Exhibitions

Sweet talker Elise Murphy is working with Emily Kocaj to organise the Sweets festival and exhibition. Elise is responsible for community festivals at the Immigration Museum and has a very sweet tooth.

The power of sweets to bring people together was affirmed on Sunday 18 March at the Immigration Museum, as over 2,255 visitors flocked to the Sweets festival and launch of the Sweets: tastes and traditions from many cultures exhibition. Six months in the making, the festival and exhibition showcased the satisfying results of collaboration between the Museum and the Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mauritian and Turkish communities in Victoria.

Sweets for the Gods, Tara Rajkumar’s Natya Sudha Dance Company
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

Heidi Victoria, Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier and Assisting the Premier with the Arts, opened the sugar-fuelled occasion. Luscious treats made by community groups and local business owners showcased our rich cultural heritage alongside commissioned dance and music performances, cooking demonstrations from community members and stories, objects and films in the exhibition. By the end of the day, there wasn't a single sweet left in the Museum.

Heidi Victoria (second from left) viewing the Sweets exhibition with community members and MV staff.
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

Left: Visitor sampling Turkish sherbet | Right: Italian sweets stall
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

It was a delight to see intercultural and intergenerational exchanges sparked by simple acts of sharing sweets and memories. "Energising, uplifting and reassuring," as Patricia Kimtia, President of the Cultural Historical Association of Rodriguans & Mauritians, suggests, "such richness and positive interaction restores hope that the fabric of our society is stronger than one may think and the sense of community prevails."

Japanese tea ceremony demonstration with wagashi sweets
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

Although the festival was a special one-day event, the exhibition will run until 7 April 2013 with opportunities for all to visit and share stories and recipes. The sweetest taste, the enriching experience of collaborating with community members and colleagues on this intercultural project, is one that will linger much longer.

Visitors enjoying sweets at the festival
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

Your Question: I noticed that the On their own exhibition about Britain's child migrants exhibition is closing, where is it off to?

On their own, the story of Britain's child migrants will be moving on from the Immigration Museum in Melbourne to the Western Australian Museum - Maritime in Fremantle, due to open on Saturday May 19th.

On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Kate Brereton
Source: Museum Victoria  

The exhibition was very popular with visitors to the Immigration Museum, many of whom commented about the moving nature of the content. Sadly, it is a story that has gone unnoticed for many years, but we were glad to be able to host the exhibition and provide visitors with a rich understanding and experience.

On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Kate Brereton
Source: Museum Victoria  

Lisa snapped some pictures today of the Museum Victoria Collection Management and Conservation team and the Australian National Maritime Museum Collection Management and Conservation team working on de-installing the exhibition, getting it ready for its move across the country.

De-installing the On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Lisa Collins
Source: Museum Victoria  

De-installing the On their own exhibition at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Lisa Collins
Source: Museum Victoria  

Although the exhibition is leaving Melbourne, we still do have plenty of information for visitors in the Immigration Discovery Centre, and online. The exhibition website will remain active until November 2013, so there is still an opportunity for you to learn more about Britain's child migrants.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links

MV Blog post - On their own opens

On their own: Britain's child migrants

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 

Your Question: Now that the Jumbunna exhibition space in Bunjilaka has closed, what Aboriginal cultural experiences can I have?

The exhibition space 'Jumbunna', part of the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at the Melbourne Museum has closed for an exciting redevelopment of the space.

Former exhibitions in Jumbunna include Koori Voices, Belonging to Country and Two Laws. The redevelopment will see a stronger focus on the vibrant and living Victorian Aboriginal culture and will provide dynamic and contemporary experiences as well as showcasing items from the incredible Aboriginal cultural material collection held in trust by Museum Victoria. The gallery will remain closed for redevelopment until mid-2013; however, Bunjilaka remains open, hosting a range of Aboriginal experiences.

Birrarung
Image: James Henry
Source: Museum Victoria

Birrarung Gallery, located in the Bunjilaka, is a space dedicated to Victorian Aboriginal artists and is where you can experience some of the best Aboriginal artists in Australia, showcasing their culture and talent through various art forms, from painting and photography to 3D installation and audio visual. This space has three exhibitions a year and is currently exhibiting River Woman by Aunty Barb Egan, which explores her connection to her home of Robinvale, in the northwest of Victoria, and to the Murray River through a series of lino prints, embossing and painting.

River Woman exhibition in Birrarung
Image: James Henry
Source: Museum Victoria

Aunty Barb
Image: James Henry
Source: Museum Victoria

Bunjilaka also has an indigenous plant garden called Milarri. This will remain open for visitors to learn about the natural resources important to Aboriginal people of southeastern Australia and about their traditional uses. Melbourne Museum's Forest Gallery, also displaying indigenous plants and animals, is another space where you can learn creation stories of Melbourne and about the seasons of the Kulin calendar, traditionally used by the Aboriginal people of Melbourne and surrounds.

Aunty Barb in her studio
Image: Kimberley Moulton
Source: Museum Victoria

The Koori Voices exhibition is currently being de-installed and will be re-installed within the museum for visitors to experience by July 2012. Bunjilaka's weekend and holiday programs will be run throughout the year and can be viewed on the Melbourne Museum and Bunjilaka websites.

The education sessions 'Our Shared History' is still available and can be booked through the museum booking office. Our Shared History is an opportunity for visitors to learn about the history and diversity of Australia's Aboriginal cultures, with a strong focus on Victoria and southeastern Australia. Learn about Victoria's 38 language groups, Aboriginal usage of both indigenous flora and fauna, and many other facets of Victoria's vibrant Aboriginal cultures.

From April 21 through to June 24, Bunjilaka will be hosting a fun weekend activity for children called 'Bunjil's Bullroarers'. Children and their families will have an opportunity to learn about, make and decorate their very own bullroarer. The bullroarer is a traditional musical instrument used by Aboriginal people for communication and ceremonial purposes.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links

Bunjilaka redevelopment project

River Woman exhibition

Significant objects in our collections can remain more or less anonymous simply because they have been detached from their stories. They sit there, quietly waiting for someone to spend some time with them and join the dots.

Two researchers working with the Indigenous Cultures collections recently made an exciting discovery that returns two objects with incomplete provenance to a very important body of work. It began with Rosemary Wrench, curator of the Many Nations section in First Peoples, the new exhibition that is under development for Bunjilaka. While the exhibition focuses on south-eastern Australian Aboriginal nations, the Many Nations section celebrates Indigenous culture from across the country. Rosemary's task is to curate over 600 examples of Indigenous artworks, tools and artefacts that tell the stories of the people who made them, used them, and continue to do so today.

"When I started looking for suitable items, I eliminated all the restricted material first," explains Rosemary. "Then I wanted objects we hadn't put on display before. I considered 14,000 to 15,000 objects and systematically started going through the collection stores because there was no other way to do it."

Last year she opened a cabinet full of boomerangs. One of them was carved with an extraordinary scene of two Aboriginal men hiding behind a tree, watching Europeans and their horses. She showed it to Jason Gibson, an Australian National University researcher working on the Spencer and Gillen Australian Research Council project. "Straight away, Jason said 'I think that's by Jim Kite'." Jim Kite Erlikilyika [from Alyelkelhayeka, meaning "he slipped" or "glided away"] Penangke (1865-1930) was a Lower Arrernte man from the Charlotte Waters area. He joined Spencer and Gillen's 1901-02 expedition as an interpreter and is recognised as an accomplished artist.

Boomerang made by Jim Kite, or Erlikilyika. Above: Upper side decorated with images of two stockmen and their packhorses and two Aboriginal men watching on. Below: Line art of the carved boomerang.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

The boomerang was purchased by the museum in 1946 from the estate of Herbert Basedow, a geologist, explorer and medical practitioner who worked in Central Australia and known collector of Aboriginal art. It came with no documentation at all. "It was clear to me from the style that it was Jim Kite's work but I had nothing to prove it," says Jason. Last month, he began searching for the proof for the artist behind this boomerang and another, exquisitely carved with hopping mice, from the Basedow collection.

Boomerang carved by Jim Kite Erlikilyika with two Spinifex Hopping-mice (Notomys alexis).
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum victoria  

In a newspaper article in the South Australian Register, Jason found a detailed interview about Jim Kite's 1913 art exhibition. "In the interview, he described this boomerang with two men hiding behind a tree." Not only was the creator of the boomerang identified, but the story behind the scene.

Detail of boomerang showing the explorers of John McDouall Stuart's expedition.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Detail of boomerang showing two men hiding behind a tree.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

"According to Jim, these were Aboriginal people watching the first European explorer, John McDouall Stuart. When they saw a man dismount from his horse they were shocked because they thought the man and the horse were one entity. They'd never seen a horse and definitely never seen a white person." Jim Kite had captured a moment of 'first contact' from an Aboriginal point of view, making it an incredibly significant object. Erlikilyika was born five years after Stuart's arrival; the story he carved was told to him by people who saw it, whether they were members of his own family, or the people he interviewed when travelling with Spencer and Gillen. "Some people have described Erlikilyika as the first Aboriginal ethnographer because he was actively engaged with the interview process with Aboriginal people and made his own pictorial notes - markings to explain the Dreaming stories to Spencer and Gillen," continues Jason.

This discovery links previously unprovenanced objects back to Jim Kite Erlikilyika Penangke's story. Rosemary and Jason have also identified a whip handle and walking stick in the collection that they think could be the work of Jim Kite. Rosemary concludes, "it's very rewarding work, reconnecting these objects with their story."

Links:

Erlikilyika (1865–1930) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography

The expedition photographs of Herbert Basedow, National Museum of Australia

When I heard Gideon Defoe’s book, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists, was being adapted into a stop-motion animation film by the highly revered Aardman Animations, I was extremely excited.

The Pirate Captain from The Pirates! Band of Misfits movie.
Image: Aardman Animations and Sony Pictures
Source: Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Australia.  

After almost a year of anticipation, The Pirates! Band of Misfits opens in cinemas today in Victoria and Queensland, 5 April nationally, and I can’t wait! Why am I so excited? Well, for two main reasons:

1. The Pirates! is an Aardman Animations studio film

Wallace and Gromit - the world's most famous inventors.
Image: Aardman Animations
Source: (C) Aardman Animations Ltd 2012  

Aardman are famous for creating two of the world’s greatest inventors, Wallace and Gromit. At Scienceworks, we’re not only busy preparing the jumbo crates to send the animatronic dinosaurs from our Explore-a-saurus exhibition to Scitech, Perth, we’re also busy preparing for our next exhibition, Wallace & Gromit’s World of Invention. More about that exhibition another time, lad.

While researching for this blog post, I was fascinated to learn that The Pirates! movie took Aardman over five years to create - two years of scripting, one and a half years of storyboarding, designing and building puppets and sets, one and a half years of shooting and a final thre months of post-production to stick it all together. Phew! That’s about the same amount of time it takes to develop some of Museum Victoria’s major exhibitions.

2. My love for stop motion animation film

I adore stop motion animation film. I love the attention to detail. The little figures in their little costumes holding little props standing in little sets, all meticulously handmade and painstakingly moved a fraction of a centimetre at a time, that magically culminates in living, breathing characters acting out wonderful and moving storylines.

For The Pirates! it took 70 talented model makers to make over 250 puppets, including 23 background pirates, 18 background scientist characters and 55 special characters. Check out this behind the scenes video from Aardman on ‘Puppet Maintenance’ during the making of The Pirates! movie.

Arrrrggghhh, now for the fun part - the giveaway. And it's just for you, me hearties!

WIN The Pirates! Booty Pack

From the creators of Wallace and Gromit, The Pirates! Band of Misfits film opens in cinemas this Thursday 5 April.
Image: Aardman Animations and Sony Pictures
Source: Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Australia.

To celebrate the movie coming to Australia (and really, to start the ‘Wallace & Gromit are moving in to Scienceworks in May’ celebrations), we’re giving away ten The Pirates! Booty Packs to MV Blog readers.

Each Booty Pack is packed with cool The Pirates! treasure including a digital watch, activity kit, stationery set and a copy of the The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists (a book more suitable for big kids).

To be in the running to win, simply leave a comment on this post telling us which scientist (or historian) would you love to go on an adventure with and why. Submit your comment before 9am, Friday 6 April. We’ll select 10 of our favourite scurvy dog answers.  

So get cracking and tell us about your dream adventure!

P.S. A big thank you to Sony Pictures Australia for providing us with this awesome Booty Pack of The Pirates! treasure to giveaway to you! And, if you want to win tickets to see the film, make sure you follow Scienceworks on Facebook and Twitter.

P.S.S. Don't miss hearing David Tennant as Charles Darwin in the film too! Swoon!

Links:

The Pirates! website

Wallace & Gromit’s World of Invention exhibition at Scienceworks - buy your tickets online now!

Exhibition horticulturalist Brendan Fleming is turning April's Bug of the Month post into Plant of the Month. He is one of the Live Exhibits staff that tend the plants in the Forest Gallery and Milarri Garden.

From an early age I have enjoyed bushwalking within the Grampian Ranges in western Victoria. One particular plant species found there that fascinates me is Xanthorrhoea australis, the Southern Grasstree. X. australis is the most widespread of the genus of 30 odd species and subspecies. It is found down the eastern coast of Australia.

A spectacular display of Southern Grasstrees following a bushfire in the Grampians.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Brendan Fleming  

Its appearance is unlike any other indigenous plant. Older grasstrees have a blackened, sometimes gnarled elevated trunk, with bluish-green whorled leaves that seem to explode from the crown and drape down to skirt the stem.

The Southern Grasstree is very slow-growing. It grows approximately one to three centimetres per year, reaching a height of three metres in about 100 years. It has a shallow root system and is found in even the poorest of soils. Whilst not generally occurring in areas with less than 250mm rainfall, it does best in areas exceeding 500mm per year. Southern Grasstrees are found in the understorey of woodlands, heaths, swamps, and rocky hillsides.

Grasstree species are mostly distinguished by the shape of their leaves in cross-section. X.australis has a diamond shape, and with the leaves being softer than other species.

Close up of the apex of a Southern Grasstree in Milarri, showing a single diamond-shaped leaf in cross section.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Museum Victoria

From germination it takes about seven years to reach maturity, and although sporadic flowering and fruiting can occur thereafter, X.australis generally flower following fire. It is not well understood why fire stimulates reproduction, but cutting off the leaves can also initiate flowering. Application of ethylene, which is present in smoke, has a similar effect, indicating that flowering is stimulated from a hormonal response to leaf removal.

I found an extraordinary scene following bushfires several years ago in the Grampians National Park. Thousands of flower spikes up to 3m high as far as the eye can see, even curly ones, evoking some Leunig illustration!

Although most flower spikes are perfectly vertical, I occasionally see odd shapes at the Grampians.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Brendan Fleming

The flowers are highly scented and produce much nectar, prized by birds, mammals and insects which pollinate the flowers. Each stalk can produce up to 10,000 seeds.

Close-up of the Southern Grasstree flower spike showing individual flowers.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Brendan Fleming  

Southern Grasstrees are quite susceptible to Phytopthora cinnamomi (root rot), often being the first plants to show symptoms. Hence they are a good indicator of the presence of the disease.

Drenching with Phosphonate is a good way to boost the Southern Grasstree's defences against the Cinnamon Fungus Phytopthora.
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria

Xanthorrhoea australis is not difficult to propagate. Seed germinate readily in just a few weeks, with no pre-sowing treatment required. Just be patient though - growth is very slow. A grasstree I germinated from seed was well-established but still trunkless after 10 years, and made a handsome addition to my garden.

Grasstrees feature heavily in Indigenous culture. Uses include weapons and fire sticks from flower stalks, sweet drinks from flower nectar, and edible leaf bases.

I don't have to go to the Grampians to enjoy grasstrees. The Milarri Garden at Melbourne Museum displays these remarkable plants right in the heart of Melbourne. Exit the Forest gallery to the North terrace and meet Milarri from its western end. It really is a dramatic entrance to the Museum's Indigenous garden.

Grasstrees at the entrance to Milarri Walk from the North Terrace during autumn.
Image: Brendan Fleming
Source: Museum Victoria  

References:

Flora of Tasmania

Wrigley, J. & Fagg, M., 1983, Australian Native Plants, William Collins, Sydney, 512pp.

Bernard works part-time at Melbourne Museum devising and delivering presentations for visitors. The other part of the time he writes and draws and edits and publishes comic books, and also teaches and broadcasts about them.

Gilgamesh. What a guy. 

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, we learn that he's the son of a human man and the goddess Ninsun.

A hero overpowering a lion (left) and Lamassu in the Louvre. These bas-relief sculpures are huge - the man figure is about three times life-size. Lion-taming spirits are often identified with Gilgamesh.
Image: caribb
Source: Used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 from caribb.

He's two-thirds god and one-third human, and single-handedly built the city walls of Uruk to protect his people.

Cast bronze sculpture of Gilgamesh at The University of Sydney. It was made by Lewis Batros and donated by the Gilgamesh Cultural Centre on behalf of the Assyrian community celebrating the university's sesquicentenary in 2000.
Image: D. Gordon E. Robertson
Source: Wikimedia Commons  

He fought and befriended the wild man Enkidu. Enkidu and Gilgamesh fought the monster Humbaba (or Huwawa). They defeated Humbaba and brought his head back to Uruk on a raft.

Clay mask of the demon Huwawa or Humbaba. The cuneiform inscription on the back says that if the intestines of a sacrificed animal are looped around to resemble Humbaba, it is an omen of 'revelation.' Gruesome.
Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum  

Gilgamesh and Enkidu also defeated the Bull of Heaven, who was sent to destroy Uruk by the furious goddess Ishtar after Gilgmesh said that he wouldn't go to the prom with her.

The 'Queen of the Night' Relief, possibly a representation of the goddess Ishtar. It might also be her sister and rival, the goddess Ereshkigal, or the demoness Lilitu, known in the Bible as Lilith. Old Babylonian, 1800-1750 BC, from southern Iraq.
Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum  

Sure, Gilgamesh is the legendary demigod hero-king of Mesopotamia, but is he actually the first comic book superhero? Of course he is. There were definitely legendary heroes and gods before Gilgamesh, but he's the first one we have a publication for. That publication weighs a little more than your standard comic book, because it's made of tablets of baked clay. But there are 12 of those tablets, each telling of a separate episode, so each could be considered an 'issue' of the Gilgamesh comic mini-series.

The one possible argument against it being a comic book is its total and utter lack of pictures. However, this objection is easily overcome by holding the tablets of cuneiform up against the large narrative Mesopotamian wall-carvings. The tablets thus become word balloons, containing a tale that the characters on the carvings are telling to one another. THEN it's a comic book. A weighty comic book. It might even, given the scope of the story, be a 'graphic novel' (=long comic book). Ooh la la!

Three thousand years after that original clay publication of the adventures of Gilgamesh, the brilliant Jack Kirby, 'King of Comics', who virtually invented the visual language that we associate with American superhero comics, put the Babylonian demigod on paper. BK (Before Kirby), comic books used the restrained compositions and drawing styles that they had inherited from newspaper comic strips. Kirby changed all that. His characters burst through the frames. They leapt from the page.

Me ensconced in the classic Jack Kirby comic book series The Eternals, which features his character Gilgamesh.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Gilgamesh shows up in issue #13 of The Eternals (1977), a comic book series that Kirby created for Marvel Comics. In the intervening years, the character has been drawn and written by various writers and artists. Sometimes he's working under a different name (simply 'Hero' or 'The Forgotten One'), sometimes he's costumed in the hide of the Bull of Heaven, and sometimes he's fighting alongside the team called The Avengers, but I'm pretty sure he won't have a cameo in the film of the same name directed by Joss Whedon (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator) coming from Marvel Studios later this year. More's the pity, eh?

On Thursday 1 March, hundreds of people gathered outside Melbourne Museum from 5pm, apparently as curious as we were to see what would happen at the adults-only SmartBar event.

Crowd waiting outside Melbourne Museum for SmartBar to open.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

The idea of adults-only museum events is not a new one, but it's new to Museum Victoria. All over the world, history and science museums like us witness the same pattern: young people in their twenties don't visit much. Many museums have started holding special events to cater for the interests of this group. The Australian Museum launched their Jurassic Lounge three summers ago and it's a hit in Sydney. Closer to home, NGV and ACMI have launched successful adult programs, but would such a thing work for us?

Mark Norman talking about strange sex in the deep blue sea. Here he shows the SmartBar crowd a female argonaut or paper nautilus.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

David Perkins works in the museum's Public Programs department and helped organise SmartBar. "The whole point was to find if people were interested in coming to this type of event," says David, "And they were, more so that we ever expected." Online tickets sold out days in advance and people waited patiently to grab the last remaining door tickets. Over 1,000 people attended SmartBar and we were delighted that 83% of the audience were between 18 and 34 years old.

Erich Fitzgerald addressing the age-old question: just how accurate was Jurassic Park?
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

"The presentations were the most popular thing," says David. The talks covered the bizarre sex lives of deep-water animals, spotlights on specimens and chats with preparators, curators and animal keepers. They all had a blast giving visitors direct access to the museum's research activity and to talk about their work. The Science and Life Galleries became a social space and all kinds of enthusiasts came out of the woodwork, many of them commenting that they liked being in the museum with no kids around.

Bird's eye view of the crowd watching Wayne's demonstration in the Science and Life Gallery.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The phenomenal success of SmartBar is encouraging and the museum is exploring how we can hold it regularly. Because we weren't sure what to expect, there were a lot of surprises – mostly good, but there were some aspects that we didn't get right. The queues at the door were too long and it was difficult to get the sound right in the Science and Life Gallery with so much going on. A survey, a comment board and feedback on Twitter, provides us with lots of information about what to improve next time, and what was spot-on. We'd like to thank everyone who gave us feedback as it will help us get things right in the future. At this stage we are planning to have four a year to follow the seasons – so watch out for our winter SmartBar.

Nearly a quarter of the attendees had never been to Melbourne Museum before. What was it about this event that attracted them? And what has stopped them in the past? David thinks the focus was just right for this crowd. "Adult education is a dirty phrase. If you asked a bunch of people to sit in a class after work, it would be a hard sell. But if it's easy and casual you can take it at your own pace. You have a nice night and you've learned something."

Links:

Comments from the pinboard on Pinterest

SmartBar photos on Melbourne Museum's Facebook page

Sweet talker Elise Murphy is working with Emily Kocaj to organise the Sweets festival and exhibition. Elise is responsible for community festivals at the Immigration Museum and has a very sweet tooth.

There is only one day to go before the Sweets: tastes and traditions from many cultures exhibition opens and five days until the Sweets Festival takes place at the Immigration Museum.

The team have been very busy installing the exhibition over the past two weeks and it is looking fantastic. Each of the communities represented – Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mauritian and Turkish – have a display showcasing their beautiful cooking implements and serving objects. Delicate Turkish coffee cups with intricate designs sit alongside Italian marzipan fruits and elegant Japanese models of wagashi, which would convince anyone that they were the real thing!

A showcase from the Sweets: tastes and traditions from many cultures exhibition.
Image: Emily Kocaj
Source: Museum Victoria  

Final touches are being put to the recipe wall, featuring home-made recipes created by the communities. You'll be able to jot down the ingredients for a syrupy, nutty baklava and learn how to make boondi ladoos, a favourite Indian sweet of Lord Ganesha. We've left space for you to leave some of your own favourite sweets recipes too.

It has been wonderful seeing the exhibition and festival come together over the last couple of weeks and to see all the ideas generated with the communities come to life. We hope that you will feel inspired to cook some recipes or sample a sweet at the Melbourne establishments that specialise in them – many of which you will find at the Sweets Festival this Sunday.

On festival day, we advise skipping breakfast to tuck straight into a mouth-watering array of sweet (and savoury) confections – from bites of nougat and tastings of sour cherry sherbet to baklava available by the piece or the half kilo. Enjoy plenty of other tempting performances, cooking demonstrations and workshops that will get your tastebuds dancing.

Do you really need another excuse to come along and immerse yourself in whole new realms of sweetness?

We'll give you a whole table full!

Sweet treats from the five participating communities.
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

This guest post is by Damien Currie, Monash University Journalism student and Public Relations Intern with Museum Victoria.

Fifteen Scienceworks displays can be found inside Melbourne's new Royal Children's Hospital, acting as a distraction for sick kids needing medical care.

Child playing with Scienceworks exhibit at the Royal Children's Hospital.
Image: Damien Currie
Source: Damien Currie  

Andrew Lewis, Manager of Exhibitions at Scienceworks, led the team who designed and constructed the displays that are scattered around the hospital.

"The majority of ideas are typical Science Centre exhibits, albeit adapted to suit their intended environment. Not having to adhere to any specific theme broadened the list of possibilities," said Andrew.

Child playing with Scienceworks exhibit at the Royal Children's Hospital.
Image: Damien Currie
Source: Damien Currie  

Christine Kilpatrick, CEO of the Royal Children's Hospital, said they were delighted at the opportunity to work with the team at Scienceworks.

"In our new hospital, we have created an environment that reflects the unique nature of a children's hospital. Art, nature and learning are reflected throughout recognising the importance of all these to the healing process. We recognise that despite being in hospital, children are still actively learning and developing," she said.

"The Scienceworks interactive learning displays support this philosophy and invite children to explore, engage and learn in the hospital environment. They are not only a welcome distraction, but challenge children to think and solve problems in a fun and surprising way."

Children playing with Scienceworks exhibit at the Royal Children's Hospital.
Image: Damien Currie
Source: Damien Currie  

The brief given for the designs of the 15 exhibits was quite specific, as they needed to be educational as well as entertaining while being durable and accessible to a wide window of ages.

"The biggest constraints were the tight budget and selecting concepts that provided repeat and ongoing appeal for children who may be required to attend the hospital for extended periods," said Andrew.

Where possible, the displays are wheelchair friendly and able to be used simultaneously by two or more kids. They also needed to not be mechanical or powered by electricity or batteries and be able to be moved with ease so they can be rotated around the hospital to remain fresh and exciting to patients.

The original idea for the project was secured in late 2006 when Scienceworks agreed to participate as a Community Partner to the new hospital project, along with other institutions such as the Melbourne Zoo and the Melbourne Aquarium.

“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.

Natasha works in public relations for Museum Victoria. 

Renowned Melbourne chef Guy Grossi is putting on a special event at the Immigration Museum, A Sweet Dinner with Guy Grossi,on 15 March as part of Sweets and the 2012 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. He has also contributed a couple of items to the Sweets exhibition. I had a chat with him about why he got involved.

Guy Grossi preparing some Italian sweets.
Image: Stewart Donn
Source: Museum Victoria  

Why were you interested in being a part of Sweets?

Food has a magical way to be able to bring people together and share special memories together and many a moment has been shared over a dessert or sweet treat that has us all melting. We all remember those moments. I was really interested in exploring how delicious sweet ingredients have been used in dishes, both savoury and sweet, throughout different cultures and how this has evolved over time. It's such a fascinating journey and I'm excited to be a part of this exhibition.

What are some of the sweet influences that you grew up with?

My speciality is Italian food so I have incorporated a great Italian pastry as the dessert – Canoli alla Siciliana. My parents are not from Sicily but I remember every time we would visit a pastry shop or café in Carlton I would have one of their crispy pastries filled with sweet ricotta. Amazing!

Do you have any memory of sweet foods being used in Italian celebrations when you were growing up?

Celebrations in Italian culture are remembered for the particular sweets that are served at them. Different cakes, pastries, lollies and biscuits are used to typify different occasions such as weddings, Easter, Christmas and many more.

Your degustation dinner includes sweet influences from Indian, Mauritian, Turkish and Japanese cuisines. Have you enjoyed integrating other cultures into your cooking?

It has been a big adventure for me and as a chef, we're always looking for new ways to do things. Food is always evolving and whether it be a new ingredient or technique there's a constant drive in chef's to always improve and evolve. Throughout my travels I've been lucky enough to try so many incredible dishes and I tried to incorporate some of those memorable ingredients, as well as my own research and speaking to other chefs who are experts in their field, to gauge their opinion on integrating sweetness into my menu. I've tried to keep it authentic to the culture as I highlight the theme.

Sweets: Tastes and traditions from many cultures encompasses an exhibition, a one-day festival and the Sweet Dinner. To buy a ticket to the Sweet Dinner with Guy Grossi, call 13 11 02 and press '3' to connect to the Immigration Museum. Credit card payments are accepted.

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

One of the largest insect species we keep here at Melbourne Museum is the Rainforest Mantid (Hierodula majuscula). At around 70mm in length, the adult Rainforest Mantid is not the longest mantid species in Australia, but it is certainly the most buff.

An adult female Rainforest Mantid on the hunt for prey
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Minibeast Wildlife  

Its powerful raptorial forelegs are equipped with razor-sharp spines that allow the mantid to pin and immobilise live prey. A resident of north Queensland rainforests, the adult's solid green colour enables it to all but disappear amongst the foliage. A mantid on the hunt may remain perfectly still for hours, waiting for the right prey to present itself. Looming over its meal and appearing to "pray", the mantid finally strikes with lightning-fast accuracy and shows its true colours as another of nature's perfect predators.

The life of the Rainforest Mantid begins as one of up to 400 hatchlings from the ootheca – an egg case laid by the female 40-60 days prior. Often attached to the underside of a branch or leaf, the hatchlings emerge downwards and crawl over one another to clear the way. The nymphs must disperse from their brothers and sisters, as once they start eating, any prey small enough is fair game - including each other! At this stage, H. majuscula nymphs are less than 10mm long. As the nymph moults and grows, it may vary from greens to browns and reds, but is invariably green by its final moult.

Mantid nymphs hatching and moulting for the first time after emerging from the ootheca.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Minibeast Wildlife  

A superb hunter, the Rainforest Mantid's best weapon is its vision. Its large, compound eyes boast a wide field of vision, enhanced by its head's extraordinary range of movement. As a result, the Rainforest Mantid hunts primarily during daylight hours.

Large eyes dominate the Rainforest Mantid's triangular, highly mobile head.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Minibeast Wildlife

An adult mantid is able to prey on not only a large selection of insects, but may also attack small lizards and frogs. After securing the prey with its raptorial forelegs, the mantid devours it alive. These mantids often eat the nuisance parts first, such as an insect's powerful kicking legs.

Insect prey is usually consumed head-first to reduce the chances of it getting away.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Minibeast Wildlife

The Rainforest Mantid lives a solitary life and may never come into contact with another of its species after hatching until it is time to breed. Only the mature male of this species is capable of flight, so it is left to him to navigate the precarious expanse of tropical rainforest to find the perfect a female who is ready to mate. In contrast to hunting, night seems to be the preferred time for mating (though it may begin during or continue into daylight hours). As a flying male is quite vulnerable, it is thought that breeding takes place in the dark to reduce the risk of aerial predators.

However, there is still one major group of insect predators active at this time – the microbats. To combat this, many mantid species including H. majuscula have evolved a single ear on the lower side of the thorax, capable of picking up the ultrasonic sound frequencies of the microbats' echolocation signals. If the male mantid in flight detects such a signal, he immediately dives and weaves in such a display of evasive manoeuvres that he has been compared to a fighter jet.

In the dark, mantid eyes are much less effective. To counter this, a female of the breeding inclination sends out pheromones to attract suitable males. Once the male locates a female, he tempers his approach until the correct moment. He may wait hours within thirty centimetres of her, before rushing her in a mad frenzy and attaching himself to her back with his forelegs. If he is lucky, he will have attached himself a way that prevents her turning around to eat him. If he is unlucky, he may immediately become a meal. Either way, the Rainforest Mantid male can continue to mate even with his head completely missing. It's not all bad news for the male's genes: by becoming an extra meal, he may give his offspring a greater chance of survival by nourishing the female through the month of egg incubation.

This male is one of the unlucky individuals that has not survived the mating process.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Minibeast Wildlife  

Rainforest Mantid females may live for up to a year. Though males may be capable of living just as long, their risky lifestyle results in a lower average life span. However, if a male survives mating, he may go on to mate with many more females and live to a ripe old age.

Whether you know it best from the Bible, the Torah or Nick Cave's song The Mercy Seat, you might not know that the common phrase 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' has Mesopotamian origins.

Left: Acrylic eye prosthesis made by Loyer Artificial Eyes, Burwood,Victoria, circa 1999. (HT 23234) | Right: Porcelain artificial teeth made by DeTrey's Diatorics, circa 1925. (HT 11829)
Source: Museum Victoria

It describes principle of retaliation – a harsh system of justice that permits someone suffering an injury at the hands of another to return like for like. The concept was first documented in the Code of Hammurabi, an upright stone pillar inscribed with 282 Babylonian laws by King Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC). It was uncovered in modern-day Iran in 1901 and is exhibited in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. 

Code of Hammurabi on display in in the Musée du Louvre.
Image: Nick Olejniczak
Source: Used under CC BY-NC 2.0 from nicholasjon  

Detail of the cuneiform script on the Code of Hammurabi.
Image: Boris Doesburg
Source: Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from batigolix  

Museum Victoria is borrowing a cast of the code from the Australian Institue of Archaeology to display during The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia exhibition. The cast, purchased by the AIA in 1968, is an exact replica made in very limited edition by the Musée du Louvre.

Much of the code addresses contracts, payments, terms of transactions and marriage laws, but a handful of laws are paraphrased in the well-worn 'eye for an eye'. In the 1915 translation of the Code of Hammurabi by LW King, the contributing laws are stated explicitly:

196. If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.

200. If a man knock out a tooth of a man of his own rank, they shall knock out his tooth.

But it's not as simple as that. In Babylonian society, there were three distinct social classes: the freemen, the second-class citizens, and at the bottom of the heap, the slaves. If a slave suffered the injury, retribution was less about flesh and more about cash:

199. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave he shall pay one-half his price.

The Code's rules, penalties and payments are a fascinating (and often contradictory) glimpse into the lives and values of the Babylonians. For example, if you leased a field and your crops were lost to the storm god Adad, it was your own problem. Yet if you hired an ox to work your fields and it was eaten by a lion, the loss was borne by the ox's owner. If the ox's death was caused by a god, an oath to that effect absolved the hirer of any responsibility. (It sounds like ox-hiring was a tough gig in Babylon.)

King Hammurabi's legacy persists and many of the philosophies of his code still ring true today. It established concepts such as medical malpractice, penalties for negligence and the role of government in resolving family matters like inheritance and divorce. Another important idea enacted in the Code of Hammurabi was assumed innocence, whereby both parties in a legal dispute were required to provide evidence of their claims – even if the evidence was no more than an oath that a god killed your ox.

Links:

The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia exhibition at Melbourne Museum

1915 translation of the Code of Hammurabi by LW King (PDF, 128 KB)

Code of Hammurabi in the Musée du Louvre

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

Adrienne creates and presents public programs at Melbourne Museum and coordinates Museum Victoria's lecture series.

A new major exhibition is coming to Melbourne Museum this year called The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia. To learn more about the history and significance of Mesopotamia, I interviewed an expert in ancient civilisations, Dr Andrew Jamieson.

Can you first tell us a bit about yourself and how you are involved with the exhibition?

I am an archaeologist from the Classics and Archaeology program at the University of Melbourne, and for the past 25 years I have been working on archaeological projects in the Middle East. I'm helping with the development and presentation of The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia at Melbourne Museum, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of my knowledge at some public lectures at the museum.

Where exactly is Mesopotamia?

Ancient Mesopotamia corresponds with the area known today as Iraq, north-east Syria and south-east Turkey. The word 'Mesopotamia' is of Greek origin (meso 'middle' and potamia 'river'), meaning the land between two rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates. Both the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers start in the mountainous regions of Turkey and flow into the Persian Gulf.

It was here, in a land through which the two rivers flowed, that some of the world's first great empires flourished - the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires.

Statue of King Ashurnasirpal II that was placed in the Temple of Ishtar at Nimrud where Ashurnasirpal established his capital city.
Source: @ The Trustees of the British Museum  

So why is Mesopotamia so significant?

Mesopotamia is important for a number of reasons.  For example, Mesopotamia witnessed experiments in agriculture and irrigation, the invention of writing, the emergence of cities and complex society, and developments in art, literature, science and mathematics. Mesopotamia is also sometimes referred to as the 'fertile crescent' or the 'cradle of civilisation', because the crescent-shaped region was a moist and fertile land, and because the first complex societies emerged in this region.

Why is Mesopotamia relevant to us today?

For me, Mesopotamia is relevant today because it represents the origins or beginnings of western civilisation. Ancient Mesopotamia has a long and rich history that continues to influence our lives.

The Mesopotamians were amongst the first people to build and live in large cities. They also developed many aspects of technology including metalworking, pottery production, glassmaking, textile manufacture and leather-working.

The oldest writing yet discovered comes from southern Mesopotamia and dates to circa 3500 BC. It consists of pictographic signs incised on clay tablets that record the Sumerian language. The earliest writing was used to communicate basic information about crops and taxes. A few centuries later the pictographs were transformed into more abstract cuneiform ('wedge-shaped') characters. This distinctive script was incised on wet clay with a stylus (pen-like instrument), usually cut from a reed. Over thousands of years, Mesopotamian scribes recorded daily events, trade activities, astronomy, myths, and literature on thousands of clay tablets. So successful was this system of writing that it was used over three millennia by the different peoples of the ancient Near East.

Early cuneiform writing tablet, circa 3000 BC. Quantities of barley allocated to officials listed by rank. The impressed circles and half-circles represent numbers.
Source: @ The Trustees of the British Museum  

What can people expect to see in the exhibition?

The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia is specially designed for Melbourne Museum It features over 170 objects highlighting significant episodes of Mesopotamian civilisation, including masterpieces from Sumer, Assyria and Babylon. It is rare for the British Museum to tour such priceless pieces. Some of these objects include an early Sumerian cuneiform writing tablet, a fluted gold cup with spout found in the death pit of the tomb of Queen Puabi at Ur that may have been used for drinking beer, a large stone statue of the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II inscribed in cuneiform giving his titles and lineage, and much more.

Gold cup with spout found in the death pit of the tomb of Queen Puabi. The long spout would have been used like a drinking straw, probably for drinking beer.
Source: @ The Trustees of the British Museum  

The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia is a collaboration with the British Museum. It is on at Melbourne Museum from 4 May to 7 October 2012.

Links:

The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia

Video: What is Mesopotamia?

Video: The Mesopotamian Minute

Pre-purchase exhibition tickets online

Dr Andrew Jamieson at the University of Melbourne

A long-time resident of Melbourne Museum's Mind and Body Gallery has retired from display to be replaced by an equally lovely, but more feminine, colleague. These two extraordinary 19th century anatomical models belong to the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney. Made from papier-mâché at the factory of Dr Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux, they were important teaching aids for budding anatomists at the university.

Left: Male Auzoux anatomical model as he appeared in the Mind and Body Gallery. Right: Female Auzoux anatomical model before she was installed in the gallery in January.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr Auzoux (1797–1880) was a French anatomist who, frustrated at the limited usefulness of genuine cadavers and wax models for learning about the human body, began producing papier-mâché models of humans, animals, organs and plants. Where a human cadaver could only be dissected once and wax models deteriorated from use, papier-mâché was durable, lightweight and could be used over and over again. His models were very popular and continued production after his death. The arrival of plastic in the 20th century superseded papier-mâché as a material, but for decades his models were unsurpassed.

They were formed in lead moulds under high pressure from a mix of papier-mâché, clay and cork. The surface was covered with veins made from linen-covered wire and then hand-painted, varnished and labelled. The handwork means that each model - and there are examples in museums worldwide – has a distinctive character and unique appearance.

Nurin Veis is the curator responsible for the Mind and Body Gallery exhibitions. "We've included a variety of multidisciplinary ways of looking at science and medicine," she explains. "This model is a great example where art meets science which is a rich area that many people are interested in. I think she's beautiful. All that work – each model is individually crafted, not like the plastic anatomical models that are churned out."

The new arrival peering out from the custom-made travel crate that carried her from Sydney to Melbourne.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr Nurin Veis looking at the arm of the female anatomical model.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The first thing you'll notice is that she is unusually proportioned with a small head and very broad hips. This remains an inexplicable curiosity; female Auzoux models are extremely rare and there aren't many to compare her with.

Nurin is fascinated by the model's odd shape and stance. "It's what they have and haven't fleshed out – her head is so small but they've made such a big issue of her hips. I can't help thinking that the external form was possibly done from sketches. It doesn't look like it's been modelled from life. The discrete way that she's trying to hide her body and all the things that it says about gender roles is very interesting."

The female model's torso opens up to reveal her internal organs but unfortunately there was not room in the showcase to permit this for display. Before she was installed, we took photographs of her insides. She is in wonderful condition for her age but for one thing: she does not have a heart. No one knows if her heart was lost, stolen or strayed; the Macleay Museum has no record of her ever having one.

Conservator Helen Privett opening the female anatomical model's torso to reveal her heartless core.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

The Human Body exhibition

Macleay Museum at Sydney University

Lack of human cadavers? Turn to papier-mâché medicine (New Scientist blog)

The papier-mache anatomist (Curious Expeditions)

Sweet talker Emily Kocaj is working with Elise Murphy to organise the Sweets festival and exhibition. She manages community exhibitions at the Immigration Museum and delights in tasting sugary creations from around the world.

The Immigration Museum is working on something very special and super sweet. For the last few months we have been collaborating with five sweets-loving Victorian communities to create Sweets: tastes and traditions from many cultures, a delicious exhibition and festival that are part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and Cultural Diversity Week in March 2012.

Members of the Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mauritian and Turkish communities have come together with the museum to jointly explore the historical and cultural significance of sweets. This unique project has seen us sharing sweet stories, traditions and recipes with the communities, not to mention fantastic creations from their kitchens!

Sweets committee members enjoying an array of sweets.
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

The community representatives have delighted each other (and us) with a steady stream of treats at each Sweets committee workshop – from crisp, syrupy baklava, tangy limone tiramisu, cloud-like mochi, rose-scented gulab jamun, gorgeous pink napolitains and numerous other delicious morsels.

  Five delicious sweets from the countries and communities featured in the Sweets festival and exhibition. Clockwise from top left: Italian tiramisu al limone | Indian gulab jamun | Turkish baklava | Mauritian napolitains | Japanese mochi
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

As well as sharing these gorgeous confections, the communities have been working incredibly hard on the exhibition and festival. In further posts we will show you sneak peeks of what will be happening on festival day and in the exhibition, both opening on Sunday 18 March 2012.

Sweets committee members with an array of sweets.
Image: Dylan Kelly
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Sweets at Immigration Museum

Alexandra is the Early Learning Program Coordinator at Scienceworks. She loves exploring the ways in which science engages young children.

We just trialled the brand new early learning Discovery Kit called 'Looking' with four- and five-year-old kindergarten children from Laverton North Children's Centre. Rosemary Monagle, the kindergarten teacher, uses a noticeboard to communicate with parents of the children she teaches. This is the notice she wrote about my visit:

Alexandra from Scienceworks visited the kindergarten today. She brought pictures of Nitty Gritty Super City and discussed what the children could see and what materials or tools were used in each picture. Alexandra then introduced the children to her 'yellow box' of 'looking' tools. The children learnt each tool's name and the correct way to use it.

The children collected natural materials from the yard or home and used the looking tools to see the objects close-up. The children drew their favourite looking tool and what they could see when using it.

Drawing of looking at a ladybug through a magnifiying glass.
Image: Angel
Source: Angel  

Drawing of looking at flowers through a microscope.
Image: Olivia
Source: Olivia  

The 'Looking' kit will be accompanied by a DVD of interviews with MV scientists, historians and curators talking about their favourite lens tools and how they use them.

Links:

Nitty Gritty Super Kids

Interactive PDF trial

You can see the work of MV's preparation department before you even walk in the door of Melbourne Museum. Hanging in the front window there is a food chain of predators chasing a school of fish. Our preparators created over one thousand individually painted fish for the school and the brilliant prehistoric animal models in the Science and Life Gallery are their work, too.

One of specialist tasks of the preparators is taxidermy: preserving the skin of an animal specimen and preparing a mount that records exactly how the animal looked in life. Taxidermy is truly an art that takes many years to learn and even longer to master. At Museum Victoria, our master taxidermist is Senior Preparator Dean Smith.

I paid him a visit as he was putting the finishing touches on a taxidermy mount of a male koala. This individual was the unfortunate victim of a road accident; Dean reported that its skull and jaw were fractured from the impact. It's a reminder for all of us to drive carefully in areas where animals roam, but this koala will now have a second life as a teaching aid in the museum's Discovery Program, our mobile outreach service. Says Dean, 'it will go to the elderly, the disabled, little kids... they will be able to touch a koala.'

Senior Preparator Dean Smith with his handiwork.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dean learned how to prepare mounts from a former taxidermist who worked at the museum for 40 years. He's now passing on his skills to other staff in the Preparation Department, describing it as 'the cycle of learning'.

This beautifully prepared koala specimen will join the Discovery Program in 2012.
Source: Museum Victoria  

From start to finish, a specimen like this takes several weeks. First Dean removed and tanned the skin. He cast an exact copy of the koala's body and stretched the skin over the cast, pinning it it place. He recreated the fine structure of its head beneath the skin. After three weeks of drying, he cleaned the fur and airbrushed the fleshy details of its ears and mouth. The result is an exquisite specimen that is incredibly lifelike.

Close-up of the koala specimen, showing Dean's amazing attention to detail.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Later this month, Dean will be working on a Wedge-tailed Eagle for the Discovery Program. He says that birds are much more difficult to prepare than mammals because their feathers lose their structure. 'You have to sit for hours and comb the feathers.' We'll cover the process here on the MV Blog.

Links:

Wildlife Victoria

Infosheet: the Koala

What's that smell?

I’ve always loved summer – nothing beats the summer holidays, trips to the beach, warm sunshine and lazy summer evenings. But this year it means even more to me, because right now we are putting the finishing touches on a new planetarium show that opens on 26 December.

The summer solstice (22 December) is that day of the year when the Sun's path reaches its highest and longest across the sky. Our new show Tilt is a whirlwind adventure that describes how the seasons work.

In the new show Tilt, Kelvin (the robot) shows Annie and Max the long path of the Sun on the summer solstice.
Image: Melbourne Planetarium
Source: Museum Victoria 

The changing seasons are so important to the way we live our lives. The summer holidays, the changing colours of autumn, the cosiness of winter and the blossoming of spring. And all this happens because our Earth spins on a tilted axis.

Without this tilt our days, year-in and year-out, would be the same. The Sun would always rise due east and set due west. The Sun’s path through the sky would be constant, reaching the same height every day. There’d also be 12 hours of daylight followed by 12 hours of night.

The tilt is what shakes this all up. Most importantly, the tilt varies the direction at which sunlight hits the Earth. Our warm days of summer occur when sunlight beams down most directly because our part of the world is tilted towards the Sun.

So enjoy the summer solstsice and the remarkable difference a little tilt on the world can make.

Links

Session Times for Tilt

The Sun and the seasons

Exhibition horticulturalist Andrew Kuhlman is turning December's Bug of the Month into Plant of the Month. He is one of the Live Exhibits staff that tend the plants in the Forest Gallery and Milarri Garden.

The story of the Shiny Nematolepis, Nematolepis wilsonii, is about a humble plant experiencing a resurrection following the Black Saturday bushfires. The Shiny Nematolepis, a white-flowering shrub also affectionately known as 'Shiny Nem', is considered critically endangered.

There was a single population of 11 mature wild plants before February 2009 according to the Department of Sustainability and Environment. Since the 2009 bushfires over 200,000 seedlings have emerged in the Yarra Ranges. This means practically the entire known population of this plant existing in the wild can be traced back to a single event.

A plant from the original population that was burnt out in the 2009 Black Saturday Bushfires.
Image: John Broomfield
Source: Museum Victoria  

The other side to this story is about the cultivated populations of this species, one of which is growing in the Forest Gallery exhibition at Melbourne Museum. These plants are now some of the oldest of the species known to exist. They were grown in 2000 from cutting material sourced from the original population that was burnt out.

Museum Victoria Exhibition Horticulturalist Brendan Fleming planting a cutting grown Shiny Nematolepis into the Forest Gallery exhibition.
Image: Andrew Kuhlmann
Source: Museum Victoria  

The display of 'Shiny Nem' plants in the Forest Gallery exhibit is a great chance to get close to a very rare plant in a setting representing its natural habitat. It's also an opportunity to reflect on how close this plant was to disappearing forever and the benefits that having a second chance will bring.

Links:

National recovery plan for the Shiny Nematolepis (Nematolepis wilsonii)

Forest Gallery helps secure incinerated plant's future (2009)

Do you have about five minutes? Great! Come and “Meet Me at the Museum”. It’s a new online video series about items from the Museum Victoria collection.

Objects and specimens always have a few fascinating people moments. We glimpse at those moments and marvel at the objects.

Here's episode one.

Watch this video with a transcript.

Alexandra is the Early Learning Program Coordinator at Scienceworks. She loves exploring the ways in which science engages young children.

As part of a fabulous partnership with DEECD Western Metropolitan Region (WMR) Laverton Community Children's Centre recently made their very first visit to Nitty Gritty Super City. These children hail from the fastest-growing region in Australia, as well as being identified as amongt the most culturally and linguistically diverse.

This is what it looked like on the big day:

Finding clothes to wear on a sunny Melbourne day.
Image: Kimalee Reid
Source: DEECD  

Using the lever to operate the digger.
Image: Kimalee Reid
Source: DEECD  

We played in the Scienceworks playground.
Image: Kimalee Reid
Source: DEECD  

The kids had a great time and the day's event was a great first step to encourage an interest in science for these early learners. We hope to see them back again soon! 

Links:

Department of Education and Early Childhood Development

Education programs for Nitty Gritty Super City

The travelling exhibition On their own - Britain's child migrants opened at the Immigration Museum on Thursday. Created by the Australian National Maritime Museum and National Museums Liverpool, UK, the exhibition recounts some of the experiences of over 100,000 British children who were sent to Commonwealth colonies and dominions from the 1860s to the1970s. They were taken from orphanages and children's homes to populate Australia, Canada and African colonies with "good white stock" in schemes that were largely hidden from public scrutiny until the late 1980s.

About 7500 children were sent to Australia. Some of the children left desperate circumstances and found their new home to be a land of opportunity. But for many child migrants, the experience was brutal.

Harold Haig, Secretary of the International Association of Former Child Migrants and their Families, speaking at the exhibition launch.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Guests in the Immigration Museum atrium for the official launch of On their own - Britain's child migrants .
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Harold Haig, Secretary of the International Association of Former Child Migrants and their Families, spoke at the exhibition launch. "Many child migrants faced an assault course of adversity rather than a preparation for adult life. The children were often led to believe that they were orphans; that their parents were dead. This was a particularly cruel deception that extinguished the hopes of many parents and children of ever being reunited." The British Consul-General, Stuart Gill, spoke about his participation in the formal apologies delivered by the Australian Government in 2009 and by the British Government in 2010. He considers them among the most powerful but emotional duties of his position, yet concealment by both Governments of their policies for decades meant that just a few years prior he had never heard of child migrants.

Stuart Gill, British Consul-General and Maggie Gill in the exhibition.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Now, it is hard to believe that the schemes that brought unaccompanied children as young as three years old to these shores were not more widely known. Settled mostly in rural institutions, the children were expected to provide farm and domestic labour. Hugh McGowan left Glasgow as an adolescent and was placed at Dhurringile Training Farm in Tatura, and later Kilmany Park Home for Boys in Sale. He says, "I was fed, I was clothed, I was somewhat educated, I was housed. [But] there are things that happened to me as a seven year old boy and as a 15 year old boy that I just didn't discuss with anyone." Mr McGowan speaks frankly about the abuse and deprivation that he suffered because he feels that it's important for people to know what happened to him. He left institutional care at the age of 17, permanently shaped by his experiences, and found it difficult to relate to people in his personal and professional life. "I didn't understand them because I wasn't the product of a loving family, whereas they were."

Hugh McGowan looking at a photo of four child migrants on their way to Fairbridge Farm School.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Says Mr McGowan, "the exhibition is precisely what it should be. It's an accurate reflection of what happened. Some of us have survived, but a lot of us haven't." Parts of it are quite harrowing. Curator Kim Tao had the difficult task of sifting through stories, good and bad, to include in the exhibition. "Despite them being such difficult and painful stories, the [former child migrants] really wanted to share them and put them on the public record and recognise that this was such an important part of Australia's migration history." She mentioned the exhibition's website which has a message board, and that people are still coming forward to talk about their experiences for the first time. Through the Child Migrants Trust and other groups, former child migrants support one another as adults much they did as children, when, in the absence of parents and families, they became de facto families for one another.

Exhibition curator Kim Tao (centre) with former child migrants Sandra Anker and Hugh McGowan.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

On Their Own - Britain's child migrants is at the Immigration Museum until 6 May 2012.

Links:

Child Migrants Trust

'Innocence lost in lucky country', The Age, 11 October 2011

Inside: Dhurringile boys (National Museum of Australia)

When you see sausages at a butcher, or purchase a barbecued fundraising snag, spare a thought for the sausage-shaped marine animals that formed one of Australia's first export industries. The trade in trepang between Chinese, Macassan and northern Australian Aboriginal people is the focus of the Trepang exhibition at Melbourne Museum which closes on 16 October.

The trade of trepang or sea cucumbers dates back before 1700. The product is known by several names: trepang (Indonesian), bêche-de-mer (French), hai-sum (Chinese) and namako (Japanese). While the live animals are shaped like a sausage, the product that is eaten is usually the dried skin (body wall) or pickled intestines. In Japan they are generally eaten fresh.

Namako (sea cucumber) for sale in a Japanese supermarket.
Image: Hector Garcia
Source: Used under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) from kirainet  

Today, trepang fisheries exist throughout the Indo-Pacific area, including Madagascar, Ecuador, Canada, New Zealand and northern parts of Australia. The products are most often consumed in China, Korea, Japan, and some smaller Indo-Pacific islands such as Samoa and Indonesia.

The Australian trade began with 600 tonnes in the early years – about six million live animals – to 11,000 tonnes in the 1990s. This high demand resulted in over-exploitation in some areas because the animals were easy to collect, slow growing and had low reproductive rates. As a result, today's fisheries target deeper water species and are carefully managed, but some species are still over-fished.

A sea cucumber (Stichopus mollis) in its natural habitat.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria  

So they look like sausages but do they taste like sausages? I asked around. The closest response was from Mel, one of the museum's marine collection managers who has lived in Japan.

"I've only eaten sea urchin [a related echinoderm group] which tasted like mushed-up prawns, but I've heard sea cucumbers taste rubbery."

Nonetheless they are a delicacy for some. Sea cucumbers are rumoured to have anti-inflammatory and aphrodisiac properties, although the latter may be based more on the shape and behaviour of the live animal rather than any scientific proof.

Exhibitions about science and technology are notoriously difficult to keep up-to date because those scientists just won't stop discovering and inventing things! Curator Kate Phillips encountered an example of this last week, after someone spotted a discrepancy between two Melbourne Museum exhibitions, Darwin to DNA (2000) and 600 Million Years: Victoria Evolves (2010).

Both exhibitions compare the similarity of DNA between chimpanzees and humans. The earlier exhibition states that there is less than two per cent difference while the more recent exhibition declares a 96 per cent similarity. While the numbers don't seem to agree, they're not necessarily incorrect because they compare different aspects of the genomes.

Young adult male chimpanzee.
Image: Frans de Waal, Emory University
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from Wikimedia Commons.  

Kate explains:

"The discrepancy comes about because these two exhibitions were developed ten years apart and the understanding of DNA has changed over that time. In 2001 the draft human genome was published and a final version in 2004. In 2005 the draft chimp genome was published and could be accurately compared to the human one. The percentage similarity that came out of this comparison was 96 per cent. Before this time the similarity was probably based on comparing known genes, and therefore was working with less information."

"However the percentage you come up with also depends on how you make the comparison – on which bits of the genome you compare and that could also account for the discrepancy. If you compare genes, we are more similar, if you include the non-coding sequences, we are slightly less similar. Really 98 per cent and 96 per cent are both indicate great genetic similarity."

Chromosomes of a human male. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and chimpanzees have 24 pairs.
Source: National Human Genome Research Institute  

We love that someone noticed this because it means that people are reading exhibition text closely, and keeps us on our toes. It's also, as Kate concludes, a pointed demonstration of "the scale of scientific discovery in the area of genome research over the last ten to twenty years."

Links:

The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium (2005) 'Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome' Nature, Vol 437 pp 69-87.  (PDF, 4.3 MB)

Media release from NIH News, 'New Genome Comparison Finds Chimps, Humans Very Similar at the DNA Level' (2005)

This post is by Melvin Patinathan, Assistant Keeper with the Live Exhibits Unit.

The Giant Burrowing Cockroach (Macropanesthia rhinoceros), also known as the Rhinoceros Cockroach, is one of Australia's treasures. It is the world's heaviest cockroach, weighing up to a whopping 30g. Although it is not the longest, it still can get up to 70-80mm in length (the longest is probably the winged Giant Brazilian Cockroach, Blaberus giganteus, growing up to 90mm). This giant critter is wingless and heavily armoured, which helps it withstand predator attacks – if that doesn't work it can emit a hissing noise which can be quite startling.

Giant Burrowing Cockroach (Macropanesthia rhinoceros).
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

I recently took the specimen below to Scienceworks for the Inspiring Scientists weekend, where he was a giant hit with hundreds of young visitors. Although I'm fond of many of the animals we keep at Live Exhibits, Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are one of my favourites.

The handsome hand shows how big a male Giant Burrowing Cockroach can get.
Image: Adam Elliot
Source: Museum Victoria  

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are found in dry eucalyptus scrubland of northern Queensland; Cape York to Rockhampton and the Whitsunday Islands. Male cockroaches have a prominent ridge on their pronotum (an extended first segment of the thorax of the insect that forms a shield over its head) where females do not have a distinct ridge but tend to be larger and heavier than males.

A few sub-adults collecting dry eucalyptus leaves on the soil surface.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

Like their name suggests, they are burrowing creatures and use their shovel-like pronotum and large spiny powerful digging legs to dig burrows as deep as one metre. The cockroaches line their burrows with twigs and dry eucalypt leaves that they gather from the surface. These gentle giants are specialist feeders; they only eat dry, crisp eucalypt leaves.

Giant Burrowing Cockroach emerging from its burrow in a terrarium.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are nocturnal and spend most of their time hidden in their burrows. They are most active at night when they come to the surface to feed; these giant cockroaches have been mistaken for small turtles when crossing roads.

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches generally do not venture too far away from their burrows except during breeding season when it is warm and humid, especially after rain. The warm humid climate provides ideal mating conditions and mating occurs at night. Once the female is gravid (pregnant) she will prepare her burrow by dragging down leaves to feed her young. This species of burrowing cockroach are oviviparous, which means that the eggs are incubated within the body and are sustained by yolk sacs.

Juveniles and their mother at the entrance of their burrow.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Unusual among insects, instead of laying eggs, females of this species give birth to live young. The female giant burrowing cockroach will produce up to 20 live young and she will care for them for up to a year. Juvenile cockroaches reach maturity at about three or four years of age and best of all apart from being the heaviest cockroach in the world, these amazing cockroaches can live up to ten years.

Giant Burrowing Cockroaches are permanently on display under the 'Diversity' exhibit in Bugs Alive!.

Further reading:

Henderson A., Henderson D., & Sinclair J. 2008. Bugs Alive: A guide to keeping Australian invertebrates, Museum Victoria pp. 47

Rentz D.C.F. 1996. Grasshopper country: the abundant orthopteriod insects of Australia, University of New South Wales Press, pp. 225-228

Rugg D. & Rose H. A. 1991. Biology of Macropanesthia rhinoceros Saussure (Dictyoptera: Blaberidae). Annals of the Entomological Society of America, Entomological Society of America, pp. 575-582

Links:

Question of the Week: How to sex a cockroach

Question of the Week: Cockroaches

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

Prior to becoming a keeper with the Live Exhibits team at Melbourne Museum, my knowledge of grasshoppers was quite limited. Locusts were probably the type of grasshopper of which I was most aware, due to their high numbers during the warmer months. They are also responsible for the must-have car fashion accessory adorning the front of vehicles, in the form of flywire to stop cars from overheating. In truth, locusts are just one of an estimated 700 species of grasshopper in Australia.

The Common Toad Hopper (Buforania crassa) is an inquisitive creature.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria  

Live Exhibits keeps many different types of grasshoppers and I am quite intrigued by them all, but the species which first caught my attention was the Common Toadhopper (Buforania crassa) from Central Australia. They are not particularly big - females are approximately 60mm long and males 40 mm long - and contrary to their name they rarely hop or jump, preferring to walk around. They have been described as an inquisitive grasshopper and that is what drew me to them. As with pets at home, if you are looking after an animal and you buy it a new toy or feed it a new food then you hope that they will enjoy it or get a reaction from it. I found that not too long after I added food they would be on it or in it. This included pollen, orthopteran mix (made up of muesli, fish flakes and other ingredients), and various forms of foliage, such as abelia, emu bush, acacia, and callistemon. You soon find out that they have their favourites - I would say that callistemon is in the top two.

Common Toad Hopper (Buforania crassa) eating callistemon, one of its favourite foods.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria  

Like most grasshoppers, Common Toadhoppers use camouflage to hide from predators. As you can see from the picture, once they are perched on a rock or stick during the daylight hours they can be very difficult to see. If they are brought up on a light sand substrate then their colours will reflect that.

Common Toadhoppers are masters of camouflage. Their colours can vary depending on what colour substrate they are brought up on.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria  

Toadhopper perfectly disguised to match the branch it's sitting on.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

Their reproductive cycle is very interesting. Grasshoppers generally breed in the summer months with the male perching on the female's back, either mating or guarding her from other males. The female then deposits her eggs in the soft sand and plugs them with a foamy substance. Our toadhopper populations here at Melbourne Museum vary seasonally and in some enclosures we currently have none at all, but we can see where females have deposited their eggs. Grasshopper eggs are good at withstanding drought periods. Normal incubation time for Common Toadhoppers is 1-3 months but it can be as long as 1-2 years, the eggs simply waiting for the right conditions. We can recreate those conditions, simulating warmer days with longer heat and light periods, and heavy rain through flooding the enclosures with water. Then hopefully not too long afterwards, little toadhopper nymphs will appear and even though they may not live up to the second part of their name, these grasshoppers certainly love eating grass.

A young Common Toadhopper.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the meantime, come along to Melbourne Museum and visit our male Common Toadhopper, featured in the arid section of our Habitats display in Bugs Alive!.

Toadhoppers are in the arid habitat display in Bugs Alive!.
Image: David Paddock
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Forest Gallery is one of the icons of Melbourne Museum – a cool temperate rainforest merging into drier eucalypt forest complete with creek, ponds and waterfall, all in the heart of a major city.

The gallery is dominated by large gum trees, wattles and southern beech, which have been growing consistently under the close supervision of Live Exhibits horticulturalists for more than 10 years. This is a ‘Forest in a Box’, a museum gallery in which the living trees must be strategically pruned on a regular basis in order to maintain the desired effect.

A view from above the fire poles at the northern end of the Forest Gallery, giving some idea of the height of the pruning operation.
Source: Museum Victoria

Last week arborists from ArborCo visited the Forest Gallery for an annual prune of the larger trees. The arborists must scale remarkable heights to reach the crowns of the trees, even before they commence their work.

Crew Leader Andrew Caldecott prepares to climb a Southern Beech for the annual trim.
Source: Museum Victoria

Great attention is paid by the arborists to the health and safety of both themselves and the trees. Much of the preparation is done on the ground, and the pruning operation is planned weeks in advance. It must be done in such a way that preserves the natural shape of the tree and promotes growth in the right directions.

Arborist Joel Creech makes his way up a gum tree towards the upper canopy.
Source: Museum Victoria

During their visit, the arborists also apply their skills to climbing one of the poles which houses the Forest Gallery’s wind gauge. The gauge is used to monitor wind speeds, and Museum staff will occasionally close the gallery temporarily if the wind becomes too strong.

Malachi Ewan at the top of a fire pole cleaning the wind gauge.
Source: Museum Victoria

Branches removed by the arborists are recycled on site into mulch, to be used on gardens throughout the Museum. When suitably aged, some of the mulch will be returned to the Forest Gallery to sustain the trees from which it came.

Left: ArborCo’s Gary Lambert feeds a steady stream of branches through the chipper. | Right: Brendan Fleming from the Live Exhibits Unit begins moving mulch back onto gardens around the museum.
Source: Museum Victoria

During the pruning operation, some of the branches cut from the Forest Gallery are tested to monitor the long term health of the trees. Foliage samples taken from new growth in the upper parts of the canopy can tell much about the trees’ nutrient content. Dr Peter Hopmans from Timberlands Research collects samples and uses them, in conjunction with soil samples and trunk diameters, in an ongoing review of plant health.

Dr Peter Hopmans from Timberlands Research collecting foliage samples, watched by Brendan Fleming and Customer Service Officer Veronica Barnett.
Source: Museum Victoria

The Forest Gallery combines ancient geology and the power of water with living birds, reptiles, fish and frogs. It also exemplifies indigenous and European use and management of forests, and the role and impact of fire. But the heart of the forest is the giant trees that stand above all else, and ongoing management should ensure their existence for many years to come.

Links:

MV News: Forest gets a haircut

Pruning saves the Forest from the storm 

Jen Mattiuzzo is an Exhibition Manager at Melbourne Museum who is on the team that assembled the Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic exhibition.

NAIDOC Week was the backdrop for a series of public programs and events for Museum Victoria’s travelling exhibition Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic. This exhibition includes stunning painted barks and ceremonial objects from the Donald Thomson Collection, all collected by Thomson during the 1930s and 1940s from central and eastern Arnhem Land.

Traditional Owners of these works travelled to Darwin from Arnhem Land to take part in floor talks and to welcome the exhibition.

The highlight of the week was the welcome celebration on Wednesday 6 July where Yolngu men and women from Milingimbi danced and spoke about the importance these sacred designs and stories to an enthusiastic audience of locals and tourists. They came to pay respect to their ancestor, Harry Makarrwala, who painted one of the works in the exhibition.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic is on display at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory until 11 September 2011.

This exhibition is supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia.

Janice Wungurrkthun and Isobel Malulawuy Gaykamangu paint up before the performance
Image: Samantha Hamilton
Source: Museum Victoria

Children danced alongside their parents and grandparents during the welcome celebration
Image: Samantha Hamilton
Source: Museum Victoria

Dancing begins at the entrance to MAGNT before moving into the exhibition space.
Image: Samantha Hamilton
Source: Museum Victoria

Bobby Makurrminya Dhurrwuy leads.
Image: Samantha Hamilton
Source: Museum Victoria

Relaxing after the performance.
Image: Samantha Hamilton
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

MV Blog: Ancestral Power opens in Benalla

MV News: Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic

Whilst the animation of our key characters for the show "Tilt" is well under way, another part of the story is taking shape (and colour). Max's rocket.

With the details still highly classified, it is expected that "Ptolemy" will be able to fly.
Image: Brendan Williams
Source: Museum Victoria

With its chic retro styling and awesome pull-back action "Ptolemy" is just the vehicle for our protagonists.

It may appear to be just a tin toy with painted on details but this rocket packs quite a punch. For reasons of security most of the technical specs are still classified, but we can confirm that the ship does indeed have a lever. The other main technology that gives this ship its futuristic edge is a great deal of buttons and switches, not to mention screens with wiggly lines on them.

Based largely on second hand accounts, this image shows some of the future-tech we can expect in the ship.
Image: Brendan Williams
Source: Museum Victoria

We’re proud of our planetarium shows and know how important it is to deliver high quality productions that speak directly to our local audiences.

But did you know that it's not just Melbournians that get to enjoy our planetarium shows? 

Melbourne Planetarium shows screening around the world. The eight shows are distinguished by colour.
Image: Warik Lawrance
Source: Museum Victoria

Since 2007, we have been licensing our shows to play in planetariums around the world. From countries as different as India, South Korea and Turkey, to cities across Europe and the USA, people are enjoying our unique brand of planetarium shows. We’ve even had one show Black Holes: Journey into the Unknown translated into Spanish, Swedish, Finnish and Russian.

Have you seen any Melbourne Planetarium shows on your travels?

A common question about the Tutankhamun exhibition is whether King Tut's funerary mask and mummy are on display.

Tutankhamun’s funerary mask and mummy are two of the most valuable artefacts in the world and the Egyptian Government has ruled that neither can travel outside Egypt because they are too fragile. The object pictured on promotional material for the exhibition is actually Tutankhamun’s canopic coffinette, an exquisite miniature replica of King Tut’s sarcophogus. Four of them were discovered in his tomb, each holding vital organs. The canopic coffinette that is on display in the exhibition at Melbourne Museum held his liver. Like the funerary mask, it too displays the face of the Boy King.

 Tutankhamun's golden canopic coffinette, which held his mummified liver. A cropped image of this exhibition artefact features on promotional posters.
Source: Egyptian Museum, Cairo

The funerary mask is display in Cairo at the Egyptian Museum and has not left Egypt since the 1970s. It is quite different to the coffinette and sarcophagi not only in size, but because it portrays his head and shoulders only and does not show his hands holding a ceremonial flail and crook.

Tuthankamun's famous funerary mask, on display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Image: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
Source: Used under CC BY-SA 3.0 courtesy of Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

As for his mummy and sarcophagi, these could never be displayed in the exhibition because they have never left the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Nevertheless, a replica of his mummy and a multimedia projection of the many layers of sarcophagi can be seen at Melbourne Museum in the National Geographic gallery, which is located outside the exhibition entrance.

GIVEAWAY

We have two tickets to Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs to give away to a blog reader. To enter, leave a comment on this post by noon (local time) on Friday 16 July with your answer to this question:

What would you ask Howard Carter if he were still alive?

Links:

kingtutmelbourne.com.au

FAQs about Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Curators Michael Reason and Deborah Tout-Smith were delighted to welcome Judith Durham, lead singer of the 1960s folk-pop group The Seekers, when she dropped in to today to see her dress in The Melbourne Story exhibition. "It's mind-blowing. That's my dress, and it's on display in the museum!" she exclaimed as she saw it for the first time in many years.

Judith Durham next to her dress in The Melbourne Story, on loan from the National Film and Sound Archive.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The dress is on loan from the National Film and Sound Archive and is featured in the Melbourne music history section. Judith donated it and other outfits to the NFSA some years ago. "I love it. It was so suited to me as a person," she said. She was pleased to give Michael and Deborah some more information about how and when she wore it.

Judith bought the dress from a South Yarra boutique to wear for a Channel Nine special program called The World Of The Seekers. It became an iconic outfit when a photograph taken during the film shoot at Como House appeared on the cover of The Best of The Seekers 1968 compilation album.

Links:

MV News: A dress of its own 

The Melbourne Story

Dr J. Patrick Greene is an archaeologist and the CEO of Museum Victoria.

At Christmas I read the biography of Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. In January I followed in his footsteps to Egypt, visiting the pyramids on the Giza plateau, then Saqqara to see the Stepped Pyramid of Djoser, then Luxor and Karnak (ancient Thebes, centre of the worship of the god Amun) and finally, across the Nile to the Valley of the Kings.

 Ornately carved pillars at Karnak temple.
Image: Patrick Greene
Source: Museum Victoria

Excavation of Ptolemaic era baths outside the main entrance to Karnak temple.
Image: Patrick Greene
Source: Museum Victoria

To enter the tomb in which Tutankhamun was buried was an extraordinary experience. In 1922 there were over 5000 astonishing objects in the tomb, stacked one on top of the other, that took Carter and his team ten years to carefully remove, record, conserve and then pack for their journey to the Cairo Museum. As I stepped into the burial chamber I felt something of the excitement that Carter had felt as he peered through the sealed blocking wall for the first time. The beautiful sarcophagus is still there, carved with the protective deities with wings outstretched that guarded the young king as he began his journey to the afterlife. So too is Tutankhamun; his mummy has never left the tomb except for a short journey outside for a CT scan a few years ago.

I was lucky enough to have the tomb to myself for ten minutes or so, to absorb the atmosphere and marvel at the paintings on the walls of the burial chamber. Photographs are forbidden, quite rightly, not just to help preserve the pigments of the paintings but also the sense of awe. When some other visitors eventually entered they concluded that the sarcophagus and mummified body were replicas. I was able to reassure them that they were not!

My fascinating journey to Egypt included a visit to the Cairo Museum to see the objects that Howard Carter had so carefully sent down the Nile. Visitors clustered around one object in particular, the famous gold funerary mask that never leaves Egypt. Some of the cases had notes to say that the objects that they normally contained were part of an international exhibition. With pride I knew where they were heading—to Melbourne Museum to be displayed in the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition that opened in April.

 Patrick Greene outside the famous Cairo Museum, where treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamun are housed.
Source: Museum Victoria

I couldn't take photographs in the tomb, or in the Cairo Museum for that matter, but elsewhere I was given access to sites and met with fellow archaeologists making exciting discoveries that I was able to photograph. A selection of my images has now been published by Museum Victoria in a book that is hot off the press. Its title? Egypt: a fascinating journey.

Links:

Egypt: a fascinating journey

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Watch Dr Greene's lecture: 'An Archaeologist Visits Ancient Egypt'

GIVEAWAY

We have a signed copy of Patrick's book to give away to a blog reader. To enter, leave a comment on this post by noon on Thursday 30 June with your answer to this question:

What fascinates you about Egypt?  

UPDATE: Thank you to all the entrants! Patrick has chosen JessB as the winner, saying:

“I was spoilt for choice in deciding the winner of my book.  I had no idea who had written the blog entries as they were shown to me without names attached.  I made a shortlist, and finally chose my winner, which expresses so eloquently the captivating beauty of the artists and crafts people whose creations still speak to us over the distance of time.”

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

Welcome to the first instalment of Museum Victoria’s Bug of the Month. At any time, more than 100 species of invertebrates are resident at Melbourne Museum, under the care of the Live Exhibits Unit. These creatures can be seen in Bugs Alive! and the Forest Gallery, and they pop up in other places such as the Children’s Museum and even Amazing Backyard Adventures, currently showing at Scienceworks.

Face to face with the Small Hooded Katydid.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

This month’s bug is the Small Hooded Katydid, also known as Phyllophorella. The name doesn’t adequately describe the large size of this species, which can grow up to 8cm long. Although this katydid has been around for millennia, it was only described by scientists and given an official scientific name two years ago.

Adult Small Hooded Katydid.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Small Hooded Katydids are found in North Queensland, from around Cairns all the way to rainforest near the tip of Cape York. They are one of the biggest katydids in Australia, but their closest relatives, the Giant Katydids (Siliquofera grandis) are easily the largest, measuring up to 13cm in length.

A katydid feeding on broad bean leaves. If you look closely you can see the katydid’s ear, a small opening located on its foreleg at the left of the photo.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Small Hooded Katydids are vegetarians, feeding on a range of rainforest plants amongst which they are remarkably well camouflaged. Some specimens even have irregular white or brown patches on their wings, which are identical to the spots found on leaves. The veins on the wings also mimic the vein pattern of leaves, so adults can be very difficult to find in the wild. For this reason, they were thought for a long time to be rare, but are actually quite common.

Close-up of a katydid’s wing, showing the leaf-like pattern of veins and brown spots.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Unlike most other katydids, males of this species don’t call to attract females, so no-one knows how they find each other in the rainforest at night. However, both adults and nymphs can produce a rasping sound when disturbed, by rubbing the bases of the back legs against the body.

A young nymph living behind the scenes at Melbourne Museum
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

The ‘hood’ of these katydids, after which they are named, is most obvious in juveniles such as these two below. The pointed spine on each side of the hood is also most prominent at this stage.

A juvenile female already bears the sabre-like ovipositor at the end of the body with which she will later lay eggs.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

A juvenile feeding on organic matter, photographed in rainforest north of Cape Tribulation
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

Small Hooded Katydids are currently on show in the ‘Enormous Numbers’ display in Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum.

Small Hooded Katydids in Bugs Alive!
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

References:

Rentz, D.C.F., Su, Y.N. & Ueshima, N., 2009, Studies in Australian Tettigonidae: The Phyllophorinae (Orthoptera: Tettigonidae: Phyllophorinae), Zootaxa, 2075:55-68

Rentz, D., 2010, A Guide to the Katydids of Australia, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 214pp.

Women with clever hands from three parts of Australia – Arnhem Land, Wagga Wagga in NSW and Victoria – shared their passion and skill in basket-weaving today, to mark the opening of the travelling exhibition Women With Clever Hands: Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala.This exhibition features vivid and intricate fibrework by women artists of Gapuwiyak in Arnhem Land.

Three of the artists – Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, Kathy Nyinyipuwa Guyula and Anna Ramatha Malibirr – are at Melbourne Museum for the exhibition opening and to demonstrate their craft. Curator Dr Louise Hamby worked on this exhibition with the artists and the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. She explained that fibrework of this region had its own characteristic style and the purpose of the exhibition was to share this with other communities in Australia.

Following the launch of the exhibition on Friday morning, the three groups of women exchanged stories about their work, techniques and materials and examined baskets and other fibre objects in the MV collections.

Curator Antoinette Smith showing fibrework collection objects to the visitors.
Source: Museum Victoria

The Gapuwiyak artists use the natural fibres from plants that that grow in their area, such as pandanus, which is a real challenge to collect because of its rows of sharp spines and its habit of growing in wet, buffalo-riddled country! The outer layers of pandanus are stripped away and the core is dyed with local materials.

The Women of Wagga Weaving (WOWW) group brought in an array of works produced by Wiradjuri Elders and other women. Melanie Evans spoke about how much the women love the opportunity to meet regularly, share their work and learn side by side. They have met with the Gapuwiyak artists several times through the collaboration between the Gapuwiyak Cultural Centre and the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and been deeply inspired by it. A small group of Wiradjeri women with Melanie Evans and Linda Elliott from the Wagga gallery also travelled to Gapuwiyak in 2010.

Women from WOWW talking about their fibrework.
Source: Museum Victoria

Three Victorian artists also spoke about their work: Vicki Couzens, Bronwyn Razem and Marilyne Nicholls are renowned fibre artists with works in major private and public collections. They told stories about learning their art and how it is sacred to them, and the importance of sharing the knowledge and giving guidance and instruction about these skills to younger people.

This glimpse into culture and skill of basket-making made me aware that these women are not just craftspeople and artists, but botanists, ecologists and geologists. Each variety of fibre comes from a particular plant, which is understood in terms of its country. Finding fibre means understanding soil types and the environment the plant requires to grow, as well as the biology and anatomy of the plant to know when and which parts to harvest. The preparation – stripping, drying, dyeing – is yet another level of knowledge.

The Gapuwiyak artists will hold a weaving demonstration at Bunjilaka at Melbourne Museum today. Come along and see how it is done!

Women With Clever Hands is on show at Bunjilaka until 28 August 2011.

Links:

Women With Clever Hands at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery

It's not every day that motorists share a freeway with prehistoric flying reptiles! Two huge models of pteranodons - with wingspans of six metres - crossed Melbourne by truck yesterday, ahead of their display in the upcoming Scienceworks exhibition Explore-a-saurus.

Pteranodon on a tuck arriving at Scienceworks.
Source: Museum Victoria

Moving crew wheel a Pteranodon model into the Scienceworks building.
Source: Museum Victoria

Did you see this unusual cargo make its trip from Coburg to Spotswood?

Explore-a-saurus will open to the public on June 1. You can pre-purchase tickets online now.

Links:

Explore-a-saurus

MV Blog: Developing a dino exhibit

When do you feel like you belong? This question is central to the new exhibition Identity: yours, mine, ours that opens at the Immigration Museum on 11 May. We took this question to the streets, setting up an open photo shoot in Little Collins St at the end of March. These photos are now in the Identity at the Immigration Museum group on Flickr and the overview video below.

If you’re on Twitter, we'd love to hear your #ibelong story, too. We want you to tell us “I feel #ibelong when...’  We'll put selected tweets up on a screen at the exhibition launch and during the opening weeks of the exhibition, we’ll be giving away tickets for some of the best #ibelong tweets. You can also follow the #ibelong tweets via the Immigration Museum Twitter account.

Links:

Identity: yours, mine, ours website

Identity blog

There are a lot of sparkling gems and minerals on display in Dynamic Earth but on Tuesday morning there was a new temporary exhibit with an unusually personal label...

Engagement ring planted in an exhibition showcase in Dynamic Earth.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

But who put it there? And why?

Simone sees the showcase.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

It was all part of an elaborate surprise marriage proposal by David to Simone. She thought she was visiting the museum to take some promotional photographs. All seemed perfectly normal until she spotted the showcase containing an engagement ring and the label asking 'Simone, will you marry me?'

Congratulations David and Simone! It was a lot of fun for the museum to be in cahoots with the lucky groom-to-be.

The newly-engaged couple, David and Simone.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

This guest post is by Chloe, a Live Exhibits keeper at Melbourne Museum.

At Live Exhibits we like to keep a range of funnel-web species. This way we can represent not only the infamous Sydney Funnel-web spider, but the majority of Australian funnel-web species in our exhibits.

As it had been six years since Live Exhibits’ last trip to Nariel Valley, it was time for Jessie, Patrick and I to pack up the car and head off on a field trip in the to find some Alpine Funnel-webs (Hadronyche alpina).

Alpine Funnel-web, Hadronyche alpina.
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria

Local resident Mrs Brown originally alerted the museum’s Discovery Centre to the presence of a population of Alpine Funnel-webs in the Nariel Valley and more particularly her front lawn. Young funnel-webs emerge from their mother’s burrow, find an attractive burrow site, and then burrow down, which makes for high density populations. For us, this leads to quick collection of multiple specimens.

After finding three funnel-webs around our campsite it was time to head off to Mrs Brown’s place, where she showed four large burrows. We started digging holes in the mud more than 30cm deep, a process much more lengthy than expected, using only a desert spoon to dig, trying not to destroy Mrs Brown’s lawn or injure the spiders. Finally we produced four plump female funnel-webs (which were less than happy about being disturbed) then we balanced them on a spoon to be transferred into their new glass homes.

Alpine Funnel-web, Hadronyche alpina
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria

Soaking wet with seven funnel-webs under our belt and no sign of any more, it was time to head off to Omeo.

The following day drove up the windy, fog-covered hills to Mt Hotham, where we began our search for Alpine Thermocolour Grasshoppers (Kosciuscola tristis), Alpine Blistered Pyrgomorphs, (Monistria concinna), Mountain Katydids (Acripeza reticulata) and Alpine Katydids (Tinzeda albosignata).

Left: Alpine Katydid, Tinzeda albosignata. Right: Alpine Thermocolour Grasshopper Kosciuscola tristis.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

On warmer days these invertebrates would be sitting up on small bushes and grass clumps, enjoying the sun. However on cooler foggy days, like the day of our visit, many of the invertebrates sink lower into the foliage to protect themselves against the elements, making our search a little harder and much wetter. Thankfully I had donned plastic pants and a rain coat which made the perfect outfit, although they didn’t help the situation in my boots, which contained enough water to fill a small lake.

Foggy conditions for collecting invertebrates at Mt Hotham.
Image: Patrick Honan
Source: Museum Victoria

During the morning of searching, Patrick’s alter ego Taxon Boy didn’t let us down, helping us bag 48 Thermocolour Grasshoppers, 7 Alpine Katydids, 1 Mountain Katydid, 12 Alpine Blistered Pyrgomorphs and a female Alpine Wolf Spider (Lycosa sp.).

Alpine Wolf Spider, Lycosa sp.
Image: Chloe Miller
Source: Museum Victoria

We made one final stop on our long drive back to the museum to collect some eucalyptus for our stick insects; here Taxon Boy also stumbled across some large Garden Orb-weavers (Nephila edulis) which you can now see on display in the Orb wall in Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum.

Garden Orb-weaver, Nephila edulis.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Infosheet: Spiders of Victoria 

MV Blog: TV Crew in Bugs Alive

During the recent Bush Blitz biodiversity survey at Lake Condah, there was one insect that intrigued even the staunchest vertebrate biologists — the Mountain Katydid (Acripeza reticulata).

In this video, Patrick, Rowena and David from Live Exhibits talk about these unusual katydids and how they're establishing a colony of them at Melbourne Museum.

Watch this video with a transcript

Katydids are in the family Tettigoniidae, otherwise known as bush crickets or long-horned grasshoppers due to their very long antennae. The name 'katydid' comes from the noise that they make by rubbing their wings together which, in some species, sounds like katy-did, katy-did.

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

Links:

Mountain Katydid on Caught and Coloured

MV Blog: Bush Blitz finds

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs opens to the public this morning, and to ensure she was the first person into the exhibition, a very excited visitor has been waiting at Melbourne Museum since 7:40am.

 Pam and Brian at the front of Melbourne Museum.
Source: Museum Victoria

Pam and her husband Brian have travelled all the way from Albury to be here for the first session. Pam is clearly a big King Tut fan; she's even wearing him around her neck!

Tickets for the exhibition are selling fast and many sessions are sold out. Be sure to pre-purchase your tickets online.

Links:

kingtutmelbourne.com.au

This guest post comes from Philip Thiel, who works in the museum’s Online Learning team, creating and publishing material for education audiences on the web.

Tuvalu is still being wrecked by climate change over two years after the launch of Immigration Museum’s exhibition Waters of Tuvalu: A nation at risk. The nation’s greenhouse gas emission is miniscule compared to that of developed nations such as Australia, but it will become the first nation to be uninhabitable as a result of climate change. “This is a grave injustice,” writes Reverend Tafue Lusama at Crikey’s Rooted blog, at which he describes the devastating effects of changing weather patterns on fishing, agriculture and public health in his homeland. “Things are shifting rapidly now.”

A young girl looks out to sea.
Image: Peter Bennetts
Source: Peter Bennetts

We’ve just updated the Immigration Museum website with content from the Waters of Tuvalu exhibition, including beautiful photographs by Peter Bennetts and Fikau Teponga. There’s information about the history and culture of Tuvalu, as well as sections on the impact of climate change. You can also download the exhibition catalogue from the site, which further enriches the online archive of past exhibitions held at the Immigration Museum.

Waters of Tuvalu was opened in August 2008, and has since travelled to several other Australian venues including the Noosa Regional Gallery. The exhibition team created it with the goal of minimal environmental impact, utilising products, materials and suppliers in an effort to achieve best practice outcomes. This contributed to Museum Victoria’s Award for Excellence in Green Purchasing (Victorian State Government) in the 2010 Eco-Buy Awards.

Funafut Atoll July 1999 - a shortage of land on Funafuti has led to housing being built around and on the rubbish-filled borrow pits.
Image: Peter Bennetts
Source: Peter Bennetts

We were proud to accept this award. Nevertheless – and despite the beautiful images and objects included in the exhibition – there’s something melancholy about telling the story of a disappearing nation.

Links:

Past Exhibitions: Waters of Tuvalu

From tiny Tuvalu: the island being destroyed by climate change

2010 Eco-Buy Awards

What's going on here behind the aquatic invertebrate display?

A Water Scorpion in Bugs Alive hanging out while the TV crew sets up.
Source: Museum Victoria

Saturday morning TV show Kids' WB have been shooting in Melbourne Museum's Science and Life Galleries today, with a special visit to Bugs Alive this afternoon. Some of the museum's young visitors were very excited to see hosts Lauren and Andrew but for the resident insects, it was all in a day's work.

Chloe from Live Exhibits and Kids' WB hosts Lauren and Andrew filming in Bugs Alive.
Source: Museum Victoria

Chloe, one of our Live Exhibits keepers, brought out some special big invertebrates for Lauren and Andrew to hold. Let's just say that Andrew enjoyed this bit more than Lauren...

Chloe shows Lauren and Andrew a Spiny Leaf Insect.
Source: Museum Victoria

You can see Melbourne Museum featured on Kids' WB when this epidsode screens on Channel 9 at 10am on 5 March.

Ben designs exhibitions at Scienceworks, Melbourne Museum and the Immigration Museum. He has previously worked designing sets for theatre, and running workshops for kids. Ben loves surprises and performing silly dances.

Over the next couple of months I’ll be working on the new animatronic dinosaur exhibition at Scienceworks called Explore-a-saurus. The dinos we’ve been given by Questacon are in need of a bit of a repair, repaint, and re-interpretation. We decided we needed to supplement the existing dinosaurs with new exhibits to present more scientifically-based themes and a more contemporary approach to palaeontology. No more daggy cargo pants and pith helmets for our paleos!

Our first step was to look at interesting overarching themes to base our interpretation on. They needed to respond to current research since paleontologists regularly make new discoveries that overturn previous understanding. They must be engaging for kids, put kids in the shoes of palaeontologists and demonstrate scientific practice. One element I am particularly interested in is the idea of absolute knowledge. The evidence is open to interpretation, and thus, our knowledge about dinosaurs changes due to new research on old material and discovery of new fossils.

An example of how our understanding of dinosaurs evolution has changed: this old chart in the MV collection suggests the dinosaur branch of the evolutionary tree was a dead end, but current research suggests some dinosaurs evolved into birds.
Source: Museum Victoria

We decided the most interesting angle would be forensic palaeontology – a kind of CSI Cretaceous. We’re using the phrase ‘how we know what we know’ as the exhibition focus. Our interactives will use evidence-based research to demonstrate particular theories, and, if possible, show the palaeontologist’s methods,

With this in mind we turned to popular dinosaur culture – what do people want to know? What are the interesting facts which we can debunk or expand upon? We started with the way dinosaurs are portrayed in films and TV because this is the most prevalent form of education for kids! We looked at the way dinosaurs moved, how we know the sounds they made, the colour of their skin, whether they evolved to become birds or reptiles; and how well they could see. We came up with a 'how we know what we know' list and then another list of types of exhibit that we know Scienceworks visitors have liked in the past.

The interactive elements of the exhibition are now in the final stages of design before we move on to the manufacturing side, then comes the exhibition installation! Before you know it, it will be June 1, when Explore-a-saurus will open and visitors can come and try the interactive components for themselves.

Links:

Explore-a-saurus

MV Blog: Open wide! 

Bernard in Public Programs didn't just receive a gory makeover for his stint as a security guard in the Science and Life commercial; he also needed a haircut to tame his unruly locks.

 Going, going, gone... Bernard's wild curls are trimmed off.
Source: Susan Bamford Caleo

But don't worry, the trimmings were put to good use... as nesting material for the finches and wrens in Melbourne Museum's Forest Gallery. In the wild, these birds salvage tufts of animal hair to line their nests and provide a soft bed for their chicks. During the birds' breeding season, Live Exhibits collect all sorts of materials that will make good nesting matter. This includes coconut fibres, fleece from sheep and horse hair to name a few. Staff stockpile material in spring and disperse them out in small amounts throughout spring and summer.

 Trimmings from Bernard's haircut.
Source: Museum Victoria

Rowena from Live Exhibits had the strange task of scattering the hair around the Forest Gallery early one morning. When I told her it was Bernard's, she said, "I don't know if it's better or worse, knowing who it belonged to!"

Rowena scattering the hair in the Forest Gallery for birds to use.
Source: Museum Victoria

The Melbourne Gallery was filled with beautiful harmonies this morning as a group of Maori performers sang and danced to farewell Phar Lap's skeleton, which will return to New Zealand next week.

Maori performance group Te Waka Raukura sing and dance in front of the Phar Lap Reunion display.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Performers from Te Waka Raukura.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

A performer from Te Waka Raukura.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

On loan from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the skeleton has been on display next to Phar Lap's hide since September 2010 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Melbourne Cup.

Today's performers, Te Waka Raukura, provided a wonderful send-off for the skeleton. It has been an honour for us to have the skeleton and send thanks to all who made this reunion possible. The Phar Lap Reunion display can be seen until Sunday 30 January.

Media and museum visitors gathered to enjoy the music and dancing.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

What's On: Phar Lap Reunion

MV News: Phar Lap reunion

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

MV Blog: The crates have arrived!

Test shot for the upcoming photo shoot.
Source: Museum Victoria

Do you know a child between seven and ten years old who'd like to be included in a new exhibition at the Immigration Museum?

The team working on the upcoming exhibition Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours are seeking up to ten children to be photographed to feature in one section of the gallery. This area will focus on how people identify difference from a very young age through to adulthood. A large scale photograph of a group of children playing - from various cultural backgrounds - will form the backdrop to a series of text panels outlining key moments of personal development. This is the section for which volunteers are needed.

Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours is a new long-term exhibition that will open at the Immigration Museum in March 2011. It will address the very personal experience of identity, and what this means in Australia – today, in the past and into the future. The exhibition will explore the complexity and fluidity of personal identity in contemporary multicultural Australia, with a focus on ethnicity, language, spirituality, ancestry and citizenship.

What's required?

No experience necessary – children (and their carers) are required to turn up on the day of the photography shoot for an hour or two.

When?

UPDATE: Thursday 3 February, 1pm

Where?

Meet at the playground near Rathdowne St, Carlton Gardens. Melways ref 43 J4

To express interest of for more information, call Monica Zetlin, Producer on 0411 555 663 or email mzetlin@museum.vic.gov.au

Links:

Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours

Exhibition development blog

If you have wandered into the Forest Gallery in the new year, you may have noticed that the creek looks much clearer. Just before Christmas 2010, Live Exhibits staff got together to clean ten years' worth of silt and sludge that had built up since the opening of the gallery. It was a tough and dirty job, but the end result was well worth it when the clean water was turned back on.

First we had to drain the creek.......

The Forest Gallery creek drained of its water.
Source: Museum Victoria

...so we could remove all the rocks.....

Removing the creek rocks.
Source: Museum Victoria

...and scoop out all the stinky mud!

Scooping out ten years' worth of mud from the creek's base.
Source: Museum Victoria

With all of the rocks washed and returned...

Squeaky-clean rocks back in position
Source: Museum Victoria

...we could fire up the pump...

The pump that circulates water through the Forest Gallery
Source: Museum Victoria

...and let the water flow. C'est fini!

Sparkling, crystal-clear Forest Gallery creek.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Forest Secrets

Have you seen the Science and Life television commercial? 

We hung around on set and learned all sorts of useful things - what fake blood is made from, how much blood is too much, and exactly what attacks Bernard the security guard at night in the gallery...

Dave Pickering checking out the teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

The crew at Scienceworks have just unpacked a shipment of animatronic dinosaurs from Questacon. They will be refurbished in our workshops before going on display in the exhibition Explore-a-saurus, which opens at Scienceworks on 1 June 2011. Palaeontology collection manager, David Pickering, was caught hamming it up in a photo shoot with the mighty models, but I don't think he'll get that close once they're switched on and come to life!

Among the dinosaurs are some of the superstars of the dino world - T. rex, Stegasaurus, Triceratops and others. They will be overhauled with some new animatronic technology and their appearance updated to reflect recent discoveries in palaeontology.

Eye to eye with Triceratops in the Scienceworks collection store.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Explore-a-saurus will have moving, roaring models on a grand scale. The exhibition will also show how paleontologists reconstruct dinosaurs - what they looked like, how they behaved and where they lived - from fossil evidence.

Links:

What's On listing for Explore-a-saurus 

Dinosaur Walk

MV News: How old was that dinosaur?

What's this conservator doing?

Elizabeth holding a rope...
Source: Museum Victoria 

And this one?

 Sam holding a rope...
Source: Museum Victoria

No, they're not flying giant kites in the Melbourne Museum foyer; they were carefully lowering our replica Duigan Biplane for cleaning last night.

 Lowering the Duigan Biplane for cleaning.
Source: Museum Victoria

This kind of large-scale work takes place once museum visitors have left. It means that conservators can work some strange hours!

The dusty Duigan back on the ground ready for cleaning.
Source: Museum Victoria

The biplane was back up near the ceiling this morning, and the floor was clear for the return of the Deliverette, which has been in storage while the special Titanic exhibition desk occupied its place in the foyer.

Special delivery! The Deliverette van returning from the collection store.
Source: Museum Victoria

It's great to see this unique little van back in the building. It is a prototype small delivery vehicle designed in the late 1940s at the aircraft factory at Fishermen's Bend. The start of the Korean War halted its production. What a shame - the Deliverette would have been perfect for Melbourne's narrow laneways. Perhaps it would have an iconic Melbourne vehicle like our trams.

Links:

Centennary of the Duigan Biplane's first flight

Deliverette on Collections Online

Coming soon to a telly near you is the new commercial for the Science and Life Gallery at Melbourne Museum. But for those who can't wait until Boxing Day, we've loaded it up on our YouTube channel.

Congratulations to the in-house production team: Bernard Caleo (actor), Tim Rolfe (writer/director), Jenni Meaney (production manager), Stephen Dixon (editor) and Maree Martin (marketing).

Many thanks also to 

• Trish Keating (cinematographer),
• David Chesworth of Wax Sound Media (music and sound design)  
• Act3Animation for the volcano eruption
• Creature Technology Company for the animatronic dinosaurs
• Emma-Jane Redmond for the make-up and fake blood

Links:

Dinosaur Walk

Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world

600 Million Years: Victoria evolves

Dynamic Earth

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

This guest post comes from Alasdair Mulligan, a Monash University student currently interning with Museum Victoria as part of his Bachelor of Arts (Journalism) course which he will complete at the end of this year.

Where did your family come from? Why did they choose Victoria? How long ago did they arrive?

These questions, and more, can be answered by the Immigration Museum’s recently updated Origins multimedia display, giving visitors the opportunity to see exactly when, and in what context their family immigrated to Victoria.

Based on Government census information gathered since 1854, Origins contains data from 82 countries, and was researched, built and designed by Museum Victoria in conjunction with SBS Radio, Australian Bureau of Statistics, and community members.

Origins is available at two kiosks in the Long Room of the Immigration Museum, complemented by a large touch screen and audio speakers, it gives visitors the opportunity to explore their family heritage by viewing graphs and bios related to population, history and gender. There is also a website version.

The Origins kiosk at the Immigration Museum displays information about migrant communities in Australia.
Source: Museum Victoria

Bettina, a 28 year old German tourist, said she found Origins “fascinating” and that it told her a lot about why her dad was considering living in Melbourne in the 1950s.

“My dad actually moved to Australia after the war for four years, it was the trend at the time – to move overseas – but I don’t think he liked being away from his family and friends for too long, so he came back.

“It was really interesting seeing how many people thought like my father back then. You can see on the graph that heaps of people from Germany decided to come to Australia during the same time.” Bettina said.

Origins has recently undergone a significant upgrade, and senior curator Deb Tout-Smith says that the service has considerably expanded and now offers a lot more.

“Origins has been updated with the latest 2006 Government Census Information, this includes 12 new communities being added, plotted histories being updated and a handful of audio-visual guides being included.

“It’s supposed to provide an insight into the community, show the political and socio-economic reasons of why they immigrated, and while this update has taken longer than we hoped to complete, working with communities is something that you can’t rush.” Deb said.

“At the moment we include communities that have a population of at least 1100 people, I’d love to get that down to somewhere around the 100 mark, but it all depends on feasibility, we get a lot of people saying ‘Why aren’t we in origins?’ but sometimes these communities only contain one or two people and it would be basically including someone’s personal history.”

Work has already begun on preparing the next update for Origins, which will include the 2011 Government Census Information, and is expected to be ready in two to three years' time.

Links:

Journeys of a Lifetime in the Immigration Museum's Long Room

Origins website

Titanic comes down, Tron Legacy goes up.
Source: Museum Victoria

It's been a mad week at Museum Victoria. It's the last week of Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition at Melbourne Museum and the crowds have poured in for their last chance to see. It closes on 7 November after an extended season. I took this picture today of workers in a cherry-picker updating the banner on the side of the building. I love that the Irish shipbuilders seem to be watching them work, too. Titanic has been a huge success for the museum and we're so pleased that visitors have liked it so much.

It's also Melbourne Cup Week - makring the 80th anniversary of Phar Lap's win and the 150th anniversary of the first running of the Melbourne Cup. The reunion display of this hide and skeleton at Melbourne Museum also has a new wonderful item borrowed for display, the Centennial Cup. It's so much bigger than you might expect, just like Phar Lap himself!

Speaking of size, did you know Phar Lap was 17.7hh? If you don't know what 'hh' means, have a look at Measure Island, which opened at Scienceworks this week. All your horse and horse-racing measurement questions will be answered!

And of course, another bit of news was announced this week. Coming in April 2011, the amazing exhibition of Ancient Egyptian artefacts in Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs.

Phew! That's a lot of exhibition news for one week!

We were delighted to win an AVIA award for the Panoramic Navigators in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world. If you'd like to know more you can now head to Museum Times for a podcast interview with Tim Rolfe, Head of MV Studios.

The exhibition design team came up with the Panoramic Navigators as an ingenious alternative to traditional labels for the 770+ specimens on display. With the mounts all the way up the wall, labels would have been impossible to read. Sometimes necessity truly is the mother of invention!

Visitors exploring the displays in Wild using the Panoramic Navigators
Image: Diana Snape
Source: Museum Victoria

You can also check out the Wild virtual exhibition without leaving your chair.

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!