8 November 2013

Taking it to the limit – the ‘extreme’ sport of six-day bicycle racing

It’s difficult for us today to imagine a cycling competition where, as The Mercury (Hobart) reported on 17 February 1897, ‘exhausted riders [were] lifted from and on to their wheels and carried to and from their quarters, their joints swollen and inflamed, barely able to see, with wandering mind, and only kept in a conscious condition by the efforts of trainers and physicians.’ The occasion referred to by the Mercury’s shocked and disapproving correspondent was a six-day bicycle...
Categories Cycling
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...
Categories 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...
Categories 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....
Categories Climate change/Museum practice
9 October 2013

An early morning view of Melbourne

The installation of new objects to our galleries is often done in the mornings, before the Museum opens to the public. Staff members from curatorial, conservation, registration and exhibitions are all involved in the process. A recent addition to our Landmarks gallery is this wood engraving showing a panoramic view of Melbourne by the artist, Thomas Carrington. It was originally published as a supplement to the Melbourne weekly paper, The Australasian, and shows the rapid expansion...
Categories Uncategorised
1 October 2013

Every dog has its day

The story of Nelson the Newfoundland’s collar is a classic tale of Melbourne in the late nineteenth century – dog rescues cab driver from drowning in Swanston Street. Walking in central Melbourne when storm clouds gathered was a risky business – dozens of people were killed or injured in torrents of stormwater that rushed down city streets laid over ancient watercourses leading to the River Yarra. But recovering the story...
Categories Dogs/Uncategorised
29 September 2013

Food: connections and resilience

‘Eating is an ecological act’, wise farmer and writer Wendell Berry famously wrote in his 1989 essay ‘The Pleasures of Eating’. Ecological thinking reveals connections, enacts relationships. At the National Museum of American History, one branch of the great Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, a new exhibition titled ‘Food: transforming the American table 1950-2000’ contains a fascinating array of historical objects that enable understanding about the embeddedness of our bodies, through eating,...
Categories Climate change/Food
27 September 2013

What the new IPCC report doesn’t say

Cultural institutions like the National Museum of Australia specialise in storytelling. We use collections to engage people in conversations about the meanings and the emotional aspects of environmental and social change. The Diana Boyer collection, for example, contains remarkable artworks, some of which creatively link one Australian farmer’s detailed knowledge of local plant and animal species with the globalised dynamics of climate change.
Categories Climate change
25 September 2013

Everybody had an ‘Aunty Ivy’

…or an Aunty Hilda or an Aunty Edna. There is something very familiar and comforting about ‘Aunty Ivy’. The character was introduced to the ‘Life. Be in it.’ public health campaign in the late 1980s, as a contrast to couch potato, ‘Norm’, who spent his days watching television. ‘Aunty Ivy’ was energetic and encouraged people to get out into the garden, enjoy the fresh air and, without even realising it,...
Categories Gardening
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...
Categories Uncategorised