to which he referred.

Welch also remarked that the pigeons were a first-rate change of diet, roasted on coals. Sturt’s party had also enjoyed them, unlike the O. lophotes which he found 'neither tender nor well-flavoured'. Why Burke and Wills were unable to exploit this source of food as Howitt’s party had done remains a mystery. Their deaths were the result of starvation. Is it possible the pigeons had only arrived in the area of Fort Wills in such numbers in the intervening eleven weeks since the deaths?

Sturt first encountered the bird in 1845 during his search for an inland sea. It was on his third and final exploration from Fort Grey, his last base camp near what is now the meeting of New South Wales, South Australian and Queensland borders. At the eastern end of Cooper Creek (which he named) he realised, with advice from local Aborigines, that no substantial body of water was to be found and began what was to prove his penultimate retreat. On the way back down the creek, 4 November 1845, he recorded in his daily journal: 'Mr Stuart shot a new and beautiful crested pigeon'. (John McDouall Stuart would himself achieve great fame as an explorer.) Four days later another was shot and he recorded a description of its behaviour. There is a colour plate illustration of it in the Narrative of this journey that he published in 1849, written up from his journal.

Colourplate of Sturt's Pigeon from MV's copy the original 1849 edition of Sturt's Narrative.
Image: pigeon-colourplate.jpg
Source: Museum Victoria  

The appendix to this two-volume work includes a description of the birds encountered on the expedition. He states the pigeon was 'entirely confined to about thirty miles along the banks of that creek'.

The species is now known to be mainly sedentary. It is highly unlikely they would have suddenly arrived in this area during the winter months; most likely they were present all along. Sturt was the first to note their quail-like flight; strictly ground-feeders, they would flush suddenly, fly a short distance, then go to cover and be difficult to flush again, preferring to run off through the scrub. Sturt also repeatedly noted the shyness of birds in his explorations throughout the region; it was difficult to get a shot at them. He described his pigeon as 'very wild'. These pigeons may well have eluded the exhausted Burke, Wills and King, along with other potential food sources such as the cockatoos and parrots that would also have almost certainly been in the area;  they only seemed able to shoot a few crows that no doubt came nosing around too close to their camps.

Howitt’s collection at Cooper Creek extends the range of the pigeon somewhat further south than it is usually found today. Their main range extends further north into the driest stony deserts where there is often no vegetation at all. They like rocky outcrops and are typically seen perched on a rock in the blazing sun in forty degree heat. It was in such a region that Sturt was forced to abandon his search for the inland sea and wrote in his weekly letter to his wife: 'The scene was awfully fearful, dear Charlotte. A kind of dread...came over me as I gazed upon it. It looked like the enrance into Hell'. His pigeons were perfectly at home around the ‘entrance into hell’. Paradoxically, in spite of their fondness for blazing deserts, they are never far from water. But unlike Sturt, a muddy little puddle is enough for them.

Sturt's Pigeon mounted specimen.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Jason Gibson is a Senior Research Coordinator with the Australian National University and the Indigenous Cultures Department at Museum Victoria.

In 1894 Walter Edmund Roth heard about a performance, called the 'Molong-go' that had been shared by the Wakaya people from the upper reaches of the Georgina River in the Northern Territory with the Pitta Pitta people in outback Queensland. As an ethnographer, Roth was fascinated to hear that the dance had 'originated from a point east or south-east of Darwin'; some hundreds of kilometres from the Queensland desert country where he was stationed. Two years later in 1898 Alice Springs Special Magistrate F.J. Gillen wrote to his friend and collaborator in anthropological studies, the then Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne Walter Baldwin Spencer, explaining that a corroboree almost identical to the one seen by Roth had appeared in Alice Springs. Gillen explained to Spencer that the dance, known as the Tjitjingalla altharte (corroboree) to the local Arrernte people, had been 'brought down' into the region by a 'northern group'.

Tjitjingalla Corroboree performed in Alice Springs, 1901. The picture depicts one of the dance sequences of the Tjitjingalla as performed by Arrernte people at Alice Springs.
Image: Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer
Source: Museum Victoria  

After attending the performance, which extended over five nights, Gillen reported that the repertoire had indeed originated 1500kms north, in the 'country of the Salt water' and that 'the implements carried by the performers' were 'in all cases the same as described by Roth'. Three years later, during the Spencer and Gillen Expedition of 1901 Spencer collected two of the dancing sticks used in the performance.

Two Tjitjingalla dancing sticks wrapped in human hair string. These dancing sticks were used in one of the dance sequences of the altharte or what Spencer called an ‘ordinary corroboree’.
Image: Justine Philip
Source: Museum Victoria  

Detail of a Tjitjingalla dancing stick.
Image: Justine Phillip
Source: Museum Victoria  

Earlier in the expedition, whilst camped by the Stevenson Creek in the remote north of South Australia, Spencer and Gillen were visited a small group of Lower Arrernte men. Gillen writes, 'we gave them a good feed and after tea rigged the phonograph up and got them to sing into it a number of corroboree songs' and Spencer also noted that the men 'were very much excited and interested, especially as we let them hear the instrument repeating what they had said.' It was here, almost by accident, that one of the Tjitjingalla song verses was recorded. A few weeks later when the expedition reached Alice Springs Spencer spent considerable time photographing and filming the altharte using his Warwick motion film camera. The sound and film recordings made of the Tjitjingalla are some of the earliest ever made on the Australian continent.

Listen to Baldwin Spencer's introduction to the recording, courtesy of the Gillen Collection, Royal Geographic Society of South Australia  (Length 0:29)  
(Download MP3)

"This corroboree, the Tjitjingalla corroboree, was first described by Dr. Roth in north central Queensland. Subsequently was performed by the natives of central Australia [unknown] the Arrernte tribe at Alice Springs. This corroboree was sung on the Stevenson River on March 22nd, 1901."

The peregrination of the Tjitjingalla/Molongo, which was subsequently documented at various locations in South Australia, the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland, later became important to theories regarding the exchange of ideas, songs, dances and mythologies amongst the Australian Indigenous population.

More stories like this are being uncovered in a joint research project between the Australian National University, Museum Victoria and the South Australian Museum. The Reconstructing the Spencer and Gillen Collection Project will produce an online database of the W.B. Spencer and F.J. Gillen collaboration, including objects they collected, their photographs, manuscripts, diaries, correspondence and other material held in over 20 institutions, both in Australia and overseas.

This episode of Married to the Job features Nick Crotty, Collection Manager, History & Technology, at Museum Victoria. He is based at Scienceworks.

In the spirit of tradition, we ask Nick to tell us about himself and his work by showing us something old, new, borrowed and blue.

Watch this video with a transcript

MV's new conservation sound studio opened for business at the end of August. Conservator Sarah Gubby hosted an open day to herald the event and to show staff this wonderful new facility.

Sarah demonstrating the Edison phonograph to MV staff at the sound studio open day.
Source: Museum Victoria

Sarah joined the museum as a paper, image and audio-visual conservator in February 2010. Among other things, she's been working with MV librarians to assess the condition of our rare books collection. In recent months she has been planning the new sound studio, which will assist her to preserve the museum's many recordings, such as interviews, oral histories, music, films and more. Some of these recordings exist on fragile media like wax cylinders, while others are in more stable formats that are now obsolete and haven't been played for years.

Before now, there weren't any dedicated spaces where staff could play back AV material. "There were pockets of room, but acoustically they weren't very good," explained Sarah. The new studio is a soundproofed, dedicated space where AV material can be played back in privacy, which is especially important for culturally sensitive items. Sarah has decked it out with a bank of both old and brand-new equipment that can accommodate almost any medium or format. This means that playback and digitisation can now happen in-house. The studio will also be useful for creating new recordings such as podcasts.

The bank of AV equipment in the conservation sound studio. The older equipment, such as the laserdisc player, was first used in the museum's production studios.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Said Sarah, "Certain forms of AV materials are robust enough to travel out of the museum for copying, such as video and movie reels, but there are lots of very fragile and old pieces. Wax cylinders are particularly fragile. If conditions are too dry, they become brittle; if too humid, they become languid and malleable. And the more you play them, the more they wear down."

Sarah will assess whether AV items are sturdy enough to play, how they will be played, and she'll work with curators to determine whether their content should be transferred to a digital format. The studio contains all the cleaning and playing gear needed to do so. "To get good sound, you need to have clean equipment – a clean record and clean needles. So we've bought various types of very soft brushes and cloths to remove dust and a special record-cleaning machine." The studio's new turntable can play twelve different speeds and there is a variety of needles and differently weighted cartridges.

Sarah with the new record-cleaning machine.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The studio itself is a small room with an eclectic mix of furniture. Much of it Sarah salvaged from other parts of the museum, but there is one large cabinet that is definitely not standard office furniture. "I picked it up for a bargain from a Chinese antiques sale," she said. "It's the only thing I could find that would close and fit the Edison horn in it for storage. It's got good mass to it as well – I was adamant that I needed a very solid surface for the turntable. That's important, to help minimise reverb."

The unusual cabinet in the studio is large and heavy enough to accomodate both the enormous old Edison horn and newer turntable.
Source: Museum Victoria  

I asked Sarah which material she was most excited about working on. She didn't hesitate to say "the interviews and other sound recordings in the Indigenous Cultures collections. Those, and the birdsongs in our Sciences collections. It will be exciting to unlock their content after all this time, and share it with new audiences." These recordings will be invaluable for research and interpretation, so watch (or rather, listen out for) this space!

Links:

Edison phonograph cylinders on Collections Online

My friend Jen recently introduced me to a card game called Chook-Chook! through a much-loved set passed down from her great aunt, still played with competitive vigour at family gatherings. Described as "an interesting & amusing parlor game for young and old", it's actually a raucous free-for-all in which you trade chickens and sell their eggs followed by convoluted accounting in shillings and pence.

After a couple of rounds of this splendidly noisy and frantic card game I was hooked and wanted to know more. It seemed there might be a set somewhere in the museum's collections, and sure enough, we have a lovely set.

 Chook-Chook! box. The label shows a farmer running after a squawking chicken. (HT 4667).
Image: Joanne Ely & Sally Jones
Source: Museum Victoria

According to BoardGameGeek, Chook-Chook! was published in 1920. I've now seen three different types of packaging; this early one on Flickr looks to be the oldest and perhaps original style. Jen's set looks a bit more recent than that and her dad remembers playing it with his cousins in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There are advertisments for Chook-Chook! peppered throughout Australian newspapers in the National Library of Australia's Trove newspaper archive but its publisher and country of origin are unclear.

I think it's probably a local game since the word 'chook' seems a very Australian term (although it does have UK origins). I wonder too whether any other country would devise a game where you play at being a poulterer and you squawk chicken breeds.

The cards of Chook-Chook! The English Game is one of the breeds of chicken that players rear.
Image: Joanne Ely & Sally Jones
Source: Museum Victoria

If you'd like your own game of Chook-Chook! (and I heartily recommend it) the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds a scan of the cards once hosted by the former Melbourne City Museum. However it's missing a scan of one crucial card – the one that tells you how much your eggs sell for each month. Here it is from MV's Chook-Chook!:

The all-important Chook-Chook! card detailing monthly prices for eggs.
Source: Museum Victoria

Do you know anything about the origins of Chook-Chook!? 

Links:

Wellcome Library blog: From the Game of Goose to Snakes and Ladders

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

Amongst the greatest treasures of the museum are its bird egg collections; their delicate beauty is outstanding. A number of the collections were made privately before the practice was ended by government in the 1950s, one the best of them by Norman J. Favaloro. He was a solicitor in Mildura and a leading field ornithologist. He published many papers on his work and was appointed an Honorary Associate in the Ornithology Department in the then National Museum of Victoria. His position enabled him to continue collecting, and towards the end of his life he presented his collection to the museum, complete with detailed documentation. It is one of the largest collections with 1500 clutches nestled in boxes neatly aligned within finely crafted glass-topped drawers in a cedar cabinet, one of the most beautiful in the bird room.

Favaloro's cabinet.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Amongst the thousands of specimens I find one particular treasure that draws my eye. Set marks were used by collectors to identify clutches. On this one is pencilled: "C.A. Red-tail Cockatoo, 17.5.1919, C.S." The Red-tailed Black Cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus banksii (once known as Banks' Cockatoo for Joseph Banks) is one of the most magnificent of the cockatoo family. It is under threat in parts of Australia, especially Victoria, but central Australia is one of its strongholds, where it is associated with rain in Indigenous culture.

  Mounted specimen of Calyptorhynchus banksii macrorhynchus, one of five sub-species of the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Like most collectors Favaloro swapped items with others to build his collection. In this case he has acquired an egg originally collected by one "C.S.". The data slip states: "Chas. Strehlow. Egg rested on wood dust in a hollow spout of a Red Gum at height of 20 feet up. Bird seen leaving nest." In 1919 Strehlow, a tall, strong man was 47 years old. But without doubt the egg would have been collected by an Aboriginal companion.

Strehlow's egg.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria  

'Charles' was the Reverend Carl Strehlow, a German missionary who ran the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg from 1894 until his death in 1922. He was also an ethnologist, and has been a rather forgotten figure in the broader discipline of anthropology in Australia. Strehlow's mission was among the central Australian tribes, in particular the Arrernte (or 'Aranda' to use his own spelling). They were the same people studied by Walter Baldwin Spencer, a long serving (1899 to 1928) and perhaps the most famous of Museum Victoria's former directors, and his colleague Frank Gillen.

Strehlow published the results of his ethnological fieldwork in German only, in a series of tomes from 1907 to 1920. They were a major resource for such luminaries of the time as Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud and Bronislaw Malinowski. But continental schools of thought were rejected by British-oriented social anthropologists who saw themselves as supporters of Darwinian science.

In the early years of the 20th century there was much controversy over the nature and origin of  religion among tribal peoples. Strehlow became embroiled in it. His reputation suffered from a clash with Spencer. Then World War I came. He was shocked by the outbreak of anti-German sentiment. Alhough a naturalized citizen, he found himself obliged to register as an enemy alien. By the time he collected the egg near the mission in 1919, he was hardly even a footnote in the literature of Australian anthropology.

Spencer continued on his illustrious and productive career until his death at Tierra Del Fuego in 1929. Strehlow's fate was not just obscurity, but a painful end. Just three years after collecting the egg, in October 1922 the strains of his work and life in general brought on an attack of the condition then known as dropsy, a massive swelling of the body due to accumulation of fluid. Strehlow needed hospitalisation urgently. His body was so bloated he could only travel strapped in a chair perched in the back of the old horse-drawn mission cart.

He left the mission for the last time with an Arrernte choir singing a hymn derived from J. S. Bach. As he was taken down the dry bed of the Finke River every bump on the track caused pain in his body, every thought the torments of Job. His family and their Arrernte friends were trying to get him to Oodnadatta and the train down to Adelaide. But when they reached Horseshoe Bend he died. The episode is recounted by his son Ted Strehlow in a great memoir, Journey to Horseshoe Bend. The story has what may be thought of as an operatic tragedy about it, and indeed a cantata of the same name was written by the Australian composer Andrew Schultz with the librettist Gordon Kalton Williams, and performed at the Sydney Opera House in 2003.

It is a rich and fascinating part of Australia's history, all there in one little egg in that beautiful Favaloro cabinet.

Links:

Spencer and Gillen Project

Ornithology Collection

Just a quick jaunt from Melbourne Museum is the hallowed Melbourne Cricket Ground, spiritual home of sport in this city, Since 2008 it has also housed the National Sports Museum. I dropped in to the NSM last week to visit several Museum Victoria collection objects borrowed for their displays.

In the Champions gallery, the Australian Racing Museum tells the story of thoroughbred horseracing in Australia through objects, pictures and sound. The skeleton of the racehorse Carbine is on loan from MV but more recently, one of Prue Acton's amazing Melbourne Cup Day outfits joined a display of race day fashions across the eras. At one end there is a full-length white dress worn by Florence Martha Cullen in 1890 when she watched Carbine win the cup; at the other end is an outfit worn by Gai Waterhouse just a few years ago. There's also an outfit worn by Fashions on the Field judge Beatrice Sneddon in 1965.

Jacket & Skirt - Prue Acton, `Concorde', Melbourne Cup, 1984 (SH 942111). The ensemble also includes a matching belt, hat, gloves and bag. Just the jacket, skirt and belt are displayed at the National Sports Museum.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Prue Acton's 'Concorde' ensemble from 1984 was based on a Cubist or Geometric design. Lorinda Cramer, Collection Manager at the Australian Racing Museum, chose the outfit for display. "It's an amazing piece and I loved the lines in it," she said. "It's so perfectly constructed with pinstripes that match beautifully. It's an engineering feat!"

The jacket's shoulders are spectacularly wide in classic 1980s style. "It really speaks of the era," said Jackie Fraser, Assistant Curator at the National Sports Museum. MV conservators helped with the installation and according to Lorinda, "it was great fun padding out the shoulders! It surprised us all... there was so much fabric in them." Textiles age rapidly under bright light and require special care to protect and support them. "The conservators spent a lot of time getting it just perfect," said Jackie. "The cases have low lighting so that some textiles can be on display for up to a year."

Lorinda (left) and Jackie putting the Concorde ensemble back in place in the Champions gallery showcase after changing the ensemble behind it.
Source: National Sports Museum  

Downstairs from the Champions gallery, curator Helen Walpole was working to finish installing a new temporary exhibition. Now open, Hidden History of the MCG tells the story of the Melbourne icon with treasures from the collections managed by the Melbourne Cricket Club. Did you know that a brass ship's bell announced the end of the football before the siren was introduced? Or that the first architect's sketches of the Great Southern Stand were doodled on a paper napkin?

In one showcase, two seagull specimens borrowed from MV and photographs illustrate birdlife interrupting play. When seagulls aren't begging for chips in the MCG stands, they're "being hit by cricketers and getting in the way of footballers," said Helen. She clearly has a soft spot for the specimens, explaining "we've named them – JL, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Steven – Steven Seagal. JL looks a lot more calm and Steven looks like an aggressive action hero."

Curator Helen Walpole with seagull specimens nicknamed Steven Seagal (left) and JL (right).
Source: Museum Victoria

The two mounts were prepared by MV's Dean Smith and Jim Couzens with their usual care. "There is so much detail in them. Where the feathers meet the beak is just astonishing; beautifully done," Helen admired.

The National Sports Museum is open 10.00am – 5.00pm daily. It is closed Christmas Day and Good Friday.

Links:

Video of Carbine's assembly on the National Sports Museum's Facebook page

'Concorde' ensemble on Collections Online

MV News archive: Having a lend

MV News archive: From Melbourne to Maine

This guest post is by Joanna Wysocki, a public relations student from Victoria University, who has recently completed a work placement at MV.

Since the late 1800s, Kodak has been one of the world's leading companies responsible for developing photography and photographic equipment. It has also played a huge role in recording our personal histories – we all remember sending film off to be processed and waiting eagerly by an empty photo album in the days before digital cameras.

It was over 100 years ago that Eastman Kodak Company founder, George Eastman aimed to make photography accessible to everyone. His vision was to make the process of obtaining photos simple so that anyone could own a camera. The advertising campaign slogan at that time was “You press the button, we do the rest.” Significant time periods such as this one are represented in the Kodak Heritage Collection.

Leaflet - 'Free Repairs to Your Kodak or Brownie', 1938 (HT 19963).
Image: Kodak Australasia Pty Ltd
Source: Museum Victoria

Since 2004, 1200 of the collection's 3100 registered items have been photographed and over 600 items from the Kodak Heritage Collection are on Collections Online. But there are still artefacts, stories and information yet to be discovered.

So, who looks after these Kodak moments?

Since the Volunteer Day in October 2010, former Kodak staff have helped Curator, Fiona Kinsey and Assistant Curator, Angela Jooste to enrich the Kodak Heritage Collection.

Angela, whose main duties are to manage both the collection and Kodak volunteers, says former staff and volunteers have added significant facts and information to the collection.

“From the early days, Kodak cared for the wellbeing of its staff. There is a real sense of loyalty and ownership of Kodak’s history with the former staff volunteering to preserve the collection at the Museum. It’s their knowledge and memories of Kodak that contributes to bringing the Kodak Heritage Collection to life,” said Angela.

Photograph - Kodak Australasia Pty Ltd, Dinner for Returned World War II Personnel, Groups Seated at Tables, Sydney, New South Wales,1946-1947 (MM 96065).
Image: Kodak Australasia Pty Ltd
Source: Museum Victoria

Kodak employed many of its workers’ family members, some of whom spent most of their working lives at the former Coburg and Abbotsford Kodak plants. This has contributed to the community spirit of former staff, as they now want to look after the company that took in generations of their families.

Preserving Kodak’s history will allow future generations to see the significant role Kodak played in the social, cultural and corporate life of Melbourne and Australia, as well as the shift in eras, from analogue to digital.

Links:

MV News: Kodak Heritage Collection

Kodak Heritage Collection on Collections Online

History of Kodak

I love the idea of an ice rink outside my Melbourne Museum office window. I really want to try ice-skating at this year's Melbourne Winter Festival (18 August–4 September). Admittedly I haven't skated since my teenage years but it's like riding a bicycle, isn't it?

The subject of ice conjures a range of interesting things, from majestic giant icebergs to the tinkle of ice in your cocktail. So I went looking for things in our collection on the topic of ice.

1. Ice-skating is an energy-efficient way to travel.

I learnt this fascinating factoid at a meeting with my fellow science communication colleagues. As a mode of transport it could only suit the odd Canadian who happens to have a frozen lake between home and work.

This is one of the 420 lantern slides once used by lecturer Walter S. Binks, a popular psychology and vocational guidance lecturer based in Melbourne, Victoria. He lectured throughout Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.

Lantern slide of cartoon sketch of a man ice skating, circa 1930s. (MM 69844)
Source: Museum Victoria

Two ice skating ladies happily demonstrating a bandaging technique at the rink, circa 1960s. (MM 054716)
Image: Laurie Richards Collectionof Commercial Photography
Source: Museum Victoria

2. Ice has much associated paraphernalia - boxes, buckets, cabinets, chests, cubes, houses, men, picks and tongs.

Before domestic refrigerators there was the ice chest (or cabinet or box). This is an early 20th century Koola cooling chest. The ice was generally placed in the top part, and water was poured onto the insulation panels (often made of things like fur, skin or charcoal ash). In this object the insulation was asbestos! Yikes! The low openings in the cabinet drew in air and this created a cooling effect. All the melted ice was collected in a drip tray underneath.

Koola cooling chest (ST 030419).
Image: Charlotte Smith
Source: Museum Victoria

Ice blocks for your ice chest used to be delivered by the ice man from the ice house who would lug around the blocks using a pair of these ice tongs.

Ice tongs (ST 026528).
Source: Museum Victoria

3. Ice can be a temporary art medium.

This photo is circa 1960s. It depicts two male chefs skilfully carving ice with chisels. They have sculpted a lovely polar bear, a penguin and some seals. But look closely: there is also Venetian gondola and I think there's a punch bowl. Plus you can just make out that the centre piece is a 3D version of the old RACV logo. 

Elaborate ice-carving, 1960s (MM 054918).
Image: Laurie Richards Collection of Commercial Photography
Source: Museum Victoria

4. There are links between life on earth and my freezer.

Water is one of those rare substances that expand when they solidify. Luckily for freshwater fish, ice therefore floats providing insulation for winter and not a frozen food section.

This picture reminded me of myself pondering the defrosting efficiency of my freezer.

Lantern Slide - Woman in Ice Cave (MM 032537).
Source: Museum Victoria

5. Ice is at its best in the form of cream or gelati!

This gelati box is from Taranto's Continental Gelati and Ice Cream Company Pty. Ltd, circa 1962.

Box - Taranto's, 'Three in One', 1962 (SH 000949)
Source: Museum Victoria   

When Dr Tony Martin joined MV palaeontologist Dr Tom Rich and volunteer Greg Denney on a four-week examination of Victoria's Cretaceous coastline last year, he was hoping to find dinosaur burrows. He didn't expect that he'd find the most significant dinosaur track site in southern Australia instead.

Dr Martin of Emory University, Georgia, was at Museum Victoria recently to examine some trace fossils in the collection. Trace fossils are his speciality and he's spent many years studying the burrows, tracks and trails of prehistoric animals preserved in the fossil record. Decades of searching for tracks at palaeontological sites worldwide means that he has an eye for spotting these subtle and sometimes cryptic trace fossils.

Late in the day during the third week of the Cretaceous Walk, Dr Martin saw something unusual in a slab of rock. Because of the low light he didn't trust his eyes and starting feeling the surface. "I was in awe at first," he says. "One of the things I did was I put my fingers into the indentations and thought OK, that's a track. Then I traced back and found two more, identically sized, making this the first Victorian trackway we know of where there's an actual sequence of steps."

Dr Tony Martin with the dinosaur trackway he found on Melanesia Beach.
Source: Museum Victoria

Until that moment, only four individual dinosaur tracks were known for all of Victoria. But that wasn't the only discovery of the day. Greg Denney long-time local collaborator on the Dinosaur Cove digs, spotted something else. "He saw there was another slab nearby of the same thickness, with the same layers, but upside down. He grabbed a piece of driftwood and flipped it over - and there were seven more tracks on it."

All up, the two slabs have increased the number of Victorian dinosaur tracks by 85 per cent. "They're only about 1.1 square metres but it was a busy little piece of real estate, because there are approximately 24 tracks within that." Some of the footprints are partial tracks and many are very faint but they still reveal a lot about the Victorian environment over 100 million years ago. The dinosaurs in question were small predatory dinosaurs, ranging from about the size of a rooster to the size of a cassowary. They belonged to a group of animals called the ornithomimosaurs, or bird-mimics. Dr Martin postulates that the individuals may have been different ages, and they were walking over swampy areas left on receding snowmelt floodplains in springtime.

In March 2011, Museum Victoria retrieved the two slabs for the palaeontology collection as they were at risk of being lost from erosion and burial. A scientific paper by Dr Martin, Dr Rich and three other experts that describes the amazing find was published in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology yesterday. As Dr Martin summarised it, "I've made other discoveries in my life, and I wouldn't like to rank them, but this one's way up there. It's one I feel very satisfied with that it added quite a bit to what's already a huge wealth of information that's come out of this part of the world."

In this video, Tom Rich talks more about the trackway and the effort to remove the slabs from Melanesia Beach.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Martin, A.J., Rich, T.H., Hall, M., Vickers-Rich, P. & Vazquez-Prokopec, G. A polar dinosaur-track assemblage from the Eumeralla Formation (Albian), Victoria, Australia. Alcheringa, 1–18.

The Age: 'Walking in their footsteps on Victoria's dinosaur trail'

Dinosaur Walk

Over recent months, Volunteer Sandra Morrow has photographed more than 600 exquisite items from Pendle Hall, the extraordinary dolls’ house that joined the Museum Victoria collection last year. There are no immediate plans to put the house on display but you can still view it in detail, as records and pictures of each piece are newly-listed on History and Technology Collections Online.

Sandra also recorded the reassembly of the dolls’ house once all the individual pieces had been registered, photographed and assessed by a conservator. She’s compiled a time-lapse video of the reassembly for which she used reference photographs of the house in Tasmania that were taken before it was packed up and moved to Melbourne.

The eagle-eyed among you will spot that she’s not wearing gloves. Most heritage collection objects are handled with gloves to protect them from the oils and sweat that accumulate on our hands. However gloves can make it difficult to handle very small objects like the miniature candlesticks and pantry goods of the dolls’ house. In these cases, very clean gloveless hands are the safest way to pick up the tiny items.

Links:

MV Blog: Introducing Pendle Hall

Collections Online theme: Pendle Hall Dolls' House

Objects in our collection don’t just go on display at our own museums. It’s also exciting to see them help other people’s exhibitions come to life. I’m particularly happy about seeing items from the space and astronomy collections being prepared for a new exhibition at ACMI called Star Voyager that will run from September this year through to January 2012. The objects being loaned include rare 19th century astronomical lantern slides, a historic surveying telescope and the gloves of a Soviet cosmonaut.

The cosmonaut glove was used by Vladimir Georgiyevich Titov on the Mir space station. Titov left Earth on Soyuz TM-4 on December 21 1987 and returned on Soyuz TM-6 on December 21 1988. He and fellow cosmonaut Musa Manarov had spent just over a whole year in space – a new record at the time. Titov, who had also been on one previous Soyuz mission, would go on to have two further trips to space on the Space Shuttle.

Photgraph of Sokol glove worn by cosmonaut Vladimir Titov.
Image: Marion Parker
Source: Museum Victoria

The glove is part of a Sokol KV-2 space suit. Each suit was custom made for a single cosmonaut, including individual moulding of the rubber part of the glove, shaped to the cosmonaut’s fingers. The Sokol suits were pressurised, and the gloves attached to the suits with an aluminium clip.

A lot of work went into making these gloves and there is also a lot of work involved in getting objects ready for display. Unfortunately, historic items like this aren’t always built to last. Museum conservator Marion Parker explains: “Modern materials like this will slowly degrade and we can't do much to stop this. What we can do is to control the conditions the objects are stored and displayed in to slow down these reactions.”

One of the nice things about getting objects out of the collection to show other people is that you get the chance to see them through new eyes and remember how exciting they can be. According to Sarah Tutton, curator at ACMI: “The opportunity to delve into the collection at Scienceworks has been invaluable and has led to some interesting tangents and avenues for exploration.”

I know what she means – it’s easy to get lost in the space collection!

The Australian node of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is now live!

BHL is a project started by a consortium of American and English museums and herbaria that wanted to make historical biodiversity texts available online. These important books and journals are scanned, uploaded to the Internet Archive, and made available through the first BHL website. It's especially useful to scientists needing historical information about species, distributions and taxonomy, but it's also a fascinating site for anyone interested in natural history or rare books. Museum Victoria is managing the Australian part of the project in conjunction with the Atlas of Living Australia.

Since late last year, MV Online Developer Michael Mason has been creating a mirror site of the USA/UK original, ready to receive scans of Australian books later this year. At present, the Australian site provides everything the original site provides but with a different interface. "We started with the US model and changed the appearance and some parts of the functionality," says Michael.

Online developer Michael Mason.
Source: Museum Victoria

The first difference you'll notice is the local influence; the page is adorned with beautiful illustrations of Australian wildlife by Gould and Australian books are featured. Michael has also worked with designer Simon O'Shea to overhaul the way the book viewer looks and works to make it more user-friendly.

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia website.
Source: Museum Victoria

At present, the 34,596,227 pages in the BHL-Australian node come from libraries in US institutions so there is plenty of Australian content yet to be added. First off the rank in this national project are some of the in-house journals that have already been scanned by other museums including those of the Queensland Museum and the Western Australian Museum. Museum Victoria, with new book-scanning equipment, will be leading the development of new scanning projects starting with the complete archive of Memoirs of Museum Victoria containing the first scientific descriptions of many Victorian animal species. This will be very handy for biologists worldwide who don't have ready access to hard copies of this journal. Later on, rare books from MV and the libraries of other Australian institutions will be scanned and uploaded.

The high-quality scans are not just useful, but often quite beautiful. You get the whole book – covers, library labels, marbled endpapers and marks of age – not just the text within. Michael's favourites are the 1600s books in Latin with fantastical illustrations. "You'd never get to see these in a library, they're too fragile and valuable," he says. BHL puts these wonderful books in the hands of anyone.

Links

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia

Biodiversity Heritage Library

MV News: BHL visitors

Photographer David Paul sent me some proof sheets of several hundred Redheads matchbox lids that he photographed recently as part of the ongoing documentation of the museum's objects. They were collected during the 1950s-1970s by Bill Boyd and form part of the William Boyd Childhood Collection, which includes most of the Bill's childhood possessions. Bill was an avid collector, and fortunately for us, his mother Lillian kept his collections long after Bill had grown up.

Like David, I think the illustrations on the matchboxes are beautiful and fascinating snapshots of the time. There are several sets – marine creatures, native animals, famous explorers, Queensland's centenary (1959), history of transport and flags of the world, mythology and more. Redheads are now made in Sweden but back then were made by Bryant and May (or Brymay). Brymay was an English company that began manufacturing locally in 1909 in a factory in Cremorne, Richmond.

Six Redheads matchbox lids featuring marine animals, circa 1966. Top L-R: California Sandhopper, Bushy-backed Sea Slug, Long-finned Squid. Bottom L-R: Portuguese Man-of-war, Sandworm, Gooseneck Barnacles.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

Special packaging, swapcards and bonus toys are a marketing idea that has proved successful for years. Pester power is nothing new: children badger their parents to buy a certain brand of tea, breakfast cereal or matches so that they can complete the set. In the pre-war mania of cigarette card collecting, there are stories of kids who would wait outside shops and pounce on emerging adults to beg for the cards from their newly-purchased pack of smokes.

Bill Boyd's matchboxes started me thinking about the nature of childrens' collections. Lots of kids collect things – stamps, coins, swapcards – but why?  I know a family where each child was charged with nominating something to collect so they'd have something to keep themselves amused on road trips. Another colleague collected stamps and reckons his mother introduced him to the hobby so he'd learn about geography and organisation. And why do some people continue their collections while others abandon them? I collect entirely different things now than I did as a kid, but that probably reflects financial independence.

Six Redheads matchbox lids from the 1970 series featuring icons from each Australian state. Top L-R: The legend of Ned Kelly, Australian Rules Football, Cultural Centre (NGV). Bottom L-R: Myer Music Bowl, Native Lyrebird, The Golden Past, Bendigo.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

I wonder how Bill got so many matchboxes? Perhaps he swapped them at school or family friends saved them for him. I imagine he didn't have much money to buy what he wanted and matchboxes were free and readily available. When smoking was more popular and before the invention of disposable cigarette lighters, there were probably matches in every pocket.

For Bill, perhaps they were important because they were objects that no one else controlled – no one else chose them on his behalf, or could tell him how to arrange or store or preserve them. These sorts of things are very important when you're a powerless kid and grown-ups dictate almost everything about your world.

What did you collect when you were a kid? How did your collection start? Do you still have it? Perhaps you'd like to upload it to Collectish?

Links:

William Boyd Childhood Collection

Tom Smith's complete Redheads matchbox collection 

History of Redheads matches

The Google doodle on June 22nd celebrated the southern hemisphere winter solstice. Earlier that morning the pop-up tag read ‘the start of winter’ but later that morning it mysteriously changed to ‘winter solstice’. It prompted me to think about the various cultural and scientific criteria that mean the start of winter. So I came up with five of my own criteria (with the help of the MV collection of course).

1. Winter means taking soup more seriously. So I ventured into the collection store to look at this publication, ready to jot down the odd recipe for you but let’s just say 1933 was probably a better year for wine.  It contained 1933 classics like Sheep’s Head Broth, Kidney Soup and Egg Soup. There was also a section on Soups for Invalids which consisted of Mutton Broth, Invalid Broth (which was mutton broth with egg yolk and milk) and Beef Tea.

   Recipe Book - 'Winter Dishes', published by Home Beautiful magazine, August 1, 1933 (SH 900857)
Source: Museum Victoria

2. Winter means little heaters with lots of personality. I used to have one; it became my little warm friend on dark nights until it could puff no heat no more. Today, heater designs are very bland. The designs of the 1920s and 1930s had character and attitude, and they had great names like ‘Jupiter’, ‘Century’ and my favourite... ‘Don’. 

 A black and white photograph of a Hecla heater circa 1932 with an embossed image of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on the front panel (MM 106793). Also check out its brother with an embossed image of a Roman chariot.
Source: Museum Victoria

Check out the names of heaters from this flyer issued by Lawrence & Hanson Electrical Co Ltd, promoting Hecla appliances, Melbourne, for the season of 1924. We actually have the ‘Century’ in the MV collection. TL52046.jpg
Source: Museum Victoria 

3. Winter means getting the first waft of your winter coat with slightly musty cupboard smell.  At school, the winter uniform also marked the season.

This photograph shows two sisters, Bernadette and Helen Herbert at the Alicante Restaurant, Melbourne, 8 July 1964. Helen remembers that she was wearing a purple coat she made herself. (MM 110815).
Source: Museum Victoria

Pair of white cotton sports socks, part of the 1996 winter uniform for Wesley College, Melbourne. Designed by the famous Prue Acton (SH 950641).
Source: Museum Victoria  

4. Winter means my work colleague went cross country skiing ... again.

Whilst everyone else in the office shudders as they look the inclement weather out the window, she is jumping for joy at the thought of powdered snow and wombat sightings. I think of soup, heaters and curling up like a wombat.

 Victorian Railways booklet promoting Victorian winter holiday packages, published in April 1939. Victorian Railways played an important role in State tourism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even operating the Mt Buffalo Chalet from 1924 to 1983 (HT 6107).
Source: Museum Victoria

5. Winter means Tunna or Gagulong (depending on where you are in Australia). Indigenous knowledge divides the seasons much more sensibly; depending on where you are in Australia there are more than four seasons. The Bureau of Meteorology has more info.

Knitted wool red and white beanie (1954-1957) (SH 900300).
Source: Museum Victoria

One last thing about winter – I love beanies.

Stay comfy, Dr Andi

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the day Alfred Howitt left Melbourne to search for Burke and Wills. By the time the explorers had returned to the Dig Tree in April 1861 there had been no news of them for six months. Public pressure had mounted and the exploration committee responsible sent out Howitt as leader of the Victorian Contingent Party. They would in fact discover the fate of Burke’s party in September that year.

Subsequently Howitt gathered a small but interesting collection of natural history specimens that were delivered to Museum Victoria. Only two mammal species were included: one of two known species of stick-nest rat Leporillus sp. [pictured in a cheeky pose here as a mount by an unknown nineteenth century preparator], and the White-footed Rabbit Rat Conilurus albipes. The Lesser Stick-nest Rat and the White-footed Rabit Rat were once widespread across parts of Australia but have long since been regarded as extinct.

Stick-nest rat Leporillus sp. collected by Alfred Howitt.
Image: Craig Robertson
Source: Museum Victoria

But there is some good news about rats! The species that the Burke and Wills Expedition knew best was the Long-haired or Plague Rat Rattus villosissimus. The ‘plague’ epithet came not from its carrying any disease, but its tendency to population irruptions reaching plague proportions, as we are currently witnessing with the introduced House Mouse Mus musculus. Burke and Wills travelled through the Channel Country after good rains, similar to the current environment. The rats swarmed over their first camp at Cooper Creek, attacking explorers and their supplies so relentlessly that they were forced to move to the site that subsequently became known for the Dig Tree.

The Long-haired Rat had hardly been sighted since the 1970s, especially during the long drought, and was feared to be heading for extinction. Now there are recent reports that the House Mouse is not the only rodent on the move. Zoologists are delighted that Long-haired Rats are now beeing seen in numbers again in Central Australia, including Alice Springs township. At least one of our native rodents is still out there.

Links:

Australian Dictionary of Biography: Alfred William Howitt (1830-1908)

The body of an enormous female Leatherback Turtle was brought to Melbourne Museum on Thursday last week after washing up at Airey’s Inlet.

The two metre female Leatherback Turtle in the Preparation Lab at Melbourne Museum.
Image: Veronica Scholes
Source: Museum Victoria

A member of the public spotted the ailing turtle while it was still alive. Local authorities called the Melbourne Aquarium, which runs the Turtle Rescue and Release Program that rehabilitates tropical turtles that have strayed into cold southern waters. Unfortunately the Leatherback Turtle was too unwell to save and it lived just a few more hours. It was brought to Melbourne Museum early on Thursday morning for post-mortem examination to work out why it died.

Melbourne Aquarium vet, Dr Rob Jones, says it’s only the second Leatherback Turtle to wash up in Victoria since 1999, with smaller species such as Green Sea Turtles and Loggerhead Turtles more commonly assisted by the successful Turtle Release and Rescue Program.

Dr Jones examined the turtle on Thursday afternoon. “The age is difficult to guess,” he explains. “She had an inactive ovary, so she was possibly still immature or had laid eggs within the last six months. But at two metres long, the size suggests she was mature.” He found a small ulcer in her intestine that was probably from parasite, and signs of dehydration, but no clear cause of death. “It was disappointing not to be able to find the answer.”

The skeleton of the turtle will become part of the Museum Victoria research collection, since complete skeletons of this species are rare. The museum will also retain soft tissues for the DNA collection and barnacles and mussels from its shell for the Marine Invertebrates collection.

Barnacles on the turtle's shell.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The Leatherback Turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) is the largest living turtle and has the widest distribution of the sea turtles. Their soft shells are unique; other species have tough protective plates called scutes as a kind of external armour, but Leatherback Turtles have small bones embedded in tough leathery skin. Another distinctive feature of these animals is their diet – they eat mostly jellyfish and have evolved a mouth full of fleshy spines to grip their soft prey. They migrate long distances in search of food, often visiting southern waters near Victoria between January and May when the sea is warm.

Inside the mouth of a Leatherback Turtle. The fleshy spines are adaptations to a jellyfish diet.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

Leatherback Turtles are critically endangered and have suffered serious declines due to human activity. They are often drowned in fishing nets or choke when they mistake plastic bags for food.

Marine wildlife in need of rescue should be reported to the Department of Sustainability and Environment. 

• Report stranded, entangled or sick penguins, turtles and seals to DSE on 136 186. 
• Contact the Whale and Dolphin Emergency Hotline on 1300 136 017 if you find stranded, entangled, sick or injured whales or dolphins.

Links:

Melbourne Aquarium Turtle Rescue and Release Program

WWF: Leatherback Turtles close to the brink

Shark Bay World Heritage Area: Leatherback Turtle fact sheet

BIRD: Leatherback Turtle

In March this year, MV scientists spent 10 days surveying the biodiversity of the Lake Condah area in a program called Bush Blitz. The project could never have happened without the collaboration and assistance of the Gunditjmara community, the Traditional Owners of Budj Bim lands around Lake Condah.

On Friday last week, the museum was pleased to return the hospitality and show a group of Budj Bim rangers and Traditional Owners around the collection stores and laboratories of the Natural Sciences Department.

Budj Bim rangers in the Ornithology store, surrounded by the museum's collection of bird specimens.
Source: Museum Victoria

Head of Sciences, Mark Norman, led a tour through the ornithology, entomology and marine collection stores. The bird collection was their favourite but the giant squid in its huge tank of ethanol was a special highlight too.

 Mark Norman showing an amazing but somewhat pungent giant squid specimen.
Source: Museum Victoria

Today’s visit was a chance to show the rangers what has happened to the Lake Condah specimens they helped to collect, and the sort of research done in the museum. We hope they’ll visit us again soon. Until then, here's a reminder of the significance of Lake Condah and the aquaculture practiced there by Gunditjmara people for thousands of years. In this video, Joseph Saunders explains eel farming and traditional life at Lake Condah.

Links:

Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape

How do museum curators learn more about the objects in their collections? Often it’s a lot of detective work and research, but sometimes a lucky encounter can reveal the rich background that underlies the item in question. Recently, this was the case when curator Liza Dale-Hallett wanted to know more about a domestic wine press that was acquired from the Di Benedetto family after thirty years of wine-making in their Thornbury backyard.

The parts of the press were in storage and piecing them together was a puzzle. “I needed to make sense of how to put all that together, so I rang around wine-making suppliers,” explains Liza. When she reached John Mitris of Costante Imports, Liza learned that John’s father-in-law, Giovanni Costante, was an important pioneer in making and importing wine presses in Australia. The two men visited us to help assemble the Di Benedetto wine press and to talk about the tradition and local history of domestic wine making.

John Mitris and Giovanni Costante with the Di Benedetto wine press.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

Giovanni explained that the 1960s Di Benedetto wine press, or torchio, is a traditional design comprising a wooden cylinder around a central shaft that holds a turning mechanism. The cylinder would be filled with grapes and stacked with wooden blocks. By turning the handles, the wooden blocks apply pressure to the grapes and the juice drains through a mesh filter into a wooden bucket.

John and Giovanni show curator Liza Dale-Hallett how the blocks fit into the wine press.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

Giovanni shows Liza how the filter fits to the base of the wine press.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

John and Giovanni with the long handles fitted to the wine press, demonstrating how two people work together to turn the screw.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

Giovanni began building presses much like this one in 1957 to supply the Italian migrant community that grew quickly after World War II. With a background in engineering, he salvaged some of his raw materials from unwanted metal from cotton gins and railyards. As his business expanded, the screw mechanism was superseded by a ratchet mechanism which takes up less room and is easier for one person to operate.

The press was used by the Di Benedettos each year and was central to a social event where the whole family would help out to press the year’s grapes. Giovanni explained this tradition is common in Italian families and reflects the importance of good food in Italian culture. “Australia is a sandwich nation. In Italy at 12 o’clock we all sit at the table. Two hours rest, then back to work. I never ate by myself when in the family.”

He ceased manufacturing wine presses about 12 years ago as the market dropped, yet in recent years, the business has witnessed a renewed interest in preserving food at home, thanks in part to the growing foodie culture and influence of European immigrants on the Australian palate. John explained that children of European migrants are also updating the family equipment to make it easier to use, and wanting to learn the techniques to keep the tradition going.

Links:

Origins: Italian migration

Costante Imports

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years. He wrote this piece for the Volunteer Newsletter in 2004.

Long-billed Corellas only ever seem to make the news when they are causing trouble. I guess this item won’t help their reputation.

I’m part of a project going through the Melbourne Museum’s vast collection of bird skins, checking their registration, or lack of it, in the EMu database. Historical specimens from legendary sources such as John Gould, William Blandowski, Baldwin Spencer and Donald Thompson are commonplace here, along with those collected by Museum staff and many collaborators in the birding community.

We all know how important the Museum is to safekeeping our heritage. We usually think of this happening in a rather abstract, institutional way, with these grand collections. But it can be quite personal.

Amongst the hundreds of items checked so far, it was a surprise to come across one specimen with a personal letter of introduction carefully placed beneath the reposing bird. “Cocky” was a Long-billed Corella (Cacatua tenuirostris) donated in 1980 by a family in Croydon. The letter is countersigned by Alan McEvey, a former Curator of Ornithology and a legendary bird man in his own lifetime. It gives us a brief biography of Cocky who had lived to the age of 80 or 90.

Cocky the Long-billed Corella with his letter of introduction.
Source: Museum Victoria

In his early life Cocky lived for many years in a hotel in Bridge Road Richmond. Eventually he was ordered from the front bar by the police for bad language. Apparently it shocked the ladies passing by. Was Richmond really more genteel in the early years of the twentieth century than now? Hard to believe.

After this indignity Cocky lived in the back shed of the hotel, where he picked up the talk from the two-up games, the sly grog and illegal betting. “C’mon Bill, put a bob on a horse,” he would urge, along with numerous other colourful sayings. All this could still be heard out in the street and the passing ladies were still getting upset. A woman who worked at the hotel as a maid eventually offered Cocky to take home for her 10-year old son. She was the widowed grandmother of the donor and Cocky was handed down in the family for the next 50 years.

Her son removed Cocky, hitherto immobile, from his small cage and exercised his wings and rubbed his feet with olive oil until he could walk. He would sleep on the boy’s bedhead. But he started tearing the skirting boards apart calling; “Rats, rats, scald the buggers!” so he was put in an aviary. When he swore a cup of water was thrown over him. He stopped swearing but still talked until the end.

The letter concludes: “I have looked after him for 20 years please take care of our friend”.

Links:

Ornithology Collection

I was reminded by my mother the other day that I had once refused to eat microwaved food. It was the 1970s and I’m not sure if it was teenage rebellion or whether I was spooked by the thought of microwaves. Here are five things about microwaves - some are spooky but some are fascinating.

1. In 1945 Percy Spencer had an “Aha!” moment after a melted lolly. Percy was doing military research on radars when he noticed that the peanut choc treat in his pocket had totally melted. It was the first item of food to ever be microwaved and luckily it was a lab accident that ended well. He realised the goo in his pocket was due to the modified radio waves - or microwaves - that he was working on.

An early commercial microwave on display at the House Secrets exhibition. This is a 1959 Swedish Husqvarna, Electronic 2001 ‘Cupol’. (I suppose the number ‘2001’ must have seemed like a space age term in 1959).
Image: Andi Horvath
Source: Museum Victoria 

2. The mid 1970s became a microwave bonanza and they began selling like hot cakes. Up until then, microwaves had been used in the food industry, restaurants and even submarines. But it wasn’t until the various components, including the new microprocessor, had come down in price and early myths about radiation were dispelled that the commercial domestic market finally took off.

A salesman looking to make a bonanza of a commission. From the State Electricity Commission of Victoria collection, Museum Victoria. (MM 009529).
Source: Museum Victoria

3. Microwaves work by jiggling water and fat molecules. A rather unattractive metal box called a ‘magnetron’ is at the heart of every microwave oven; the rest is just insulated casing. The magnetron generates the microwaves that jiggle molecules so fast that they heat up the food.

 The magnetron - rather a good name for a super hero or a grunge band, don’t you think?
Image: Andi Horvath
Source: Museum Victoria 

4. Some things don’t belong in a microwave oven. The House Secrets exhibition at Scienceworks has a display of things not to microwave because it destroys your appliance. We sacrificed a number of microwaves making this film so you don’t have to ruin yours. So don’t try this at home.

The video of microwave mistakes is inside a microwave in the House Secrets exhibition. Marshmallow will puff up and then flump, thin metal creates mini lighting (electricity arcs form between the metal and the microwave) and an unpierced egg will explode due to build up of steam.
Image: Andi Horvath
Source: Museum Victoria

5. Making a tasty gourmet meal in a microwave oven is still a challenge. The pictures in 1970s cookbooks always seem rather unappetising – perhaps the food stylist’s profession was in its infancy. When I asked around the office, most people told me they just use their microwaves to heat things. Perhaps if MasterChef runs a microwave cooking challenge it may inspire people to give it a go.

 Are those chicken skewers with lemon pieces? It doesn’t seem to me to be a microwave thing but maybe that’s why they chose it for the cover: to surprise you. This 1970s microwave cookbook is on display in the House Secrets exhibition.
Image: Andi Horvath
Source: Museum Victoria

The other day when I went out for some milk, I passed by a shop window display and noticed some lovely ceramic jugs in the shape of cardboard milk cartons and a range of colourful silicon rubber versions of paper coffee cups. All these iconic containers in unexpected materials! It got me thinking about my milk and my milk carton I just purchased. Here are five things from Museum Victoria about milk containers...

1. In 1860s Europe, if you wanted milk, the only milk container was a cow or possibly a metal milk can. By the 1870s, Europe saw the emergence of large metal milk cans. I found some old milk cans in the MV collection but then I stumbled across this beautifully decorated milk can from our Immigration and Creative Practice Collection.

Milk Can, painted by Yoka Van Den Brink, 1993, using Hindeloopen craft techniques which date back to the 16th century port of Hindeloopen, in Friesland, North of Holland. (SH 931248)
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

(I also just had to show you this intriguing image...)

International Harvester McCormick-Deering 3-S Cream Separator with Female Model, 1939. (MM 115002)
Source: Museum Victoria

2. Glass superseded metal. Some of you will remember the glass milk bottle. Invented in 1884, it meant milk could be stored for several days without spoilage because bottles could be sterilised, plus pasteurised milk (quickly heated and cooled) restricted bacterial contamination.

 Left: How cute is the Imperial half pint milk bottle from the Gilchrist Dairy, Fitzroy in use between 1930 and 1959? (HT 14148) Right: One imperial pint milk bottle painted white on the inside; we didn’t put the actual milk in the collection. (ST 038370).
Image: L: Cherie McKeich and Eloise Coccoli R: Unknown
Source: Museum Victoria

3. In 1915, John Van Wormer cried over split milk because it also involved broken glass (fair enough). He turned his frustration into an idea of a ‘paper bottle’ that had to be folded, glued and dipped in paraffin wax. He was granted the patent and ten years later he also had a machine to form, fill and seal the new ‘Pure-pak’ containers.

The humble milk carton in a gilded frame. The House Secrets exhibition at Scienceworks celebrates many domestic inventions like the milk carton.
Image: Andi Horvath
Source: Museum Victoria

4. Plastic convenience superseded wax. In the 1940s the paraffin wax was replaced by polyethylene plastic. But the milk carton did not catch on until the 1960s when cartons included a new feature: the open-able spout.

A large crowd watching the 1959 Moomba parade travelling along Swanston Street. Featured is the milk board float with a large milk bottle on top. (MM 051923)
Image: Unkonwn
Source: Museum Victoria

A one litre carton of milk, branded Pura, manufactured by National Dairies Limited. Looks familiar? It only entered the MV collection in 2010. Just like the milk bottles it will be kept for future generations to marvel at. (HT 27262).
Image: Matilda Vaughan
Source: Museum Victoria

5. It's possible we've gone full circle. If John Von Wormer were alive he would chuckle at this funky domestic accessory. I don’t think he would use it as a milk jug for coffee, I reckon he’d use it as a vase.

Glass Half Pint Milk Carton - Milk Jug
Source: Rockett St George

The City Gallery at the Melbourne Town Hall is crawling with possums, owls, moths and other twilight creatures in the new exhibition, Crepuscular. Here you can observe the animals that often escape our notice as we rush home from work or retreat from winter to cosier climates indoors.

Curated by honorary Museum Victoria associate, John Kean, the exhibition includes specimens and Prodromus illustrations on loan from MV, and specially-commissioned taxidermy by Dean Smith (who also works as a senior museum preparator). There are also new artworks by local artists Alexis Beckett, Mali Moir, and John Pastoiza-Pinol, and I couldn't tear my eyes away from the exquisite portraits of invertebrates by botanical artist Dianne Emery.

Emperor Gum Moth eggs, caterpillar, adult, cocoon and imago, Opodiphthera eucalypti 2011. Watercolour on Kelmscott vellum 25x 20 cm
Image: Dianne Emery
Source: Dianne Emery

Crepuscular presents a fascinating picture of the life in urban Melbourne that exists and persists despite – but sometimes because of – human activity. For every loser there's a winner: clearing habitat has caused the loss of many species (such as quolls, which remained in remnant populations at Kew's Studley Park until just a few decades ago) but plantings of exotic trees have been a boon for others. An abundance of fruit trees drew in the Grey-headed Flying Foxes for the first time, while Powerful Owls have emerged from the forests to take up residence in city parks and grow fat on the possums.

Crepuscular is on at the City Gallery until 6 July 2011. Be sure to find the spot in the room where all eyes are upon you...

Links:

City Gallery at Melbourne Town Hall

Question of the Week: Emperor Gum Moth

Emperor Gum Moth on Caught and Coloured

The Age: 'Critters of the night shift'

I loved the Far Out, Brussel Sprout books when I was a kid. Do you remember them? They stood from the other children’s books because they were filled with all the cheeky rhymes and sayings that kids actually used in the playground, rather than the sterilised stuff that teachers and parents wanted us to read. These books were compiled by Dr June Factor, writer and folklorist, and founding editor of the journal Play and Folklore.

Play and Folklore is devoted to recording and discussing what children do when largely free of adult direction or control—their colloquial speech, songs, games, rhymes, riddles, jokes, insults and secret languages. Established in 1981, it has been published online by Museum Victoria since 2001 and the April issue just released celebrates the journal’s 30th anniversary.

Paper football made from newspaper was constructed at Carlton North Primary School in the mid-1980s. Footballer Peter McKenna describes playing with a newspaper footy as a child in the 1950s in the April 2011 Play and Folklore.
Image: Jennifer McNair
Source: Museum Victoria

Dr June Factor and Dr Gwenda Davey began publishing the then-titled Australian Children’s Folklore Newsletter out of the Institute of Early Childhood Development that later became part of the University of Melbourne. Keen observers of children, Dr Factor and Dr Davey began collecting and preserving their folklore in the 1970s. This became the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection (ACFC) which they donated to Museum Victoria in 1999. In 2004, it became the first MV collection to be placed in on the prestigious UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register.

Slingshot made from a tree branch, circa 1980-1983. Found on the steps of the Institute of Early Childhood Development, Kew, by Dr June Factor. It had been left there by children who often used the empty car park as a playground at weekends. In the background are index cards used by Dr Factor to record children's rhymes.
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria

Deborah Tout-Smith, Senior Curator of Cultural Diversity, is the curator for the ACFC and oversees the production of Play and Folklore. “Children’s folklore is amazing repository of cultural information. In the past a lot of study into children has been adults looking at children [whereas] children’s folklore is a cultural world children themselves preserve and articulate,” said Deborah. “June Factor pointed out that information is handed on between children and never enters the adult world. Sometimes we see remnants of old ideas and practices that have disappeared in the adult world but still continue in children’s folklore.”

The study of children’s folklore has been important while researching the newly-opened exhibition at the Immigration Museum, Identity: yours, mine, ours. “We find the roots of prejudice in the ways children start to notice difference,” explained Deb. “There are distinct phases of understanding that can end up hardening into prejudice, or can become part of embracing difference.” Both the ACFC and Play and Folklore capture children’s culture from around the world and while they have a distinctly Australian flavour, they include the layers of influence from migrant children over the decades.

Links:

Play and Folklore archive (1981-current)

Collections Online: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

Infosheet: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

In the early hours of Saturday 7 May, an intruder stole an important cultural object from Melbourne Museum. Police are investigating the theft, and Museum Victoria appeals for its safe return.

Central Australian spearthrower stolen from Melbourne Museum.
Source: Museum Victoria

The item is a spearthrower from Central Australia. It is approximately 80cm long and is made from mulga wood. Carved into the item is a series of circles and lines depicting waterholes, creeks and claypans in Pintupi country.

If you have any information about the stolen object, please contact Melbourne Museum or the police.

Nick Alexander from CSIRO Publishing visited the MV Library last week in search of gliding mammals. He’s working on the production of an upcoming book by Stephen Jackson called Gliding Mammals of the World.

The book will cover certain groups of mammals - squirrels, possums and lemurs - that have evolved traits for soaring between trees, such as extra folds of skin along the sides of their bodies. Victorian gliding mammals include Squirrel Gliders, Sugar Gliders and Yellow-bellied Gliders.

In Gliding Mammals of the World, 19th century artworks from our rare books will accompany an introduction to the historical context of gliding mammal studies. Some of the early European natural history illustrations are, in Nick’s words, 'rather fanciful' but the new book will be beautifully illustrated by Peter Schouten who is renowned for his accurate and naturalistic wildlife illustrations.

You can look forward to the publication of Gliding Mammals of the World later this year.

Links:

CSIRO Publishing

Stephen Jackson

Peter Schouten's site 

Aston Gibbs, Acting Manager, Collection Location Systems.
Image: Emma Hutchinson
Source: Museum Victoria

Why is Aston so happy? She’s jubilant at the completion of the History and Technology Lantern Slide Collection Rehousing project!

Collection managers, database gurus, History and Technology curators, conservators, photographers and many others joined in a huge, coordinated project to rehouse the museum’s entire lantern slide collection – that’s over 10,000 individual items – into new, custom-made storage systems. Lorenzo Iozzi, senior collection manager for the image and AV collections, has been coordinating this mammoth task for months, culminating in an intensive, week-long effort to ready the collection for its move from Scienceworks to collection stores at Melbourne Museum.

Eloise Coccoli, Assistant Curator for Collections Online, keeping the lantern slides in order.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

Collection Registration Officer Emma Hutchinson with the new storage system for the lantern slides.
Image: Lorenzo Iozzi
Source: Museum Victoria

Staff photographing lantern slides.
Image: Ria Green
Source: Museum Victoria

MV's lantern slides are a fascinating, eclectic snapshot of all manner of topics from the Victorian era to the early 20th century. Comprising a light source, a lens and a transparent image, magic lanterns were the precursor to the slide projector and were very popular entertainment before the advent of film. Some of the more complicated projectors had multiple lenses and projected slides with intricate moving components. The video below demonstrates a magic lantern show.

The museum's collection has come from a number of sources; the Francis Collection, containing over 5500 items relating to pre-cinematic technology, comprises is a large portion of it. Before the relocation project, some lantern slides were stored in wooden crates that were as old as the slides themselves, unregistered and inadequately described simply because there were so many of them.

It’s a huge achievement for all involved:

• they rehoused, registered and barcoded the entire collection of 10,600 lantern slides
• they photographed 3,400 lantern slides to preservation standard
• they prepared 2,000 object records and 4,600 photographs for upload to Collections Online

And you know what? Not a single one of the fragile glass slides was broken in the process! Congratulations, team!

The huge crew who all pitched in for the lantern slide project.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Lantern slides on Collections Online

The Magic Lantern Society (UK)

Craig is a Melbourne writer with an interest in natural history. He has been a museum volunteer in Birds and Mammals for several years.

150 years ago today, Burke and Wills returned from their trek to the Gulf of Carpentaria to Cooper Creek in south-west Queensland. Tragically, the party that had waited for them for 18 weeks had left just hours earlier on the same day, leaving a small cache of food buried under the a coolibah tree carved with the message 'DIG 3FT NW APR 21 1861'.

The Burke and Wills Dig Tree at Bullah Bullah Waterhole, on Coopers Creek, Queensland, Australia.
Image: Peterdownunder
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 from Peterdownunder

By the end of June both Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills were dead, leaving John King the only survivor. He was rescued by Alfred Howitt the following September during a search expedition, which also located the bodies of Burke and Wills.

Museum Victoria holds a number of important items associated with the story of Burke and Wills, particularly from Howitt’s two expeditions to Cooper Creek. Watch this space for more information in the coming months.

Medal - Burke & Wills, Victoria, Australia, 1864. (NU 20096)
Source: Museum Victoria

The famous, ill-fated Victorian Exploring Expedition was an enterprise of the Royal Society of Victoria, which is still located just across Carlton Gardens from Melbourne Museum. The expedition remained a dominant story in the Colony (and later State) of Victoria at least until World War I and the advent of the ANZACs. Pictured is a medallion from the Numismatics Collection, minted by Thomas Stokes about 1864 to commemorate Burke and Wills.

Links:

Royal Society of Victoria: Burke & Wills Commemoration program

Dig - The Burke & Wills Research Gateway at the State Library of Victoria

This post comes from Leonie Cash, a librarian at the Museum Victoria library.

Thanks to the network of arts libraries, ARLIS, a trio of RMIT art academics visited the MV Library’s rare books collection recently to view examples of eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific illustration. Facsimiles of Albertus Seba and Maria Merian’s work were also on display.

Facsimiles of famous works by Albertus Seba and Maria Merian.
Source: Museum Victoria

The three visitors are associated with RMIT’s School of Art and all are practising artists with a keen interest in natural history, particularly natural history illustration.

Greg Moncrieff, work experience student Max and Louise Weaver examine the exquisite illustrations in MV's rare books.
Source: Museum Victoria

Greg Moncrieff was very pleased with the diversity of material available from the old books on display.

While looking at Gould’s humming birds, Louise Weaver was fascinated by the methods of layering of paint that reproduce the beautiful colours of these small birds.

Peter Ellis, Associate Professor and Studio Coordinator of Painting at RMIT, has written that the “experience of travel has had a profound impression on my work” and his visit to Museum Victoria’s rare books, though a short distance, has left him wanting to return again soon.

Fish illustration from 19th century America.
Source: Museum Victoria

The MV Library is happy to host visiting scholars by appointment; please contact us via email.

Links:

X Marks the Spot exhibition, 2006

The story of Leadbeater's Possum is so interwoven with the history of Museum Victoria that there was no better place to celebrate it than at Melbourne Museum last Sunday.

This tiny, highlands marsupial was first described by the museum's director, Sir Frederick McCoy in 1867, who named it Gymnobelideus leadbeateri after our first taxidermist, John Leadbeater.

By the 1900s, it was thought extinct. No one saw it for decades. Charles Brazenor, later to become director of the museum, published a plea in 1946 for naturalists to find the creature to no avail. In 1961, a young museum employee changed the fate of Leadbeater's Possum. The amazing story of its rediscovery is recorded in this short film by Curator of History of Science, Rebecca Carland:

On Sunday 3 April, exactly 50 years after his first glimpse of a wild Leadbeater's Possum, Eric was honoured at a ceremony jointly organised by Parks Victoria, Friends of the Leadbeater’s Possum and Museum Victoria. On behalf of the museum and the people of Victoria, Robin Hirst presented Eric with a print of Leadbeater's Possum from the Prodromus of Zoology.

L-R: Robin Hirst, Director of Collections, Research and Exhibitions; Eric Wilkinson; CEO Patrick Greene and curator Rebecca Carland.
Image: Liza Dale-Hallet
Source: Museum Victoria

Eric handed a young sapling of Mountain Ash as a symbolic baton of care to a representative of the of the group HELP (Help the Endangered Leadbeater's Possum). Four Year 7 students started HELP in 2009 to raise awareness of the plight of the species and to gather funds to assist in its future survival. Eric spoke about the inspiring work they've done so far, and the important role of the next generation in protecting our state's faunal emblem.

Jo Antrobus from Parks Victoria with students from St. Margarets School, Berwick, special guest speaker and environment ambassador Sheree Marris and Lake Mountain mascot Lenny Leadbeater. Lake Mountain is home to most of the remaining Leadbeater's Possum habitat.
Image: Liza Dale-Hallett
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

YouTube video - Leadbeater's Possum: Our state emblem under fire

The Age article: Hello, possums! Breed saved from extinction 50 years on

Leadbeater's Possum on Collections Online

Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum

17 March is St Patrick's Day, a national holiday for the Irish and widely celebrated by communities of Irish descent worldwide. A quick search on Collections Online turned up a photograph of a St Patrick's Day parade along Spring Street, Melbourne, in 1925.

There was certainly no parade through town today when I visited the site. In fact, the only events I can find celebrating St Patrick's Day this year involve Melbourne's many Irish pubs. Still, it gave me an interesting chance to compare how the three buildings in the 1925 photograph have changed.

 Two photos of the same site in Melbourne taken 86 years apart. Top: St Patrick 's Day parade passing the Windsor Hotel and Spencer's Old White Hart Hotel, 1925. Photo taken by The Allen Studio. (MM 6348) Bottom: The same Spring St site in 2011.
Source: Museum Victoria

In the top photo, the White Hart Hotel still stands on the corner of Bourke and Spring Streets. This was demolished in 1960 and replaced with the Windsor Hotel's north wing. The Imperial Hotel in the right of the frame dates back to the 1860s - and before this site was occupied by buildings, apparently it was used by a circus!

Links:

MV Blog: Benalla, then and now

2005 Irish Festival at the Immigration Museum

Origins: History of immigration from Ireland and Northern Ireland

The MV Library received one of 150 invitations sent for a worldwide gathering of book collectors, librarians, archivists, and historians known as The Antarctic Circle. This group is united by their interest in the art and history of Antarctic studies.

The meeting in New Hampshire is organised by Robert Stephenson, a retired Harvard professor and founder of The Antarctic Circle. Unfortunately we can't attend the meeting, but Robert visited us recently to inspect MV's copy of Aurora Australis. This book is one of 90 copies printed under harsh conditions in Antarctica in 1907-08 during Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod expedition.

Founder of The Antarctic Circle, Robert Stephenson, and MV librarian, Leonie Cash, with MV's copy of Aurora Australis.
Source: The Antarctic Circle

Robert has visited libraries and personal collectors around the world comparing copies of Aurora Australis and the individual features of each copy are painstakingly recorded on The Antarctic Circle website. Each Aurora Australis is unique; the book was bound with covers made from wooden packing-cases which contained the expedition's provisions. The MV copy is stencilled CHICKEN and is signed by Ernest Shackleton and George Marston. We also have the 1988 facsimile edition in the Rare Books Collection of the library.

Details of MV's copy of Aurora Australia. Left: signatures of Ernest Shackleton and George Marston. Right: the inside back cover reads 'CHICKEN' from the original packing crate.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

Two pages of MV's copy of Aurora Australis.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

The Antarctic Circle

Details of MV's copy on The Antactic Circle

MV News: Library Week rare book viewing

Last week, just in time for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Eliza Duckmanton's Recipe & Remedy book was added to Collections Online. This blog post pays tribute to her in the most delicious way.

Eliza Duckmanton was a bush nurse and mother of 12 who lived in Dunkeld, Victoria. She created the book in 1870 and its contents - recipes for cakes, pickles, jams, jellies and biscuits - reveal what pioneer women cooked for their families. Eliza's book of clippings and handwritten recipes is also dotted with the odd sketch.This treasure was passed down the generations of the Duckmanton family until it was donated to Museum Victoria in 2002.

While the food section in any bookshop today is spilling over with cookbooks about every kind of edible, published cookbooks were relatively uncommon in Victorian times. The English & Australian Cookery Book written by Walter Abbott in 1864 is considered the first Australian cookbook. Recipes were handed around between friends and family members, or torn from newspapers, and compiled in books like Eliza's. Hers is particularly interesting for its remedies, too - her cure for cancer is a concoction containing saltpetre, sulphur and molasses!

I quite liked the idea of reviving one of Eliza's cake recipes, so on the weekend I baked her Queen Cakes. I assume these are named for Queen Victoria but would love to know the full story if there are any food historians reading. Although Eliza didn't specify that Queen Cakes are baked in individual cases, my copy of the CWA cookbook did. The recipe is transcribed below along with a few changes I made to the order of operations.

As I cooked, I thought about the 140-odd years between Eliza and I. My ingredients came in neat supermarket packages and an electric mixer saved me a lot of elbow grease. Eliza might have made her own butter and hauled home sacks of drygoods. She probably collected and chopped the wood that fuelled her oven and it certainly didn't have a thermostat. Despite this, I'm sure her cakes were just as buttery, dense and delicious as the modern remake. 

Queen Cakes made from Eliza Duckmanton's 1870 recipe.
Source: Museum Victoria

Queen Cakes

1 lb flour

½ lb butter

½ lb pounded loaf sugar

3 eggs

1 teacupful of cream

½ lb currants

1 teaspoonfull of soda

Work the butter to a cream. Dredge in the flour and add the sugar and currants. Mix the ingredients well together. Whisk the eggs, when fluffy, mix the cream and flavouring and stir these to the flour, add the soda, beat the paste well for 10 minutes, bake from ¼ to ½ hour.

*Changes made: I creamed butter and sugar together, then added eggs and cream, mixed lightly, and cooked about 15 minutes at 180ºC. This made about 20 small cakes.

Today is the 100th celebration of International Women's Day. In 1911, rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March turned the movement into an international phenomenon, with over one million protesters calling for women's right to vote and equality in the workplace. Now held each year on 8 March, International Women's Day celebrates women's achievements and encourages everyone to address inequalities between the sexes where they still persist.

It's also Women's History Month in March and the featured theme on Collections Online is the militant suffrage movement in Great Britain, exemplified by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The 'militant' behaviour of WSPU campaigners seems rather restrained compared with the modern-day definition of the term, but in the 1900s, accosting politicians and public demonstrations were decidedly unladylike and they used military language to describe their 'fight'.

The theme is illustrated with a wonderful object - a silver muffineer, or shaker for dispensing spices for the tops of cakes. The muffineer is in the form of a suffragette complete with a sandwich board.

Suffragette muffineer made by Saunders & Shepherd, Silver, 1908 (HT 17185)
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Another Collections Online WSPU object is a medal awarded for valour to Myra Eleanor Sadd Brown, an activist and mother of four who was arrested in 1912 for breaking a window in a government office. Her hunger strike ended when she was force-fed in Holloway Prison. It is estimated that fewer than 100 of these medals were struck. It still has its ribbon with bands of green, white and purple, the offical colours of the women's suffrage movement. (You may see people wearing these colours today - I'm one of them!)

Suffragette medal awarded to Myra Eleanor Sadd Brown, Great Britain, 1909, for her efforts in the militant Women's Social and Political Union. (NU 36216)
Image: Jennifer McNair
Source: Museum Victoria

Myra was one of around 1000 British women imprisoned for protesting for the right to vote, which finally came in 1918 for England women, 16 years after non-Aboriginal Australian women were allowed to vote in Commonwealth elections. Our neighbours in New Zealand did much better; women could vote from 1893, including Maori women, whereas Australian Aboriginal women were excluded until 1962 when Commonwealth voting rights were extended to Australia's Indigenous population.

How are you marking International Women's Day?

Links:

International Women's Day

Australian Women's History Forum

MV News: From Little Things

The annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival starts tomorrow and MV is hosting events at Melbourne Museum, the Royal Exhibition Building and the Immigration Museum. It seemed the perfect time to ask the History and Technology curators to suggest some foodie collection items for a series of MFWF posts.

It's hard to imagine Melbourne's food scene without an Italian influence. The flush of Italian migrants that arrived here following World War II brought with them the foundations of the café culture so prevalent across Melbourne today. Some early cafés still survive; Don Camillo near Victoria Market, and Pellegrini's in Bourke St being two well-know examples. Many Italian migrants also started food manufacturing businesses to satisfy the appetites of the migrant population, and, increasingly, the wider community that embraced Italian cuisine. One of these businesses, La Tosca, was founded in 1947 and still produces pasta today.

'La Tosca' Ravioli label for labelling tins of food produced by La Tosca Food Processing Company in the 1970s.
Source: Museum Victoria 

Curator Moya McFadzean talks about the La Tosca roller in this video from The Melbourne Story website:

La Tosca tools and package labels are on display in The Melbourne Story exhibition, which is also the venue for Melbourne's Culinary Story. This festival event features special guest Charmaine O’Brien, author of Flavours of Melbourne, a Culinary Biography and Victorian wines and produce. If you mention MV Blog when booking you will get the MV Members discount  - call 13 11 02 for bookings.

Links:

Selling Pasta to Melbourne - the La Tosca story

Marvellous Melbourne: Café Culture

Borghesi Family Collection on Collections Online

MV Melbourne Food and Wine Festival events

Pendle Hall is an enormous, elaborate and intricate dolls’ house that Felicity Clemons built almost entirely by hand. It was donated to Museum Victoria through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program in 2010 and work has begun to ready it for eventual display at Melbourne Museum.

Beginning in the 1940s, Melbourne-born Felicity was inspired to create Pendle Hall after her daughter received a small dolls’ house as a gift. Ultimately, Pendle Hall reached 21 rooms of Georgian-style country splendour, complete with parquetry floors, working chandeliers, a fully-stocked larder, a resident family with servants and even a mouse beside a wheel of cheese.

The shelves in Pendle Hall's larder are well-stocked. You can see the wheel of cheese and mouse in the middle of the the first shelf.
Image: Michelle Berry
Source: Museum Victoria

Janet Pathe has been steadily registering the individual pieces which number over 600 items. As chief unwrapper, she’s been the first to sight some of the amazing miniature items therein. “ I really like the little pack of cards but some of the pieces of furniture, like cabinets, are just absolutely amazing. All the little drawers and doors open.”

A cabinet from Pendle Hall's Withdrawing Room. It's hard to believe this intricate piece is only 18 cm high. (HT 25753)
Source: Museum Victoria

Pendle Hall has been on display in Felicity Clemons’ private museum in Westbury, Tasmania for many years. To transport it from the Apple Isle, the dolls’ house was carefully photographed while assembled, then each item wrapped, labelled and boxed by a conservator. The reference photos will be critical to reassemble and manage all the little pieces, since, as Janet explains, “so much of it is too small, like the tiny candlesticks, for us to put registration numbers on them.”

This board shows the tools and techniques Felicity Clemens used while constructing Pendle Hall.
Source: Museum Victoria

While Janet registers, conservator Sarah Babister is working through the house room by room. “At the moment I’m doing a conservation assessment on all 612 components, literally looking at every piece, and trying to determine what treatment, if any, needs to be carried out,” says Sarah. “To date most pieces I have examined only require basic surface cleaning, however there are some components which will need to be repaired or stabilised." In some cases she may consider replacing materials (such as a tiny foam mattress) with an inert material because she suspects the foam may be speeding up the deterioration of the bedspread on top.

Conservator Sarah is working through the furniture from the Chinese Bedroom of Pendle Hall.
Source: Museum Victoria

We’ll provide more pictures and news on Pendle Hall here on MV Blog in coming months.

Links:

ABC Radio National: interview with curator Michael Reason on ByDesign

Priscilla is a Program Coordinator for Life Sciences and works on education programs at Melbourne Museum. She has been a regular dinosaur digger for over 10 years!

I'm often asked what it's like at a dinosaur dig. The romantic view most people have, fuelled by films like Jurassic Park, is that we simply sweep away the sand with a brush, use high-tech gadgets to locate the exact location of the bones, and get flown to tropical islands with Jeff Goldblum.

Over 100 years ago the first dinosaur fossil, the Cape Paterson Claw, was found on the coast of Victoria at a site known as Eagles Nest. Nothing much else was found until two young palaeontologists in the making, Tim Flannery and John Long, spent their youth searching the rocks along the coast of Victoria, eventually finding more fossil booty. Their finds have led to decades of dinosaur digs along the coast of Victoria.

From Cape Otway to Inverloch, the Cretaceous-aged sandstone rocks have been blasted, bashed and bored to reveal what life was like 120 million years ago in Victoria. Each year the work at the Dinosaur Dreaming Dig, which is a joint project between Museum Victoria and Monash University, recruits numerous volunteers who spend hours breaking rock. Over the years, the same volunteers return, making the whole experience more like a giant family gathering at Christmas. Uncle Norman, Mother Lesley, Sister Alanna, and Grandma Mary are all there. Gerry and his rock, Doris and her eggnog, Mike and his poems, Nick and his telescope, Nicole and her berry crumble are all part of the experience.

And yes, there are the dinosaur bones. Each year some 800 new bones are found and catalogued. Just like a Christmas stocking, you never know what you are going to find inside each rock  – will it be the discovery that changes theories of evolution or another disappointment? Yet despite so many fruitless ‘stocking openings’, I and many others are lured back. After so many years of digging, amazing fossils have been found. Many of these incredible specimens are now on display in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves. Hopefully, this clip gives you some insight into just how we find them...

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Dinosaur Dreaming: the Inverloch Fossil Site infosheet

Fossil collecting sites in Victoria infosheet

Dinosaur Walk

Dinosaur Dreaming blog

Jackie is a volunteer at Museum Victoria. She has been documenting and researching the Newmarket Saleyards Collection.

On Saturday Liza Dale-Hallett and I were lucky enough to head along to the 150th Newmarket Saleyards Reunion. It was a fabulous day under the shady peppercorns and oaks, with a turnout of over 250 drovers, buyers, transporters and auctioneers returning to share stories and catch up with old mates. Chequered shirts, moleskins and akubras set the dress standard for the day while a cold beer in hand was a necessary addition to any reminiscing.

Crowd at the 150th anniversary Newmarket Saleyards Reunion on 19 February.
Source: Museum Victoria

Although these days some of the ‘boys’ don’t get around that quickly, it was all too easy to imagine them striding around the saleyards, calling out to each other over the fences and down the lanes. They happily recounted anecdotes about their days at Newmarket – some were bold and some were bawdy, many were full of intrigue and most of them gave an insight into the tough life lived by drovers. Some chestnuts were enlightening, explaining things a city-girl would never otherwise know, while some memories were more sombre, recollecting mates that had passed on. I was regaled with yarns from Barney, Knocker and Marbuk; Bluey, Paddy, Waxy and young Strop. And while Jingles had me captivated with stories of getting up to no good, Dick warmed my heart with entertaining tales of his beloved dogs. Brothers Laurie and Lindsay were the gentlemen drovers, eloquent orators and fine historians; and larrikin Spot proudly showed off his new grandson. Men came from as far away as Queensland while others live just up the road and didn’t have so far to get home.

L-R: Greg Nichols, Peter Woodhead and Graham Spargo.
Source: Museum Victoria

Volunteer Jackie with Dick Chandler at the reunion.
Source: Museum Victoria

It was a day of storytelling and reminiscing at its very best and although there wasn’t a sheep dog in sight, it was easy to imagine Newmarket in its glory days as Australia’s premier saleyards.

Some exciting donations were made to Museum Victoria and we look forward to adding them to our Newmarket Heritage Collection.

Links:

Newmarket Saleyards Collection

MV Blog: Newmarket Saleyards turn 150

Have you ever passed the weathered, rough-hewn post and rail fences near the corner of Smithfield and Flemington Roads? These are the remains of the former Newmarket Saleyards which opened 150 years ago this month.

Newmarket Saleyards, highlighting the laneway running between the stock pens showing detail of bluestone pitches and post and rail fencing.
Image: Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Cars, trucks and trams thunder along Flemington Road these days and but there was a time when the roads were full of traffic of a different kind. For decades, thousands of head of cattle were driven along here ‘on the hoof’ by working dogs and drovers, many from as far away as Queensland. In the late 1800s Newmarket was on the city fringe, but as Melbourne expanded, the chaos, sounds and smells of rural life collided with the city. Increasingly, trucks and rail were used to transport livestock during the 20th century and a stock overpass, built in the 1960s, reduced the risk of escapes. There are plenty of stories of stray cattle trampling through local houses, turning up at the pub, the milk bar, and even the Zoo. After the auction, drovers ran livestock to nearby abattoirs or to be transported to the paddocks of their new owners.

 A yardman directing cattle at Newmarket Saleyards, 1960.
Image: Laurie Richards Studio
Source: Museum Victoria

The vast Newmarket Saleyards were the most important in Australia, setting the price for livestock nationwide. It became a ‘town within a town’ with its own essential services, including a telegraph office, cricket club, newspaper and radio station. Record numbers of animals were sold here during World War II.

Covered walkways between the stock pens at the Newmarket Saleyards where auctioneers stood and conducted sales.
Image: Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Regional stockyards led to the decline of Newmarket which finally closed in 1987. Museum Victoria acquired significant objects from Newmarket and volunteer Jackie Gatt has been working with curator Liza Dale-Hallett to document the collection, which is featured on Collections Online this month.

You can still see bluestone paving, stock pens, covered walkways and brick buildings on the site, but new housing occupies much of the original 57 acres. Every year since its closure, drovers, agents and auctioneers who worked at Newmarket hold a reunion on the third Saturday of February each year to catch up with old friends. This year there will also be a community celebration day on Sunday 20 February, 11am-2pm, to honour the 150th anniversary.

Detail of the Newmarket Saleyard mosaics, featuring Bill Glenn, a drover at the Newmarket Saleyards, and his cattle dog.
Image: mural artist Elizabeth McKinnon, photographer Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Newmarket Collection on Collections Online

Brochure about Newmarket Collection (PDF, 2Mb)

ABC Landline: Saleyard of the Century

Poster for Community Day on 20 February (PDF, 6.2Mb)

In 2008, senior curator David Demant gave a talk about CSIRAC at the Computer History Museum in California's Silicon Valley. CSIRAC is the only surviving first-generation computer in the world, and is a key item in MV's Information and Communication Collection.

Following David's visit, two CSIRAC items were borrowed by the Computer History Museum for their new exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. The objects - a replica paper tape that holds a CSIRAC program and an amplifier from CSIRAC's memory - feature in a section called 'The Birth of the Computer' beside the 1953 computer JOHNIAC.

Display case containing CSIRAC amplifier and paper tape at the Computer History Museum.
Source: Computer History Museum

JOHNIAC on display in the exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
Source: Computer History Museum

It's great to see an Australian-built computer - and the fourth computer ever built - represented in this important timeline of computing history.

Links:

CSIRAC: Australia's First Computer

What's On: CSIRAC

Computer History Museum

The tennis is over for another year; some people are still looking for their long-lost remotes so they can change channel and others have made a mental note to reapply sunscreen with more regularity. I’m not actually a fan of the tennis (apologies - this is very un-Melburnian of me) but my inner curious cat or simple animal instinct not to go outside in the searing heat at lunchtime led me to hunt for tennis items in MV collections. So here are five things about tennis that will be useful to mention to your tennis friends as they recover from being dedicated spectators.

1. Before the 1970s tennis balls used to be white (not fluoro green). 

Apparently the fluorescent colour was introduced in 1972 after some research showed viewers could see the ball much better on television.

Tennis balls and bag, circa 1950 or later (SH 880567)
Source: Museum Victoria

2. Tennis balls were produced as merchandise in support of Melbourne's bid to host the 1996 Olympics.

In 1956 when Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games, tennis was not yet reinstated as an Olympic sport. Tennis was an Olympic event in the first modern Olympics in 1896 but then got dropped from the games after 1924. It returned as a medal event in 1988. (Trust me - you’ll need this info for your next trivia night.)

Tennis Ball - Olympics for Melbourne, 1996 (SH 910002)
Source: Museum Victoria

3. Scandals featuring tennis players are nothing new.

According to History and Technology Collections Online:

Tennis player Billie Jean King became the first high-profile US athlete to come out as a lesbian in 1981 when she revealed her relationship with Marilyn Barnett. The revelation cost her a fortune in endorsements. She said at the time that the long-term affair had been a 'mistake', angering lesbians and gays. She was supported by her husband in a financial claim mounted by Marilyn, but they later divorced, and Billie said that the term 'mistake' had referred to being unfaithful rather than to being a lesbian.

Hmmm, today it might have attracted endorsements from increased exposure in glossy gossip magazines.

Badge - We All Make Mistakes, Wimbledon Dance, 1981 (SH 920477)
Source: Museum Victoria

4. You might meet your future spouse at a tennis club.

St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, West Hawthorn, had its own tennis club. At the opening in 1925, the Parish Priest sanctified the courts. It was said many members met their marriage partners at this club. After the 1970s non-Catholics were allowed to join.

The two courts were originally dirt and later asphalt and they clearly didn’t have 3a water restrictions back then. The club closed in 1988 and the sign ended up here at the museum.

Painted masonite sign from St. Joseph's Tennis Club (SH 890354)
Source: Museum Victoria

I also found this delightful shot of tennis club players in Geelong Victoria circa 1935 (with ladies in their lovely blazers). I am baffled at the unbroken windows in such close proximity to a tennis court.

Four men and two women of the Noble Street Church Tennis Club standing by the net. Geelong, Victoria, circa 1935 (MM 006631)
Source: Museum Victoria

5. Early tennis rackets were made of wood and catgut.

The ‘cat’ in catgut is short for cattle rather than cat of the feline variety. The tennis racket strings were once made from a cow's intestinal wall and they were stored clamped in a frame to stop the highly strung wooden rackets from warping.

Tennis Racquet and Press - Slazenger Tournament Model (SH 891665)
Source: Museum Victoria

Every now and then, those of us who work at Melbourne Museum receive a polite but slightly troubling email:

"The Preparation Department needs to undertake work today that may generate some odours."

I can’t think of another workplace where stench warnings are a regular occurrence. They’re intriguing, too, because I always wonder what they’re doing down there in the basement.

Our skilled preparators do much as their name would suggest: they prepare things, from animal specimens for research collections to intricate models for display. Their job combines elements of biology, taxidermy, sculpture and painting and their work area is a den of creativity and practicality that is stocked with tools and equipment and art supplies.

In mid-December, a Gray’s Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon grayi) unfortunately was stranded at Portland and died. Given the rarity of this species, and MV’s strength in the study of whales, its skeleton is a valuable addition to our research collection. The preparators perform the somewhat gruesome but necessary task of cleaning the skeleton, and that’s where the odour comes in.

The Preparation Department's collection of rubber gloves - essential tools in this line of work.
Source: Museum Victoria

Preparator Steven Sparrey explained the facilities in which large specimens are prepared. The specimens are placed in a sequence of water baths in the ominously named ‘maceration tank’ which allows the animal’s soft tissues to loosen away naturally from the bones without damaging them. It’s not pretty and it doesn’t smell good. After this, the bones are given a soapy wash and dried thoroughly.

The sealed room that holds the maceration tank (at the back) and cleaning benches.
Source: Museum Victoria

Some astonishingly large vertebrae from the backbone of a whale were on the drying racks. These were prepared for the Melbourne Aquarium from another stranded animal. The bones were quite yellow and Steven explained that the stains are from the whale’s oils, and they would be bleached by the sun once they were properly dry.

Whale vertebrae in the drying racks.
Source: Museum Victoria

Shortly after that, he firmly suggested that we leave the area because the smell tends to cling to clothing. Needless to say, he doesn’t wear his work clothes home on the train. So there you have it – perhaps not one of the most glamourous jobs at the museum, but an essential task to maintain Victoria’s collection of our state's fauna.

Links:

Model-making for Dynamic Earth

Climate change and whale evolution

Fossil unlocks secrets to the origin of whales

'Catching a Star' - a Christmas card created by Thomas Le showing people plucking stars from the sky and hanging them on a Christmas tree. (SH 991104 1)
Image: Thomas Le
Source: Museum Victoria

This lovely card in our Migration Collection was created in 1996 by Thomas Le for humanitarian organisation Austcare, now ActionAid Australia. Mr Le fled Vietnam as a teenager, arriving in Australia in 1980, where he put himself through art training and established his career as an illustrator, artist and graphic designer. He donated this and other artworks to Austcare as a way of giving something back for his new life in Australia and helping others who are suffering.

Also on the topic of Christmas stars, the Planetarium's latest FAQ ponders the astronomy of the Star of Bethlehem and provides some good reading until our venues reopen on 26 December.

From all at Museum Victoria, we wish you a happy and safe Christmas!

Links:

Thomas Le's Christmas card on Collections Online

Origins: History of immigration from Vietnam

This guest post is by Catherine McLennan. As part of her Master of Public History, Catherine completed a student internship with Museum Victoria, working with Senior Curator Liza Dale-Hallett on a special object that was acquired for the Victorian Bushfires Collection. This collection recently won the 2010 Arts Portfolio Leadership Award in the Community Leadership category.

This year I was given the opportunity to work on the Victorian Bushfires Collection. In my role as student intern, I was assigned to research a tree-shaped sculpture, interview its makers and create some stories for publication on Museum Victoria’s Collections Online. When I first laid eyes on this beautiful piece of art, I had no idea who made it, why they made it, or what it represented. It was time for some research…

The Thank You Gift
Source: Museum VictoriaAfter a few phone calls, I learnt that the sculpture was created in the Kinglake Ranges by local woodworker Glenn Barlow and local blacksmith Ray Brasser, using wood and metal that had been salvaged from their properties following the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Glenn and Ray presented this sculpture to the ex-Premier of Victoria John Brumby at a concert that was held at Federation Square, Melbourne, on 10 April 2010 – the Thank You Melbourne and Victoria concert. The purpose of this concert was to thank the people of Victoria for their generosity in the wake of Black Saturday and the sculpture was made as a physical token of this ‘thank you’ message.

In September I travelled to Kinglake to meet and interview Ray, Glenn and three other people that were involved in organising the Thank You Melbourne and Victoria concert. It was an honour to meet these people. All of them had been through some terrible experiences during and after the fires, but despite this, they were so welcoming and had a great sense of humour. Organising the Thank You concert was, for them, a way of channelling their grief and getting local musicians, artists and poets involved in the recovery process whilst simultaneously saying ‘thank you’.

Researching the Thank You Gift was an incredible experience that I will never forget. I would like to thank those who were so generous in sharing their stories with me (they know who they are), and to Museum Victoria for hosting my student internship.

Links:

2010 Arts Portfolio Leadership Awards

Thank You Gift on Collections Online

Making of the Thank You Gift

Thank You Melbourne and Victoria concert

This post comes from Leonie Cash, librarian at the Museum Victoria library.

Finally, something Sydney and Melbourne agree upon! Both Museum Victoria and the Australian Museum were avid collectors of books in the mid-19th century.

Gould's Birds of Australia in the MV Library Rare Books Collection.
Source: Museum Victoria

Matthew Stephens, reference librarian at the beautiful Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection at the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, recently spent time examining MV's archives and rare books. As part of his PhD research on the growth of book collecting from 1850 to the late 1880s. Matthew was keen to compare his findings from the Australian Museum with evidence of the early book collections at Museum Victoria. His research here confirmed the richness of the scientific book collections nurtured in Sydney and Melbourne at that time.

Links

MV News: Biodiversity Heritage Library

MV News: Library Week rare book viewing

Rare books at the Australian Museum

The History & Technology Department is steadily listing the vast International Harvester Collection on Collections Online. This collection of over 50,000 items records the operations, products and manufacturing of the Australian subsidiary of the International Harvester Company. This US-based company began selling its agricultural machinery and trucks in Australia in 1902. Local manufacturing in Victoria began in the late 1930s.

The IH Collection includes colour transparencies which are particularly interesting because colour photography was still quite rare in the 1940s. It’s unusual to see scenes of this era captured in vivid reds and blues and greens.

Horse-drawn GL-60 plough manufactured by International Harvester, 1940. This is one of several colour transparencies in the collection. (MM 115209)
Source: Museum Victoria

Nearly 200 images are now online and more will be listed in coming months. Curator David Crotty is keen to hear from anyone who could help identify some of the people in the images, particularly the photos of farmers and town residents who attended presentations by International Harvester sales reps.

A group of International Harvester salesmen presenting the Farmall A Tractor in Albury, 1940. The company embarked upon regional tours demonstrating its agricultural machinery. (MM 115021)
Source: Museum Victoria

Group of farmers from Cohuna outside International Harvester factory, Geelong, 1940. (MM 115033)
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

International Harvester Collection

On our recent trip to Benalla Art Gallery, Nicole and I took the chance to track down some of the town's historic buildings that appear in Collections Online. We wanted to see how they had fared over the years.

The State Electricity Commission (SEC) building was flanked by some impressive automobiles back in 1948:

Glass Negative - State Electricity Commission, Benalla, Victoria, 9 August 1948 (MM 011402)
Source: Museum Victoria

We spotted it on Main Street now housing a second-hand bookstore. A local helpfully shouted, "that's the SEC building!" at us from his ute as he drove by.

Benalla SEC building in 2010.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

This hotel was a little bit harder to find because it looks quite different these days.

Negative - Floodwaters around a Benalla hotel, September 1921 (MM 6159).
Source: Museum Victoria

We spotted it near the railway station. The friendly owner confirmed that it's the same building pictured in the 1921 photograph, but it had a significant facelift following a fire not long after that picture was taken. The basic bones of the building are still there, even though its iron lace verandahs are long gone.

Victoria Hotel in Benalla in 2010.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

We ran out of time before we could locate the Farmers Arms Hotel, but I've since found a recent picture of it on flickr that shows it too has lost its decorative iron lace but is otherwise much the same.

A bullock team and car outside the Farmers Arms Hotel, Benalla, pre-1940 (MM 001773).
Source: Museum Victoria

We'd love to hear any stories about these buildings from Benalla locals. Anyone know the character leading the bullock train?

Links:

Collections Online: search for Benalla

This guest post comes from Nicole Alley, who currently works in the Webteam. She is a geek at heart who loves taking photos.

Here in the ICT (Information Communications & Technology) Department, we work with plenty of digital stuff – telephones, computers, software, servers, video cameras, touch screens...you name it. So it was a refreshing change of pace when a group of us visited the Victorian Telecommunications Museum last month to revisit some of the old ways of communicating.

The museum is housed in the Telstra Hawthorn telephone exchange near Glenferrie Station and is managed by Stef Nowak and a group of volunteers who are passionate about preserving Australia's telecommunications heritage. The items come from both Telstra and the volunteer affiliate that manage the collection.

Ken Hoskins gave us a tour through the museum, where we learned about the history and technology of cables, insulators, phones, switchboards, talking clocks, exchanges and more.

Ken Hoskins guided us through the history of communication in Australia, from the first telephone to more recent technologies like this VOIP (voice over IP) phone.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

There were, of course, telephones galore, showing the evolution of technology: wooden wall phones powered by two enormous batteries, where you had to turn the handle and speak to an operator; black rotary dialers that appear to be coming back in fashion; kids' phones in the shape of cartoon characters; public phones and phone booths; and the ubiquitous mobile phone (remember when they were the size and weight of a brick!?).

There's a certain charm to these old telephones.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

A highlight was a morse code demonstration from Brian, John and Bob, members of the Victorian Morsecodian Fraternity who meet at the museum every week. They explained how morse code worked and reminisced about the days when they would hop on the red Post Master General bike and deliver the typed messages to their recipients, including some lottery winners. You can see John in action in the video below, turning our names into dits and dahs.

We also met Bob Muir, who showed us the Violano Virtuoso that he is restoring for Museum Victoria. It's a cross between a violin and a piano, and is expected to go on display at Scienceworks next year. Can't wait to hear it!

Bob Muir with the beautiful Violano Virtuoso.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

The evolution of the public phone box. I'm sure Superman preferred the wooden red ones to the more modern glass version!
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

Who knew there were so many different styles of rotary diallers?
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

Left: This cross-section of a telephone cable housing hundreds of smaller cables looks a bit like liquorice! Right: These dolls were used to hide the "ugliness" of the telephone in the home.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

Eight exchanges built from the 1920s through to the late 90s, including the first ever designed and built electronic exchange in Australia by the old Telstra Research Laboratories.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

It's fascinating to see the technology changing so rapidly. I wonder what our phones will look like and what we'll be able to do on them in another five years?

Links:

Victorian Telecommunications Museum

MV History & Technology Collections Online: Information & Communication Collection

A crew from MV spent much of last week in bushranger country in the town of Benalla in Victoria's north, readying the exhibition Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land paintings and objects from the Donald Thomson Collection for its opening on Saturday 4 December.

The exhibition, curated by Lindy Allen, was first shown at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in 2009. This showing at the Benalla Art Gallery is the first stop on a tour that will include other galleries in regional Victoria plus the Northern Territory and New South Wales.

The exhibition crew carefully cover a display of objects with a protective case.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

The exhibition features large bark paintings by Yolngu people that were collected in the 1930s and 40s by Donald Thomson. They capture the sacred patterns, known as minytji, that were painted onto the bodies of ancestors in creation times. The same destictive designs were painted onto ceremonial objects also.

Nicole and I were there to interview Lindy about the exhibition for an upcoming Ancestral Power website, but it was a rare treat for us webteam staff to see an exhibition being installed, too.

Lindy Allen preparing for her video interview about the works in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

Benalla is well worth a visit to see this amazing show. Admission is free and it will be on display until 30 January 2011. 

Links:

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic MV News story

Benalla Art Gallery

You've probably heard reports that northern Victorian farmers are losing whole crops to armies of marching hoppers and that locusts are on their way into Melbourne. The species in question is the Australian Plague Locust, Chortoicetes terminifera, which belongs to the short-horned grasshoppers (family Acrididae). High rainfall over past months has created a bounty of lush green growth for the locusts to eat, allowing them to breed to plague conditions.

‘Locust’ is used to describe grasshoppers that can swarm in huge numbers. Most grasshoppers are solitary and the Australian Plague Locust generally shuns company too. But something interesting happens when their numbers build up: they enter what is known as a gregarious phase and their behaviour changes profoundly.

Juvenile locusts aggregate in ‘hopper bands’ that march across pasture, devouring everything in their wake. The adults travel vast distances in flying swarms that can be kilometres wide. A swarm that covers just one square kilometre can eat ten tonnes of vegetation in one day.

Band of nymphs moving through pasture, as seen from the air.
Source: Industry & Investment NSW

We spotted locusts on a recent trip to Benalla; they were all over the town, hopping and flying over roads and gardens in low numbers.

This locust was sunning itself on the footpath of the main street in Benalla.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

In some species – such as the Desert Locust found in Africa, the Middle East and Asia – the gregarious phase displays very different colours and body form to the solitary phase. Not so with the Australian Plague Locust; the two phases look pretty similar, especially when they’re dry specimens and their colours have faded, such as those in our entomology collection.

Specimens of the Australian Plague Locust in the Museum Victoria collection. The dark spots at the end of the hindwings in the top specimen are distinctive features of the species.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Australian Plague Locust Commission

DPI Victoria locust information

DPI NSW locust image gallery

Melbourne Museum foyer is decked out for the Christmas season! The tree went up this morning and a special case full of beautiful vintage Christmas decorations was installed yesterday. These are borrowed from the amazing collection of Rob and Lee-Ann Hamilton and include fragile glass baubles and a miniature tree made from dyed goose feathers.

Installing the Christmas display.
Source: Museum Victoria

Vintage glass owl decoration on a miniature Christmas tree made from dyed goose feathers.
Source: Museum Victoria

The first of December is the day to start counting down to Christmas Day with an advent calendar. So we thought we’d make an online Museum Victoria advent calendar with random treats and prizes.

At 5pm each day until Christmas Eve, we’ll post a link to a Christmassy collection item through MV’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and ask a question. The first correct answer to the question will be in the running for museum goodies like badges, books, toys and tickets. Come and play!

Links:

Vintage Christmas Decoration display

This guest post is by Charlotte Smith, Senior Curator, Public & Institutional Life, who is in Paris researching the John Twycross 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition Building Collection for an upcoming book. This collection comprises 175 exquisite decorative arts objects purchased by wealthy wool merchant John Twycross at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.

I thought my finds last Friday at the Archives Nationales de Paris were pretty impressive – floor plans of the French courts, showing where each exhibitor was located, with a key – but today things got even better. I uncovered a document titled Section des Beaux-Arts. Oeuvres vendues a Melbourne [translation: Fine Art Section. Artworks sold in Melbourne]. The document is a list of 47 artworks. It describes the artist, title of work, purchaser and purchase price. What is really exciting for my research is John Twycross is mentioned eight times!

A record of purchases from the French Court. Twycross is listed third from the top.
Image: C. Smith
Source: Museum Victoria

He spent £806, the equivalent to a little over $63,000 today. While we don't have these paintings in the Twycross Collection, knowing more of what John purchased at the exhibition is really exciting, and adds to our understanding of the scope of the collection he amassed at the 1880 Exhibition.

Accompanying documents describe how artworks could be purchased from the French Court; one had to go to the French Consulate office on Collins Street between 10 and 4 weekdays, where a clerk was always 'ready to give the prices asked for such paintings by the artists'.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris was built for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. This was one in a series of World's Fairs that included the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition. The tradition of World's Fairs took off after the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.
Image: C. Smith
Source: Museum Victoria

Links

The Twycross Collection

The 1880 and 1888 International Exhibitions

Royal Exhibition Builidng: Site of two World Fairs

What happens after archaeologists dig up thousands of pieces of historical material? Where do they go next? And who will care for them in years to come?

These questions were central to a recent symposium at Melbourne Museum. Jointly sponsored by Museum Victoria, La Trobe University and the Australian Research Council (ARC), the symposium was organised by Dr Charlotte Smith, a senior curator at Museum Victoria. The symposium, called Developing sustainable, strategic collection management approaches for Archaeological Assemblages, invited local and international guests to discuss the problem shared by institutions around the world – what to do with boxes and boxes of artefacts.

Rows and rows of archaeological material in storage at Museum Victoria.
Image: Veegan McMasters
Source: Museum Victoria

Charlotte’s curatorial duties include oversight of the Commonwealth Block assemblage, which is the world’s largest 19th century urban assemblage. It comprises 508,000 individual fragments that were excavated from the site bordered by Lonsdale, Exhibition, Little Lonsdale and Spring Streets in Melbourne. It was painstakingly documented and has phenomenal research and exhibition potential, but this is not always the case. Some assemblages excavated in the 1980s arrived at the museum with such scant records that we don't even know where they were dug up.

Some archaeolgocial material is poorly documented; we don’t even know where this particular box of artefacts came from.
Image: Veegan McMasters
Source: Museum Victoria

The idea of sustainability, explained Charlotte, refers to cultural and social sustainability. “It’s making sure we hand on to future generations collections that are manageable.” When it comes to the idea of significance, the perspective of archaeologists and museums are slightly different. “When a museum develops a collection, you can limit your collecting from the start. But in archaeology you can’t make those kinds of decisions because the whole of the record is important and you can’t predict how big it will be.”

Speakers at the archaeological assemblage symposium. L-R: Tim Murray, Nick Merriman, Charlotte Smith, Maryanne McCubbin and Terry Childs.
Source: Museum Victoria

By training museum workers in archaeology and vice versa, both groups better understand the perspective of the other. Museum Victoria has a great working relationship with local archaeologists, but not every institution has access to such experts. Until recently, archaeologists rarely received training in collection management and Charlotte talked about the importance for people to have skills in both areas.

Charlotte is very pleased with the outcomes of the symposium about what she describes as “a huge and interesting problem.” The symposium participants were pragmatic in their approach and agreed that better planning at the dig stage of a project, including on-site significance assessment, would help keep these large, important historical assemblages manageable for future generations.

Links

Unearthing Little Lon

Casselden Place on Collections Online

Archaeology on the World Heritage, World Futures blog

World Toilet Day, held on 19 November each year, serves to point out that nearly half the world's population don't have access to proper sanitation. It's not the world's most glamorous issue, but it is an important one - globally, more people die from disease caused by poor sanitation than from any other cause.

There are several toilets of note in Museum Victoria collections. We're not shy about poo at MV, since the Spotwood Pumping Station at Scienceworks was once responsible for moving all of Melbourne's sewage out of the city. One particular toilet at the Pumping Station was installed in 1939 for the exclusive use of Lucey Alford, the first female scientist to work there. Her job was to determine if corrosion in the concrete pipes was caused by bacteria and her research was important to the proper functioning of the system.

Toilet - Fowler Ware, MMBW Spotswood Sewerage Pumping Station, circa 1939 (HT 2486)
Source: Museum Victoria

Before Spotswood Pumping Station and sewage treatment at Werribee were established in the 1890s, sewage disposal was a much dirtier job. The stink of cesspits and open sewers earned our city the moniker of 'Smellbourne' in the mid-1800s. Typhoid outbreaks killed hundreds of residents. With no internal plumbing, Melburnians used chamber pots or the 'dunny' at the back of the yard, which was emptied by nightsoil collectors. (You can still see many of these old dunnies from the laneways that run behind older houses in the inner city.) 'Nightsoil' - the coy term for human waste - was dumped in pits or depots in the outskirts of the young city, including the area that would become Carlton Gardens.

A fragment of a simple whiteware chamber pot from the Little Lon archaeological assemblage. (LL 068610)
Source: Museum Victoria

'Dunny' toilet and chicken coop in a suburban backyard, Glenroy, 1960 (MM 110571)
Image: John Cuff
Source: Museum Victoria

So today as you 'spend a penny', as my grandmother would say, spare a thought for those who don't have the convenience and hygiene of clean, safe, indoor toilets.

Links

World Toilet Day

Melbourne Water education resource - Lucey Alford

MV News: Royal Exhibition Building archaeology

Kingston Historical Website - Night Soil

In a pet shop window I saw tubs of dried pig’s ears, in either smoked or natural flavours. ‘Poor piggies,’ I thought, but then remembered my love of BLTs and felt a bit hypocritical.

A fellow curious cat, Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma, wanted to find out what happens to a pig after slaughter, so she followed the journey of pig #05049 to an astounding 185 products. This is a real testament to chemistry and commerce. The list included the use of pig tissue for chemical weapons testing, bone ash for the production of train brakes and bone gelatine for placing explosives into bullet casings. The fatty acids from the bone fat ended up in shampoo to provide a pearly appearance, in crayons for hardness and in paint for gloss. The gelatine ended up in myriad dairy products and was also used to turn fruit juice, beer and wine into clear liquids.

Ever played a real tambourine – it was probably a pig’s bladder! Inspired by this research I followed a trail of pig parts (cultural, natural and smoked) in the museum. Here are five things about pigs.

1. ‘Pig’ was actually a type of clay used to make pots and it became a much loved ceramic pun. Remember owning a piggy bank as a kid?

Christmas circa 1970, from Australia's Biggest Family Album. (MM 110719)
Source: Museum Victoria

2. There were plenty of colourful predecessors to pig characters like Porky, Olivia and Peppa.

This lantern slide is from a set of 12 which depicts the children's story titled 'Precious Pigs'. (Francis Collection, MM 109847).
Source: Museum Victoria

3. It depends on time and place but pigs are also a symbol of good luck, fertility, gluttony, and uncleanness. When it comes to puddings, perhaps its symbolism depended on whether you found it the trinket, swallowed it or wore the pudding in the attempt to find one.

Christmas pudding charms, circa 1950. Such sterling silver pieces were put at random into the Christmas plum pudding. They were light-heartedly used to suggest the 'fortune' of the recipient for the next year. (HT 3131)
Source: Museum Victoria

4. We owe our health to many pigs. They have been a source of medicines like insulin, heart valves and skin for transplanting into humans.

Human Mind & Body exhibition shot of case with pig from the (now deinstalled) Biotech and Beyond section. Genetically engineered 9 month old pig used in transplant trials and exhibited at Melbourne Museum in 2000.
Image: Ben Wrigley
Source: Museum Victoria

5. A cast iron pig would have started off as ‘pig iron’ which is raw iron extracted from iron ore that flowed into sand moulds that must have looked like little piglets, hence the name.

"White" pig iron manufactured by Bolckow, Vaughan & Co of Middlesbrough, Yorkshire and exhibitied at the 1888 Centennial Exhibition in Melbourne. (ST 019338)
Source: Museum Victoria

I wonder if people who collect cute pig ornaments are vegetarian. Oink at me if you find something interesting about pigs.

Thanks to modern phones and gadgets, many of us carry a camera of some kind everywhere we go and we can document our lives like never before. Today's children feature in hundreds, if not thousands of photographs in the first years of their lives. I think in the flood of images, the importance of any one image has lessened.

Last year, Christine Anu featured in an episode of the SBS series Who Do You Think You Are. She grew up in mainland Queensland but her ancestors were from Saibai Island in the Torres Straight, and the episode takes her back into a personal history she never knew about. At the start, she talked about the lack of a family album: "My family don't have many photographs. We didn't own cameras or had no way to develop the film." In her case, a single photograph has amazing power.

The show's researchers tracked down a photograph of her grandfather in the Donald Thomson Collection that is managed by Museum Victoria. Taken in November 1943, it shows Nadi Anu among other soldiers in Irian Jaya. He died when Anu was ten and she had never seen a photograph of him. When presented with the image of him with his patrol, she was overcome. "The photo has snapped him right in his prime," she said. "This photograph changes my life."

A still from series 2 of Who Do You Think You Are, with Christine Anu being shown a photograph of her grandfather as a young man.
Source: Courtesy of SBS

The Donald Thompson Collection has been managed by Museum Victoria since 1973, and since then, there have about 600 requests from communities and researchers to access and use the collection. The episode originally screened on 18 October 2009 but you can now watch it online on the SBS website.

Is there a photograph that has changed your life?

I was initially surprised to see the American tradition of carved Halloween pumpkins at my local Australian supermarket. Then on second thought, I was not surprised at an American inspired commercial opportunity gaining yearly retail momentum.  

The pumpkin carving was a tad amateurish; I suspect no one in the fresh food section had done one before. I wondered if I should give it a go, then I shuddered at the thought of accidently impaling myself. I wonder how many pumpkin injuries are admitted to US hospitals.

There isn't much in Collections Online about Halloween - not surprising as Halloween is not a Victorian or Australian tradition. But when I searched the catalogues for ‘pumpkin’ - what joy!  Here are the five best things I learnt about pumpkins.

1. Some pumpkins look more like zucchinis. The museum’s Economic Botany Collection includes wax fruits and specimens and preserves an amazing biodiversity of agricultural plants.

White Pumpkin model, made in India. Displayed at the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1875. (ST 017079)
Source: Museum Victoria

2. Pumpkins can grow to the size of small children.

A small boy with a giant pumpkin, circa 1925. From Australia's Biggest Family Album. (MM 5670)
Source: Museum Victoria

3. Native insects love the introduced pumpkin. A native Victorian insect had “forsaken” (their words) native vegetation for the introduced agricultural pumpkin (check out what they recommended you spray with - arsenate of lead, tar-impregnated water and sulphur!)

Boxed botanical display of the Banded Pumpkin Beetle (Aulacophora hilaris). This was displayed at the old museum as part of a series about the destructive insects of Victoria and how to get rid of them. (HT 11387)
Source: Museum Victoria

4. There's something called 'pumpkin polish'.

Floor Polisher, circa 1955, from Larundel Mental Hospital in Bundoora. Used in conjunction with Pumpkin Polish, presumably a brand of floor polish. (SH 850040)
Source: Museum Victoria

5. You'll need one of these for your next pumpkin creation. Don't you love that it's called the 'Glamorizer'?!

Kitchen Magician Food Glamorizer, circa 1963. The instructions tell you how to use this plastic tool for carrot curls, radish roses, lemon wheels and pumpkin faces. (SH 920993)
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria

What do you know about the nature and culture of pumpkins?

I needed a tetanus shot yesterday after a gardening accident involving my arm and a very spiky cactus. Like many people, I hate needles, but I'd rather suffer the jab than take a risk with this quite awful, and often lethal, disease.

We have several vials of tetanus vaccine in the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) Collection. CSL was established in 1918 when it became clear that Australia's isolation, combined with the global disruption of World War I, demanded that we become self-sufficient in medicines and vaccines for the sake of public health. Like most vaccines, the anti-tentanus vaccine includes deactivated pathogen that doesn't cause illness, but still triggers the immune system into battle mode. The resulting antigens can respond quickly to destroy any active tetanus bacteria that enter the body and prevent us from developing full-blown tetanus.

A group of Clostridium tetani bacteria, responsible for causing tetanus in humans
Image: Centre for Disease Control
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library

When I was a kid I thought you caught tetanus from rusty nails, since standing on a rusty nail was the most common reason people went for a tetanus shot. It's not, of course - it's caused by a rod-shaped bacterium called Clostridium tetani. C. tetani is a common, free-living bacterium that flourishes in anaerobic (or oxygen-free) enviroments... such as the deep wound caused when you stand on a rusty nail. Once in there, the bacteria release a toxin called tetanospasmin which causes devastating muscle contractions and spasm. The infection is also known as 'lockjaw' since the first muscles to be affected are often the large chewing muscles. Tetanus is lethal in up to 45% of cases.

So on that cheery note, as summer approaches and you ditch your winter shoes for summer flip-flops, and spend more time outside near rusty nails, perhaps it's time for a tetanus booster? 

In April the Racing Minister Rob Hulls put out a call to reunite Phar Lap's heart, skeleton and hide to mark the 150th anniversary of anniversary of the Melbourne Cup. His heart, which lives in Canberra at the National Museum, is too fragile to travel. However his skeleton, usually on display at Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, was sturdy enough to make the trip.

Now, after months of planning and packing, it's here! It arrived late last night in two custom-built crates.

Phar Lap's skeleton being escorted up from the loading dock at Melbourne Museum.
Image: Karen Jakubec
Source: Museum Victoria

Of course, we can't be sure it's in there until the crates are opened tomorrow by AQIS, the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. Until then the crates will sit quietly in the collection store. We can't wait to see his skeleton and hide displayed side by side on Thursday.

The crates containing Phar Lap's skeleton awaiting quarantine inspection.
Image: Karen Jakubec
Source: Museum Victoria

If you want to know more about the skeleton, have a look at Te Papa's wonderful video about its preparation for travel:

Links:

Phar Lap Reunion What's On listing

None of our venues could be called art museums although we collect and display artworks, such as childrens' paintings from the Victorian Bushfires Collection and the Indigenous sculptures of Menagerie. However we're always delighted when visitors interact with us creatively and some wonderful photos, drawings and other pieces of art are the result.

A few months ago the Melbourne Museum Discovery Centre hosted a visiting artist who sketched an African Wild Dog. Recently we received a message from an American artist, Sandy Rodriguez, who has been inspired by our local marine life to create a series of drawings and paintings. Lovely. 

The Striped Pyjama Squid is one of my favourites - a very cute, but very poisonous, little cephalopod.

Striped Pyjama Squid (Sepioloidea lineolata). Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Sandy Rodriguez
Source: Sandy Rodriguez

Have you ever sketched or photographed in the museum? We'd love to see your work!