Kirsten Wehner – The People & Environment Blog

17 August 2015

It’s normal! Women in science

Why is it that most Australian scientists are men? It may be, as University of NSW professor of engineering Veena Sahajwalla argued last year in The Australian, because people tend to think of science as ‘male’ rather than ‘female’.

Museum practice/Plants/Science/Uncategorised

21 April 2015

Seeing seaweed

I’ve never really been all that keen on seaweed. At least, not until recently, when a nineteenth century album of pressed seaweed specimens began to open my eyes to the wonderful world of marine macroalgae. Now I find seaweed changing how I see and think about Australia.

Climate change/Landscapes/Museum practice/Plants/Seaweed/Uncategorised/Water

1 September 2014

Armpit and Arabian racing

Like, I suspect, many Australians, I have always thought of racehorses (or at least the non-harnessed variety) as Thoroughbreds, but Arabian enthusiast Virginia Dodson recently opened my eyes to the part her favourite breed has played in Australian racing.

Horses/Uncategorised

1 May 2014

Painting horses

Horses have fascinated Australian artists for just on two centuries. The first locally produced work to feature a horse is thought to be a watercolour by an unknown artist who, in 1804, depicted mounted troopers confronting rebels at the Castle Hill uprising near Sydney. Since then, hundreds of painters, sketchers, illustrators, photographers and sculptors have set out to capture the character and charisma of horses and the meaning and nature...

Horses/Uncategorised

28 January 2014

What bird (egg) is that?

How many species of birds can you identify just by looking at the size, shape and colour of their eggs? For me, the answer is probably one or two, so I recently asked collection donor Bill Gibbs and ornithologist Dick Schodde to visit the Museum to help describe the species represented in some 276 bird eggs. For me, engaging with these beautiful eggs provoked complicated thoughts of loss and appreciation.

Birds/Museum practice

17 January 2014

Horses and horsepower

In a few weeks time, on the 25th February, the Royal Automobile Club of Australia will be celebrating the Year of the Horse with its inaugural Horsepower Dinner. The club is generously donating to the National Museum $30 for each person booked for the event to help support our Horses in Australia project, and especially our exhibition which opens in September. You can find more details about the dinner, and how to purchase tickets, here.

Horses

24 December 2013

Under the tree this Christmas

The Museum’s People and the Environment team is heading off on holidays, but we’ve left you a few ‘gifts’ to enjoy over the summer holidays. To help you pass those lovely lazy days we’ve just launched new pages on our People and the Environment website. If you’re following the Horses in Australia project, you’ll enjoy a glimpse of our forthcoming exhibition, opening in Canberra in September 2014. We’ve included some of our first ideas about what the show will look like, but we still...

Food/Horses/Rabbits

13 December 2013

Equine CSI

In every curator, there’s surely a bit of the forensic investigator and I’m currently playing sleuth in an excellent mystery – an equine ‘who-is-it’. When the National Museum’s Horses in Australia curatorial team started work on the project earlier this year, one of our first tasks was to discover what the Museum already held in its collection’s relating to equine and equestrian history. We searched through our online collection database,...

Horses/Museum practice

21 November 2013

The reef

How do we imagine the Great Barrier Reef? Does how we see this amazing marine environment decide whether or how we care for it? The Great Barrier Reef stretches along the Queensland coast for over 3,000 kilometres, an intricate ecosystem including hundreds of kinds of corals, sponges, molluscs, rays, fish, birds, turtles, whales, dugongs, dolphins, plants, microscopic organisms, sea-water flows, sunshine and, of course, people.

Landscapes

5 November 2013

A visit with the ancestors

This afternoon, Australians around the country have once again take a few minutes to join in our nation’s annual bout of horseracing hijinks, known as the Melbourne Cup, and the winning owners have just happily taken possession of the elegant gold trophy. Here at the National Museum, Cup season has already been in full swing for a few weeks, kicked off in September when this year’s trophy stopped in for a brief visit with the 1866...

Horses

22 October 2013

Australia’s favourite birds

Have you seen a pennantian parrot lately? Do wattled bee-eaters live in your backyard? What about the crested goatsucker or the white vented crow? This week is BirdLife Australia’s annual Bird Week, and, to celebrate, the conservation organisation is inviting Australians to vote for their favourite bird. This avian election prompted my colleague Martha Sear and I to wonder which species the first British settlers in Australia might have selected as...

Birds

18 October 2013

Collecting the future

How should museums engage and respond to climate change? How can we use our collections, exhibitions and programs and our traditions of fostering conversation and debate to help communities make sense of this global challenge? A few weeks ago, I travelled to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in the United States, to talk with other curators, educators, scientists and scholars about these complicated and challenging questions....

Climate change/Museum practice

20 September 2013

Skyscapes and heritage

How often do we look up and wonder ‘What’s the cultural value of a patch of blue sky?’ A few days ago, international urban conservation expert Dr Ron van Oers prompted me to consider this very question. Ron was at the National Museum to present a public lecture discussing the evolution and achievements of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre’s ‘Historic Urban Landscape Initiative’. This initiative, launched in 2005, aims to...

Uncategorised

18 September 2013

A blog about dogs

… and about cats, horses, plants, viruses, rocks, farms, houses, roads, bicycles and the diverse and intriguing ways in which Australians are inter-connected with them all. Welcome to our new People & Environment Blog. This is a place for members of the National Museum of Australia’s People and the Environment program to talk about our work collecting, researching, writing, talking and exhibiting about Australians’ relationships with their physical environments.

Cycling/Horses

Author: Kirsten Wehner