24 September 2014

A Spirited opening event

The National Museum celebrated Australia’s horse story with the official launch of its new exhibition Spirited last week. The opening event mustered together horse enthusiasts from across the country, many of them having contributed their stories to the exhibition. Animal trainer Zelie Bullen opened the exhibiton by sharing her own horse stories, including those from the set of War Horse. Many more stories were shared as guests mingled and looked through the exhibition for...
Categories Horses/Museum practice/Uncategorised
12 September 2014

A Botanical life – a new chapter

It’s truly serendipitous how the fabrics of our lives sometimes manage to weave themselves into fortuitous little knots of connection, and it seems that just such a knot led to this guest blog post – exploring two women’s contemporary lives in the bush – by Pappinbarra River valley resident Chay Khamsone and her neighbour-come-colleague Bryony Anderson. You see, not long ago, I wrote an article titled “A botanical life”, which...
Categories Climate change/Landscapes/Uncategorised
15 August 2014

Striking new horse portraits by Margrete Erling

A few months ago we introduced painter Margrete Erling and her works that powerfully convey the significance of horses within Australian history, see Painting horses. In the meantime, Margrete has finished two striking new paintings. ‘Brumby’ honours the contribution of stock horses to the Australian pastoral industry, and ‘Pit Pony’ records the lives of horses bred to work in the cold darkness of underground coal mines.
Categories Art/Horses/Uncategorised
30 July 2014

Toxic tales from the Pilliga

The Pilliga is a beaten-up burnt-out forest where the creeks flow underground and the trees grow barely as wide as a child’s arm. Its grasses have been eaten and its soils pulverised, its timber ringbarked and wood-chipped. It is criss-crossed with fire breaks and narrow old logging roads. Wild boars tear out from its sandy watercourses and wind whips dust into your eyes here.

And yet there are a bunch of people lining up to get arrested – to turn their lives upside down – for this ‘scrub’. What’s going on in North West New South Wales?
Categories Climate change/Food/Landscapes
16 July 2014

The Strange Case of Professor Tipper: cyclist extraordinaire

In what must surely rate as one of the most bizarre career choices in Australian history, Alfred Henry Tipper, a 6 ft 2 inches tall Victorian man, decided to start making his own range of tiny bicycles and tour the globe. The National Museum recently acquired a postcard depicting the intriguing Mr Tipper, in 1919, showing off one of his-10 inch bicycles and his ability to ride while carrying two children. We...
Categories Cycling
9 July 2014

‘Par avion’ – French for ‘by airmail’

While visiting Australia during 1914, French aviator Maurice Guillaux flew his Bleriot monoplane to deliver Australia’s first official airmail, flying from Melbourne to Sydney on 16-18 July. Over this coming weekend, the The Aviation Historical Society of NSW, with the assistance of Australia Post, will lead the centenary celebrations for this significant event, through a re-enactment flight by Owen Zupp in his Jabiru and accompanying aviators and aircraft. Although the idea of carrying...
Categories Aviation/Uncategorised
3 July 2014

A horse tricycle and SO much more…!

The Museum recently acquired a single family’s impressive collection of nearly 350 toys and we are marking the arrival with the display of one of the most beautiful pieces in its number – a 1920s horse tricycle. The trike, like the rest of the toys in the Susan and Andrew Gibson collection, belonged to a single generation of children in whose memory the collection was donated and named – the enviable...
Categories Cycling/Horses/Uncategorised
27 June 2014

Science & suburbs: new stories about food

We’ve uploaded some fascinating new pages onto the Museum’s Food Stories website. The pages feature a stump-jump plough, and reveal its close ties to Majura Primary School, our Food Stories partner school in the ACT. Majura Primary School students live in houses built upon paddocks and scientific plots formerly managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which operated the Dickson Experiment Station on the lower slopes of Mount Majura between 1940 and...
Categories Uncategorised
13 June 2014

Cycling revolution? Velo-City Global 2014: a personal view

There’s a scene in the 1999 blockbuster The Matrix that kept jumping into my mind during the annual international cycling conference Velo-City Global held in Adelaide in May. In a flash restaurant, one of Neo’s (Keanu Reeves’) collaborators is making a deal with the enemy, the machines. He bites into a piece of steak admitting that while he knows it is merely a virtual construction that makes it seem juicy...
Categories Climate change/Cycling/Museum practice