History & Technology

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

The Phryne Fisher detective series by Melbourne author Kerry Greenwood has been delighting and exciting those of us who have a passion for, or even a passing interest in, the dynamic and ever changing history of Melbourne. The television adaptation of the adventures of the sassy super sleuth has set the scene of 1920s Melbourne for avid readers of the series.

We are excited to say that Museum Victoria’s very own Spotswood Pumping Station will star in this Friday night's episode of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (27 April 2012, 8:30pm on ABC1, repeated Sunday 29 April, 10:15pm on ABC1). To help you spot our beloved Pumping Station, we have included some terrific images from our collection in this post.

Spotswood Pumping Station, North Engine House interior, 1930s.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The heritage-listed Spotswood Pumping Station was built by the Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works and completed in 1897. It formed a crucial link in Melbourne’s first sewage collection system by pumping the raw sewage from the underground sewers around Melbourne to Brooklyn, from where it flowed under gravity to the final processing site in Werribee.

Melbourne’s growth as an internationally renowned city was dependent upon being able to manage its waste in a safe and efficient fashion, and the Pumping Station certainly played a most important role.

Spotswood Pumping Station, eastern frontage, 1930s.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Imagine our delight and intrigue when we heard that the Spotswood Pumping Station, located at Scienceworks, would play host to a TV shoot and be transformed into a 1920s factory. The upshot of which: this Friday night, episode ten of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries sees Phryne (Essie Davis) investigate the death of a young female worker in a factory 'accident'. She soon learns that the woman's death might not be the misadventure the police think it is. Faced with a wall of secrecy and lies, Phryne sends her trusty maid Dot (Ashleigh Cummings) undercover into the factory to investigate. When a second suspicious death occurs, Phryne fights desperately to save one of her closest friends from the gallows.

Dr Mac (Tammy MacIntosh) in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries episode 10, 'Death by Miss Adventure', in a scene shot in the Spotswood Pumping Station.
Source: Provided courtesy of ABC TV  

In the above image, Phryne’s best friend Dr Mac is standing in the South Engine Room in front of one of the electrically powered air compressors built by local engineering company, Kelly & Lewis, circa 1926. Most of the Pumping Station interior and machinery seen in the background of factory scenes during the episode have barely changed since the decade in which the series is set.

Spotswood Pumping Station, North Engine House interior, 1930s.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Spotswood Pumping Station has been the site of many a dalliance with the silver screen and we are all excited to continue our sleuthing into the many uses of this wonderful part of Melbourne’s history in film and television. To be continued...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Museum Victoria's collection on Google Art Project

Google Art Project playlist on YouTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Question: I am trying to trace my aunt and uncle and their children or any of their living relatives. They migrated to Australia after World War II in the 1940s or early 1950s. How would I go about finding them?

Locating living people is a question we often get and, although it can be very difficult, there are a number of resources that might help you to find them:

• For those that immigrated here in the mid 20th century, the first step would be to order their immigration records, which are held by the National Archives of Australia (NAA). This will give you information about their immigration and may give some indication of where they went when they arrived in Australia. These documents might then allow you to know where to search for further information in electoral rolls, public registries and other resources

The National Archives website has online indexes, which feature a percentage of records in their collection. A step by step guide to using these indexes and ordering documents can be found on our Quick guide to passenger lists infosheet.

Newly Arrived Migrant Family Standing Near Temporary Accommodation, Ringwood East, 1955
Image: unknown photographer
Source: Museum Victoria  

• Electoral rolls list all the names and addresses of registered voters within Australia. The State Library of Victoria Genealogy Centre holds archived as well as current electoral rolls dating from 1856 until the present. For more information about accessing electoral rolls contact the State Library of Victoria Genealogy Centre or the Victorian Electoral Commission.

• Copies of Birth Deaths and Marriages certificates may reveal useful personal information and allow you to trace your relative’s descendents. Births, deaths and marriage registries are run by different government departments in each state and some have a limited amount of information in online indexes.

• A simple search of the telephone directories may reveal the location of relatives. The White Pages is available online or you may wish to peruse hardcopies, which are often available at state, and sometimes local, libraries.

Man, Woman & Two Girls, Backyard, Ukrainian Christmas Day, Newport, 1951
Image: unknown photographer
Source: Museum Victoria  

• If your relatives belong to a specific migrant community, a relevant community organisation may be able to give you advice about finding them.

• Search digitised newspapers at the National Library of Australia’s Trove website for mentions of their name. With hundreds of national, state and local newspapers digitised from 1803 to 1954, you may find a mention of them.

• Their may be an online bulletin board for the ship your relative came on or a migrant camp in which they may have stayed. Many people find each other through such forums so it might be a great place to throw your question out to the wider world.

Mother, Boy & Girl Sitting on Public Seat, Middle Park, 1949
Image: Mr Cliff Atkinson
Source: Museum Victoria  

• Doing an online search for their names might reveal something. While it sounds obvious, many don’t think of it! Lots of people are online these days with personal websites, blogs, social networking, business websites and so forth.

• Various organisations have tracing services that may, in certain circumstances, be able to locate missing family members.

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Post World War II Immigration in Photographs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Victorian Women's Honour Roll

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

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

Anyone want a free goat?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Goats are great for playtime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers and bleats, Dr Andi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Victorian Trugo Association

YouTube video: Trugo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Western Australian Museum - Maritime

Pearl lugger Mary on Collections Online

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)

Your Question: What was the Lloyd Triestino Trio?  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Triestino in MV Collections

Museum Victoria Migration Collection

Picture Australia

On Sunday 29 January Melbourne’s Chinatown came alive with beating drums, firecrackers, lion and dragon dances, kung fu demonstrations, market stalls, and great food. We went down for a little look to enjoy the spectacle and join the thousands of people from diverse backgrounds who came to celebrate Lunar New Year.

Dragons ready to parade
Image: Nic Davis
Source: Nic Davis  

Monday 23 January 2012 marked the official Lunar New Year – often referred to as Chinese New Year. It is the most important celebration of the year for many communities throughout Asia, including in China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand. It’s a time for families to reunite and celebrate together, with the festivities often lasting for a whole month from around mid January to mid February.  

Wing Chun demonstration
Image: Nic Davis
Source: Nic Davis  

It is a festival rich with symbolism, designed to bring prosperity and happiness in the New Year. Decorations in cities throughout Asia go up early in January and the streets, stores and homes are riot of colour that rivals the Christmas season in Australia, with houses, streets, shops and businesses, brightly festooned with red lanterns, cherry blossoms, paper banners and other decorations.  

Crowds in Chinatown enjoying the Lion Dance
Image: Nic Davis
Source: Nic Davis  

Contemporary and traditional decorations for New Year
Image: Nic Davis
Source: Nic Davis  

Of course Lunar New Year festivities are not limited to Asia, with Chinese communities throughout the world celebrating the festival. Australia’s long history of immigration from Asian countries means that today the Lunar New Year is one of the biggest celebrations in our diverse calendar of cultural events. Events are held in throughout the country, including in Melbourne’s Chinatown, Footscray, Richmond, Springvale, Box Hill and regional centres such as Bendigo.

A traditional Lion Dance team
Image: Nic Davis
Source: Nic Davis  

Links:

MV Blog: Five things about dragons

Ben is an assistant curator currently researching the collections of wealthy Melbourne wool merchant and art collector, John Twycross, for an upcoming book and online exhibition. On the weekends, he likes to wander through grand gardens and restore his 1920s State Savings Bank bungalow home.

Returning to Melbourne following an impromptu drive up Mount Macedon, I stopped at Forest Glade, one of the mountain's well-known private gardens that is open to the public. Barely had I gone a few steps through the garden's cast iron gates when I recognised a very familiar sculptural group. I rushed forward and had my suspicions confirmed.

Alfred Jacquemart’s Huntsman and Dogs, cast by Val d’Osne c.1879, in the Forest Glade private gardens on Mount Macedon. The cast was included in the company’s exhibits at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.
Image: B. Thomas
Source: B. Thomas  

Huntsman and Dogs, also known as Hunter and Hounds or by its French title, Le chaussuer et les chiens, was originally produced by the noted French sculptor, Henri Alfred Marie Jacquemart (1824-96), often known as Alfred Jacquemart, famed for his realistic representations of animal figures. He studied painting and sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris and was a regular exhibitor at the Paris Salon from 1847. His reputation as one of France's leading monumental sculptors was recognised in 1870 when he was awarded the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, the country's highest decoration.

Among his many monumental works, Jacquemart also produced a number of sculptures for commercial production, which were cast by the French foundries of Val d'Osne in 'imitation bronze'; a technique of casting in iron that was then coated with a thin surface of copper through electrolysis. Over time, the aging copper developed a green patina giving the appearance of a genuine bronze casting.

Detail of the base of Huntsman and Dogs.
Image: B. Thomas
Source: B. Thomas  

Val d'Osne exhibited Huntsman and Dogs at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition and the following year at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition where it was mounted on a stone plinth at the front of the eastern forecourt to the Exhibition Buildings, at the edge of Nicholson Street. Val d'Osne was awarded a silver First Order of Merit for their castings at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.

Val d’Osne’s display of decorative castings in the eastern forecourt of the Exhibition Buildings during the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition, with Jacquemart’s Huntsman and Dogs in the foreground of the Nicholson Street entrance.
Source: Museum Victoria  

One cast of Huntsman and Dogs was purchased by the New South Wales government at the conclusion of the Melbourne Exhibition in 1881 for £180; almost $13,000 in today's terms. It was mounted in the gardens surrounding Sydney's exhibition building, the Garden Palace, but was damaged when the Palace burnt down in 1882. It was restored in September 2001 and is now situated in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens.

The Huntsman and Dogs in the Forest Glade gardens apparently remained installed at the Exhibition Building, but – much like its Sydney counterpart – was badly damaged when the Aquarium situated in the building’s eastern annexe was destroyed in a fire in 1953. Forest Glade’s present owners recount that the sculpture languished for a time at the back of a nursery, until being bought from a Richmond-based art auctioneer after the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. It now finds a fitting home, nestled amongst its garden bed of maples, greeting visitors to these wonderful gardens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Podcast: Roll out the Steam Engines!

MV News: Roller returns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got a question? Ask us!

Links:

Australia Day: History

Australia Day Student Resources: Indigenous Australians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Dragons are from mythical lands and Victorian coastlines.

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

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

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

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

Links:

Gippsland Water Dragon

Frederick McCoy's debunking of the Gippsland crocodile myth

Question of the Week: Dragon's den

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

H.V. McKay Sunshine Collection

Where would we be without our donors? Thanks to the generosity of our supporters and donors, Museum Victoria's collections (and thus, the collections belonging to all Victorians), research, exhibitions and facilities are much enriched. To acknowledge our donors and express our gratitude, we held an official thankyou event at Melbourne Museum last month.

Guests viewing Twycross collection objects at the donor thankyou event.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Sarah Myer (Trustee, Yulgilbar Foundation and Myer Foundation, wife of Baillieu Myer) and Tim Hart (Director IMT) at the event.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Recent donations to Museum Victoria include:

• An omnicycle from 1880
• An important collection of butterflies
• A slab of tiger eye that features in Dynamic Earth
• Pendle Hall Dolls' House
• Support for a research fellowship
• Assistance with the upgrade of the Immigration Museum Discovery Centre
• The Twycross Collection of decorative arts
• Support of the Bunjilaka redevelopment

On the evening, Senior Curator Lindy Allen toured the guests through the Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic exhibition and specially selected Twycross Collection objects were on display.

Lindy Allen (Senior Curator - Anthropology Northern Australia) talking to donor Ross Field and his wife in the Ancestral Power exhibition. Ross donated a significant selection of butterflies to MV.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Many of our donors have given objects of tremendous personal significance to the museum, and it is quite an honour to be entrusted with them. Financial support has enabled valuable research projects and much-needed exhibition renewal. As MV CEO Patrick Greene said, "It was wonderful to meet so many of our generous supporters, and be able to thank them personally. Whether the donation is a priceless object or financial support, it is greatly appreciated and supports the work of our exhibitions, research and programs."

Martin Carlson (Treasurer, Hugh D. T. Williamson Foundation), with Will and Margie Twycross beside selected items from the Twycross collection they donated to MV.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Donate to MV

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Collections Online: Apple I replica

Original Apple I, Powerhouse Museum collection

Smithsonian Institution interview with Steve Jobs, 1995

ABC Lateline interview with Mike Daisey

Michelle is the Facilities Coordinator at Scienceworks, and as such has had to quickly learn the ins and outs of the building in her 10 months with the museum – every day brings new discoveries.

I've been at Scienceworks for only a short time in the big scheme of things, and was really proud to finally be able to take part in the training session for Machines in Action Day held here on the arena in September. The folks out here at Scienceworks kept referring to this 'MAD' day, and I couldn't help but wonder what it actually was - some very strange imagery certainly entered my mind I can tell you!

Upon seeing the giant old steam trucks brought out from their garage, it suddenly took me back to my childhood days (both in sights and smells) of visiting Puffing Billy. We had several enthusiastic volunteers shovelling coal, and driving these magnificent old engines around the arena. How easy we all have it now in our quiet cars that require only a keystart!

I jumped on board for a ride on the Super Sentinel Steam Wagon with Tom. Tom's a fitter and turner by trade, but he just loves being a part of the crew that get the old machines running. He told me how he had several at home he liked to tinker with, and it was really heartwarming to find out that the volunteers offer so much of their time to Scienceworks and to our lucky patrons, their only payment being opportunity to be a part of the fun.

Tom and another volunteer outside the garage at Scienceworks.
Image: Michelle Ladgrove
Source: Museum Victoria  

Des Lang, our supervisor for the Scienceworks Engineering workshop, jumped aboard and decided we'd take the Wagon out on the road to Willi (Williamstown for those who may not know)! Apparently they've taken her all the way to Mitcham before too, at a reasonable pace of 30-40kph mind you - not bad!

  Inside the Sentinel, with Des and Tom.
Image: Michelle Ladgrove
Source: Museum Victoria  

View from the driver's seat of the Super Sentinel Steam Wagon.
Image: Michelle Ladgrove
Source: Museum Victoria  

The MAD Training session came to a close, and after a few rounds of the arena where I got to wave to the crowds and pull down on the steam whistle, we carefully backed the lovely old Sentinel back into the garage. I can honestly say that I am SO looking forward to the next Machines in Action Day on Sunday 9th October and will be bringing my family in to experience it too.

Thanks to the wonderful volunteers we have here at Scienceworks, and to Paula Collins who coordinates such an enormous group to which we owe so much. Hope to see you all there!

Links:

Access All Areas podcast Episode 20 - Roll out the steam engines

Machines in Action Day

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

On Saturday I attended a remarkable event in Whakatane, a town on the Bay of Plenty in New Zealand's North Island. I was a guest of the Ngāti Awa people, and the event was the opening of Mātaatua Wharenui (meeting house), a wonderful structure that was originally built in 1875 by the iwi (tribe) despite the devastating effects of colonisation and land confiscations.

Mātaatua Wharenui back home in Whakatane, New Zealand.
Image: Patrick Greene
Source: Museum Victoria  

Unfortunately, the building was soon lost to the people who built it as it was dismantled to be taken to be displayed in Sydney and then, in 1880, as part of the New Zealand display at the Melbourne International Exhibition. That was my connection with the event, as Museum Victoria is the guardian of the Royal Exhibition Building constructed for the 1880 exhibition. Charlotte Smith (Senior Curator in MV's History and Technology Department) carried out some research at the request of the Ngāti Awa which revealed that only the carved wooden panels were displayed rather than the complete structure.

  The interior walls of Mātaatua Wharenui have intricate woven panels and carvings. They were restored by Ngāti Awa craftspeople.
Image: Patrick Greene
Source: Museum Victoria  

After Melbourne, Mātaatua was taken to England where it was displayed, and remained for several decades. It then went to the Otago Museum, and in 1996, under the Treaty of Waitangi, it was returned to the Ngāti Awa. A team of craftspeople — carvers and weavers — have worked for 15 years to restore the building that had become seriously decayed on its travels.

I was present for the pohiri (general welcome), a series of speeches and songs in which the Ngāti Awa welcomed their guests, who, group by group, responded. As well as other iwi, there were delegations from Hawaii and the Cook Islands. It was a great privilege to part of the ceremony and to witness the oratory that is a treasured part of Maori (and Polynesian) culture, a world away from the sound bites that constitute so much current discourse. The restoration of the building is a triumph: it has been beautifully carried out and the building will stand as a testament to survival of a people and their culture.

Mātaatua: The House That Came Home is a short film that tells the story of the meeting house, courtesy of Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa.

At 2pm today it was exactly 100 years ago, on 28 September 1911, that the No. 8 Steam Pumping Engine in the Spotswood Pumping Station was fired up for the first time. You can still see the it in motion in the Engine Room but these days it runs in demonstration mode, powered by compressed air.

Steam Pumping Engine - Austral Otis, No.8 Pumping Engine, MMBW Spotswood Sewerage Pumping Station, 1911 (ST 038266).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Built by local company Austral Otis, the No. 8 Engine was a modified copy of the earlier Hathorn Davey engine. It is one of five surviving engines at the Pumping Station which remain some of the most sophisticated steam engines ever built in Australia. It took four men to run the No. 8 Engine: an engine driver, a greaser, a pump attendant and a fireman. It was one of the engines that moved sewerage from Melbourne to Werribee following the welcome introduction of Melbourne's sewerage system in the 1890s.

Original blueprint for an Austral Otis Steam Pumping Engine.
Image: Austral Otis
Source: Museum Victoria  

Of the bank of engines, one or two were run continuously with additional machines brought on to handle peak sewerage flow. The Pumping Station log books show that from 1912, the No. 8 Engine was used heavily for the first decade of its life. In the 1920s and 30s the old steam engines were progressively replaced by electric engines which were cheaper to run. No. 8 was used less often, but was still important for managing peak periods.

There was a regular flow pattern coinciding with the daily cranking up of industrial and domestic activities. Curator Matthew Churchward describes a peak on Mondays when many women did the week's laundry. The superintendant would also keep a close eye on the weather and impending rainfall, and counted raindrops to predict how many staff would be needed to manage the stormwater that would be on its way to Spotswood within a couple of hours. During big storms, all the engines might be running to prevent sewerage from entering the Yarra River.

During its working life from 1911 to 1947, the No. 8 Engine pumped the equivalent of four billion toilet flushes out of the city. It was a filthy job but vital to the health and quality of life of 20th century Melbourne. If you're at Scienceworks today, be sure to wish this gleaming hulk of pistons, valves, cranks and pipes a happy birthday!

Workshop volunteer and casual engine driver Graeme Kerrs running a pumping engine demonstration in front of the No. 8 Engine.
Image: James Geer
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Centenary of the Austral Otis Steam Pumping Engines

Spotswood Sewerage Pumping Station

MV Blog: World Toilet Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

William Buckley on Australian Biography

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch this video with a transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, who looks after these Kodak moments?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

MV News: Kodak Heritage Collection

Kodak Heritage Collection on Collections Online

History of Kodak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ice tongs (ST 026528).
Source: Museum Victoria

3. Ice can be a temporary art medium.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

MV Blog: Introducing Pendle Hall

Collections Online theme: Pendle Hall Dolls' House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

William Boyd Childhood Collection

Tom Smith's complete Redheads matchbox collection 

History of Redheads matches

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 Richard Gillespie is a historian and the head of the History and Technology Department at Museum Victoria. He wrote this guest post in tribute to F. John Kendall, former Director of the Science Museum of Victoria, who died on 20 June 2011.

I never worked with John Kendall. He had retired six years before I joined the museum in 1990. But I met him at the opening of Scienceworks in 1992 and at later special events.

John Kendall, newly appointed as Director of the Science Museum of Victoria, 1975.
Source: Museum Victoria

At John’s encouragement I would call him at home whenever I was puzzled by something in a museum file, or the file didn’t seem to tell the whole story about how we acquired an object. John could always be relied on to give me a full account of the events that might have happened 30 or more years previously with astonishing recall and accuracy. Having neatly summarised an event, John would finish off with ‘You’ll be able to find all the details in File 64F’.

John trained as an agricultural scientist at the University of Melbourne in the late 1940s, and after graduating worked at the government fruit cool stores at Melbourne’s Victoria Docks. A chance encounter led to him discovering that there was a job as an agricultural scientist vacant at the Museum of Applied Science. He knocked on the director’s door and landed the job. He would later recall: ‘I adapted instantly to the Museum environment. I was paid for doing what I loved doing’.

In what was a small institution running on a tiny budget, John’s curatorial work included designing and even building new displays. He measured and cut the backing boards for the existing showcases, and breaking with tradition, he rejected the traditional white gloss paint in favour of pink, blue and green paint. Then he sat down to cut out the letters with stencils for the headings, and type the labels.

John Kendall and Ruth Leveson, early 1980s.
Source: Museum Victoria

John made a huge impact on the museum’s collections, particularly by documenting and collecting significant Victorian and Australian inventions. The museum had acquired the first Australian-built aircraft, John Duigan’s 1910 biplane, back in 1920. But it was John Kendall that conducted the research that documented this landmark in Australian aviation. Happily John was able to attend the Duigan centenary celebrations held by the museum last year.

He believed passionately that as well as understanding contemporary scientific and technical principles, students and scientists alike needed to appreciate the history of scientific and technical development.

Intrigued by the fact that the museum held one of the suits of the Kelly Gang armour, John became historical detective and tracked down the other three sets of armour; one set was cast aside in the police horse stables in South Melbourne, a kind of government dumping ground for old things from which John rescued other historic artefacts.

In 1975 John became director of the Science Museum of Victoria. He was to be its last, as in 1983 the National Museum and Science Museum were merged into Museum Victoria. The consummate administrator, John wrote much of the Museums Act of 1983, and was acting director of the merged institution until a director was appointed. On his retirement he continued as a museum consultant, notably providing advice on the development of science museums in India for the Indian Government and International Council of Museums. A Rotarian for over 30 years, John chaired the local committee that organised the World Congress of Rotarians in Melbourne in 1993.

I will miss those phone conversations, but I know I will constantly encounter John’s precise and instructive notes in our museum archives, whenever I am searching for additional information about an object.

John Kendall riding his bicycle.
Source: Museum Victoria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One last thing about winter – I love beanies.

Stay comfy, Dr Andi

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Origins: Italian migration

Costante Imports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Ornithology Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Play and Folklore archive (1981-current)

Collections Online: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

Infosheet: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a huge achievement for all involved:

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

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

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

Links:

Lantern slides on Collections Online

The Magic Lantern Society (UK)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Royal Society of Victoria: Burke & Wills Commemoration program

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

This guest post is from Jan Molloy, a teacher who now works at the Immigration Museum. She develops education programs and works on partnership projects with schools.

How do you bring a gaggle of students from across Victoria together with prominent historians into one classroom? Virtually, that’s how!

Making History is an interactive website where students can research their community’s history, interact with professional historians and access Museum Victoria’s online collection. By sharing research and stories on the Making History channel, students will showcase their work while contributing to the knowledge and collections of the museum. Making History is a collaboration between the DEECD, Museum Victoria and the Public History Department at Monash University. It will launch in June 2011 but in March we held two pilot online sessions.

On Friday 25 March, Professor Graeme Davison spoke with more than 40 students from Maffra Secondary College, Fairhills High School and ,Sacred Heart College, Kyneton and the Victorian School of Languages, about his work as a historian. He answered questions from the virtual floor for over an hour, using the web to link the computer lab at Melbourne Museum to classrooms across Victoria. Students moved from personal queries like:

If you got to own one of the things in a museum what would it be?

to

What happens when you have something at home that looks old but you don’t know its history and no one in your family does?

 Screenshot from Making History pilot session.
Source: Museum Victoria

In a second session on 30 March, Dr. Seamus O’Hanlon  responded to questions in a virtual classroom of over 100 students. Our very keen Year 9s from Maffra and Fairhills Secondary Colleges returned and were joined by students from Castlemaine North Primary School, Tongala PS, Kyabram P-12 and Lalbert Primary School. Their questions ranged from:

Why do you like your job as an historian?

to

How do you research the history of a building without using the internet?

 Screen shot from the Making History pilot session: Seamus tours students around a site about architectural history.
Source: Museum Victoria

The participating students were inspired by their chats with Seamus and Graeme and were keen to start their own research. We look forward to seeing some fantastic work from these students.

Links:

History education resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

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

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

Leadbeater's Possum on Collections Online

Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum

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

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

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

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

Links:

MV Blog: Benalla, then and now

2005 Irish Festival at the Immigration Museum

Origins: History of immigration from Ireland and Northern Ireland

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queen Cakes

1 lb flour

½ lb butter

½ lb pounded loaf sugar

3 eggs

1 teacupful of cream

½ lb currants

1 teaspoonfull of soda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are you marking International Women's Day?

Links:

International Women's Day

Australian Women's History Forum

MV News: From Little Things

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Selling Pasta to Melbourne - the La Tosca story

Marvellous Melbourne: Café Culture

Borghesi Family Collection on Collections Online

MV Melbourne Food and Wine Festival events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

ABC Radio National: interview with curator Michael Reason on ByDesign

On Friday 25 February Immigration Discovery Centre participated in the annual Shake Your Family Tree. Organised by the National Archives of Australia (NAA), this is a national event that brings together family history experts in one location for an entire day.

Along with six other institutions, including State Library of Victoria, Public Record Office of Victoria, and Genealogical Society of Victoria, we set up our stand in the foyer of the VAC in North Melbourne and helped many enthusiastic visitors with questions about doing their family history research.

Advising a visitor at Shake Your Family Tree.
Image: Anna Koh
Source: National Archives of Australia

A number of seminars were presented on the day and I did a talk on Revealing objects & stories from Museum Victoria's Migration Collection. In this, I discussed the power of objects to tell a story and the way museums use them in their exhibitions, programs and online resources. As an example, I told the story of one particular migrant through the medium of some objects related to her life that are part of the Migration Collection. Lastly, I encouraged my audience to see if they could utilise any objects in their own homes to further enrich their family history research.

Nicole speaking on the MV Migration Collection.
Image: Anna Koh
Source: National Archives of Australia

Museum Victoria also participated in a Conservation Clinic, where members of the public could bring in their precious documents or objects for advice on how to protect and conserve them.

All in all it was a great day and we are already looking forward to next year!

A Museum Victoria conservator gives advice at the Conservation Clinic.
Image: Anna Koh
Source: National Archives of Australia

Links:

Museum Victoria Migration Collection

SLV Family Matters blog: Shake Your Family Tree 2011 style

National Archives of Victoria

Public Record Office of Victoria

Genealogical Society of Victoria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links:

Newmarket Saleyards Collection

MV Blog: Newmarket Saleyards turn 150

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

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

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

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

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

Covered walkways between the stock pens at the Newmarket Saleyards where auctioneers stood and conducted sales.
Image: Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Regional stockyards led to the decline of Newmarket which finally closed in 1987. Museum Victoria acquired significant objects from Newmarket and volunteer Jackie Gatt has been working with curator Liza Dale-Hallett to document the collection, which is featured on Collections Online this month.

You can still see bluestone paving, stock pens, covered walkways and brick buildings on the site, but new housing occupies much of the original 57 acres. Every year since its closure, drovers, agents and auctioneers who worked at Newmarket hold a reunion on the third Saturday of February each year to catch up with old friends. This year there will also be a community celebration day on Sunday 20 February, 11am-2pm, to honour the 150th anniversary.

Detail of the Newmarket Saleyard mosaics, featuring Bill Glenn, a drover at the Newmarket Saleyards, and his cattle dog.
Image: mural artist Elizabeth McKinnon, photographer Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Newmarket Collection on Collections Online

Brochure about Newmarket Collection (PDF, 2Mb)

ABC Landline: Saleyard of the Century

Poster for Community Day on 20 February (PDF, 6.2Mb)

In 2008, senior curator David Demant gave a talk about CSIRAC at the Computer History Museum in California's Silicon Valley. CSIRAC is the only surviving first-generation computer in the world, and is a key item in MV's Information and Communication Collection.

Following David's visit, two CSIRAC items were borrowed by the Computer History Museum for their new exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. The objects - a replica paper tape that holds a CSIRAC program and an amplifier from CSIRAC's memory - feature in a section called 'The Birth of the Computer' beside the 1953 computer JOHNIAC.

Display case containing CSIRAC amplifier and paper tape at the Computer History Museum.
Source: Computer History Museum

JOHNIAC on display in the exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
Source: Computer History Museum

It's great to see an Australian-built computer - and the fourth computer ever built - represented in this important timeline of computing history.

Links:

CSIRAC: Australia's First Computer

What's On: CSIRAC

Computer History Museum

The tennis is over for another year; some people are still looking for their long-lost remotes so they can change channel and others have made a mental note to reapply sunscreen with more regularity. I’m not actually a fan of the tennis (apologies - this is very un-Melburnian of me) but my inner curious cat or simple animal instinct not to go outside in the searing heat at lunchtime led me to hunt for tennis items in MV collections. So here are five things about tennis that will be useful to mention to your tennis friends as they recover from being dedicated spectators.

1. Before the 1970s tennis balls used to be white (not fluoro green). 

Apparently the fluorescent colour was introduced in 1972 after some research showed viewers could see the ball much better on television.

Tennis balls and bag, circa 1950 or later (SH 880567)
Source: Museum Victoria

2. Tennis balls were produced as merchandise in support of Melbourne's bid to host the 1996 Olympics.

In 1956 when Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games, tennis was not yet reinstated as an Olympic sport. Tennis was an Olympic event in the first modern Olympics in 1896 but then got dropped from the games after 1924. It returned as a medal event in 1988. (Trust me - you’ll need this info for your next trivia night.)

Tennis Ball - Olympics for Melbourne, 1996 (SH 910002)
Source: Museum Victoria

3. Scandals featuring tennis players are nothing new.

According to History and Technology Collections Online:

Tennis player Billie Jean King became the first high-profile US athlete to come out as a lesbian in 1981 when she revealed her relationship with Marilyn Barnett. The revelation cost her a fortune in endorsements. She said at the time that the long-term affair had been a 'mistake', angering lesbians and gays. She was supported by her husband in a financial claim mounted by Marilyn, but they later divorced, and Billie said that the term 'mistake' had referred to being unfaithful rather than to being a lesbian.

Hmmm, today it might have attracted endorsements from increased exposure in glossy gossip magazines.

Badge - We All Make Mistakes, Wimbledon Dance, 1981 (SH 920477)
Source: Museum Victoria

4. You might meet your future spouse at a tennis club.

St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, West Hawthorn, had its own tennis club. At the opening in 1925, the Parish Priest sanctified the courts. It was said many members met their marriage partners at this club. After the 1970s non-Catholics were allowed to join.

The two courts were originally dirt and later asphalt and they clearly didn’t have 3a water restrictions back then. The club closed in 1988 and the sign ended up here at the museum.

Painted masonite sign from St. Joseph's Tennis Club (SH 890354)
Source: Museum Victoria

I also found this delightful shot of tennis club players in Geelong Victoria circa 1935 (with ladies in their lovely blazers). I am baffled at the unbroken windows in such close proximity to a tennis court.

Four men and two women of the Noble Street Church Tennis Club standing by the net. Geelong, Victoria, circa 1935 (MM 006631)
Source: Museum Victoria

5. Early tennis rackets were made of wood and catgut.

The ‘cat’ in catgut is short for cattle rather than cat of the feline variety. The tennis racket strings were once made from a cow's intestinal wall and they were stored clamped in a frame to stop the highly strung wooden rackets from warping.

Tennis Racquet and Press - Slazenger Tournament Model (SH 891665)
Source: Museum Victoria

Have you ever looked down at the footpath in Melbourne's CBD and wondered about those 20cm round bronze plaques that seem to lead a trail through the city? Well, they are the path of the Golden Mile Heritage Trail. This walking tour explores Melbourne's buildings, laneways, streets, characters and history from its beginnings through to modern times. And, on a beautiful sunny Melbourne morning last week, I went to discover what it was all about!

The tour started at Federation Square, on the intersection of Swanston and Flinders Streets, one of Melbourne's liveliest spots for over 150 years. Our tour guide set the scene for the rest of the walk, describing the history of the buildings around us. From the 1852 gold rush era St Paul's Cathedral on one corner to the famous Young & Jackson's pub of 1861 opposite; from the Federation era opulence of Flinders Street Station of 1910, to the ultra contemporary public spaces of Federation Square, this intersection provides a physical snapshot of the city's history.

Sandridge Bridge
Image: Nicole Davis
Source: Museum Victoria

We next walked along the Yarra talking about how Melbourne was built up around this spot from its beginnings as an Aboriginal meeting place to the coming of Europeans to today. We chatted about some of the characters in the city's early history, such as John Batman, John Pascoe Fawkner and Robert Hoddle, and how they shaped the city. Our guide also pointed out interesting sites like the outlet for the creek that runs under Elizabeth Street and the Sandridge Bridge. This Bridge was originally a railway bridge and was the line that took immigrant passengers from Port Melbourne to Flinders Street Station before embarking on a new life in Australia. Now a pedestrian bridge, its sculptures and text panels explore the waves of people,from Melbourne's Indigenous inhabitants onward who have crossed the river on this spot.

Immigration Museum was next, where the tour officially starts. I turned tour guide for a few minutes, guiding our guide through the Immigration Discovery Centre and explaining what we do here.

The Travellers, Sandridge Bridge
Image: Nicole Davis
Source: Museum Victoria  Rutherglen House, Highlander Lane
Image: Nicole Davis
Source: Museum Victoria

We then meandered through some of my favourite sites in Melbourne - its laneways! I got to pop my head inside the Mitre Tavern and found out the fascinating history of the Savage Club, plus discovered a new spot I hadn't previously known about and will definitely be popping back to. Rutherglen House is an 1850s bluestone residence/warehouse located on Highlander Lane. Today it's still a private residence!

After our little laneway exploration, we wandered up Collins Street discussing the progress of Marvellous Melbourne and the boom and bust of the 1880s to 1890s. Despite the many modern office blocks that I always feel characterise Collins Street, there are actually a surprising number of buildings from the 1870s to 1900 period that survive. There are some fabulous opulent buildings like the Gothic ANZ bank building on the corner of Elizabeth Street and the adjoining Stock Exchange. I also really enjoyed seeing the way the 1890s Rialto and Winfield buildings have been incorporated into the Intercontinental Hotel and Rialto Towers.

Rialto Building from Collins Street
Image: Nicole Davis
Source: Museum Victoria

The tour ended another hour later with some of Melbourne's famous arcades: the Block Arcade from the 1890s; Howey Place, next to which the famous Cole's Book Arcade was once located; and the controversial Capitol Arcade, developed in the 1960s.

As you can see the tour was densely packed and I could write reams on more of the great stories that our guide had to impart. He was amazingly knowledgeable, gave fabulous detailed accounts, and brought to life Melbourne's history for me. Most of all, he answered my constant questions with good grace and love of his subject. As a student of urban history, it was a fascinating insight and a great opportunity to talk with someone who had an in-depth knowledge of these places. If you want to get to know Melbourne, whether you're a visitor or a local, I highly recommend going on one of these walking tours.

Links:

You can see more images of the tour and find out how to book on the Immigration Museum Website.

From the 1950s to 2009, the western forecourt of the Royal Exhibition Building was an asphalt car park - useful, but hardly befitting the World Heritage classification of the site. Certainly there was no trace of the ornamental garden planted there for the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.

Cue World Heritage, World Futures: a major project that began in October 2009. Funding for this project was provided form the Victorian Property Fund on the approval of the Minister for Consumer Affairs.

The project's three phases: excavation of the site to recover artefacts from the original 1880s garden, installation of an enormous rainwater storage tank, and restoration of the heritage garden and circular drive - are almost complete. 

Landscapers have installed the watering system and are now preparing the ground for planting. Within the next month the project will be finished and a beautiful water-wise garden will return to Rathdowne Street.

This extensive watering system will use the water from the new rainwater storage tank to ensure the garden stay lush and green sustainably.
Source: Museum Victoria

So keep an eye on the final flurry of activity behind those purple hoardings this month; the World Heritage, World Futures blog contains posts on the project's progress from the very beginning if you'd like to know more.

Hoardings around the project building site with a glimpse of the restored circular driveway.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Royal Exhibition Building

World Heritage, World Futures

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

This guest post is by Catherine McLennan. As part of her Master of Public History, Catherine completed a student internship with Museum Victoria, working with Senior Curator Liza Dale-Hallett on a special object that was acquired for the Victorian Bushfires Collection. This collection recently won the 2010 Arts Portfolio Leadership Award in the Community Leadership category.

This year I was given the opportunity to work on the Victorian Bushfires Collection. In my role as student intern, I was assigned to research a tree-shaped sculpture, interview its makers and create some stories for publication on Museum Victoria’s Collections Online. When I first laid eyes on this beautiful piece of art, I had no idea who made it, why they made it, or what it represented. It was time for some research…

The Thank You Gift
Source: Museum VictoriaAfter a few phone calls, I learnt that the sculpture was created in the Kinglake Ranges by local woodworker Glenn Barlow and local blacksmith Ray Brasser, using wood and metal that had been salvaged from their properties following the 2009 Victorian bushfires. Glenn and Ray presented this sculpture to the ex-Premier of Victoria John Brumby at a concert that was held at Federation Square, Melbourne, on 10 April 2010 – the Thank You Melbourne and Victoria concert. The purpose of this concert was to thank the people of Victoria for their generosity in the wake of Black Saturday and the sculpture was made as a physical token of this ‘thank you’ message.

In September I travelled to Kinglake to meet and interview Ray, Glenn and three other people that were involved in organising the Thank You Melbourne and Victoria concert. It was an honour to meet these people. All of them had been through some terrible experiences during and after the fires, but despite this, they were so welcoming and had a great sense of humour. Organising the Thank You concert was, for them, a way of channelling their grief and getting local musicians, artists and poets involved in the recovery process whilst simultaneously saying ‘thank you’.

Researching the Thank You Gift was an incredible experience that I will never forget. I would like to thank those who were so generous in sharing their stories with me (they know who they are), and to Museum Victoria for hosting my student internship.

Links:

2010 Arts Portfolio Leadership Awards

Thank You Gift on Collections Online

Making of the Thank You Gift

Thank You Melbourne and Victoria concert

The History & Technology Department is steadily listing the vast International Harvester Collection on Collections Online. This collection of over 50,000 items records the operations, products and manufacturing of the Australian subsidiary of the International Harvester Company. This US-based company began selling its agricultural machinery and trucks in Australia in 1902. Local manufacturing in Victoria began in the late 1930s.

The IH Collection includes colour transparencies which are particularly interesting because colour photography was still quite rare in the 1940s. It’s unusual to see scenes of this era captured in vivid reds and blues and greens.

Horse-drawn GL-60 plough manufactured by International Harvester, 1940. This is one of several colour transparencies in the collection. (MM 115209)
Source: Museum Victoria

Nearly 200 images are now online and more will be listed in coming months. Curator David Crotty is keen to hear from anyone who could help identify some of the people in the images, particularly the photos of farmers and town residents who attended presentations by International Harvester sales reps.

A group of International Harvester salesmen presenting the Farmall A Tractor in Albury, 1940. The company embarked upon regional tours demonstrating its agricultural machinery. (MM 115021)
Source: Museum Victoria

Group of farmers from Cohuna outside International Harvester factory, Geelong, 1940. (MM 115033)
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

International Harvester Collection

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

This guest post is by Charlotte Smith, Senior Curator, Public & Institutional Life, who is in Paris researching the John Twycross 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition Building Collection for an upcoming book. This collection comprises 175 exquisite decorative arts objects purchased by wealthy wool merchant John Twycross at the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.

I thought my finds last Friday at the Archives Nationales de Paris were pretty impressive – floor plans of the French courts, showing where each exhibitor was located, with a key – but today things got even better. I uncovered a document titled Section des Beaux-Arts. Oeuvres vendues a Melbourne [translation: Fine Art Section. Artworks sold in Melbourne]. The document is a list of 47 artworks. It describes the artist, title of work, purchaser and purchase price. What is really exciting for my research is John Twycross is mentioned eight times!

A record of purchases from the French Court. Twycross is listed third from the top.
Image: C. Smith
Source: Museum Victoria

He spent £806, the equivalent to a little over $63,000 today. While we don't have these paintings in the Twycross Collection, knowing more of what John purchased at the exhibition is really exciting, and adds to our understanding of the scope of the collection he amassed at the 1880 Exhibition.

Accompanying documents describe how artworks could be purchased from the French Court; one had to go to the French Consulate office on Collins Street between 10 and 4 weekdays, where a clerk was always 'ready to give the prices asked for such paintings by the artists'.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris was built for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. This was one in a series of World's Fairs that included the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition. The tradition of World's Fairs took off after the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.
Image: C. Smith
Source: Museum Victoria

Links

The Twycross Collection

The 1880 and 1888 International Exhibitions

Royal Exhibition Builidng: Site of two World Fairs

What happens after archaeologists dig up thousands of pieces of historical material? Where do they go next? And who will care for them in years to come?

These questions were central to a recent symposium at Melbourne Museum. Jointly sponsored by Museum Victoria, La Trobe University and the Australian Research Council (ARC), the symposium was organised by Dr Charlotte Smith, a senior curator at Museum Victoria. The symposium, called Developing sustainable, strategic collection management approaches for Archaeological Assemblages, invited local and international guests to discuss the problem shared by institutions around the world – what to do with boxes and boxes of artefacts.

Rows and rows of archaeological material in storage at Museum Victoria.
Image: Veegan McMasters
Source: Museum Victoria

Charlotte’s curatorial duties include oversight of the Commonwealth Block assemblage, which is the world’s largest 19th century urban assemblage. It comprises 508,000 individual fragments that were excavated from the site bordered by Lonsdale, Exhibition, Little Lonsdale and Spring Streets in Melbourne. It was painstakingly documented and has phenomenal research and exhibition potential, but this is not always the case. Some assemblages excavated in the 1980s arrived at the museum with such scant records that we don't even know where they were dug up.

Some archaeolgocial material is poorly documented; we don’t even know where this particular box of artefacts came from.
Image: Veegan McMasters
Source: Museum Victoria

The idea of sustainability, explained Charlotte, refers to cultural and social sustainability. “It’s making sure we hand on to future generations collections that are manageable.” When it comes to the idea of significance, the perspective of archaeologists and museums are slightly different. “When a museum develops a collection, you can limit your collecting from the start. But in archaeology you can’t make those kinds of decisions because the whole of the record is important and you can’t predict how big it will be.”

Speakers at the archaeological assemblage symposium. L-R: Tim Murray, Nick Merriman, Charlotte Smith, Maryanne McCubbin and Terry Childs.
Source: Museum Victoria

By training museum workers in archaeology and vice versa, both groups better understand the perspective of the other. Museum Victoria has a great working relationship with local archaeologists, but not every institution has access to such experts. Until recently, archaeologists rarely received training in collection management and Charlotte talked about the importance for people to have skills in both areas.

Charlotte is very pleased with the outcomes of the symposium about what she describes as “a huge and interesting problem.” The symposium participants were pragmatic in their approach and agreed that better planning at the dig stage of a project, including on-site significance assessment, would help keep these large, important historical assemblages manageable for future generations.

Links

Unearthing Little Lon

Casselden Place on Collections Online

Archaeology on the World Heritage, World Futures blog