While I was in Sydney, I kept seeing a bunch of billboards advertising the King Tutankhamun exhibit in Melbourne. When I decided to come to Melbourne, I had to opportunity to go to the exhibition. So I went and found the museum. I initially went on a Sunday, just to find out about the exhibit and how to get tickets and all. Well, Sunday is a peak day for the exhibit, and like a good capitalist venture, they charge more on a Sunday. It's a good thing I wasn't interested in seeing it on the weekend. It's actually about 20% more to go on the weekend. I think that's a bit ridiculous. The regular museum exhibits are all the same price, no matter what day you visit though. So I thought maybe I would visit the museum one day and then come another day to see King Tut. When I enquired about whether I would be able to buy just a King Tut ticket, I was informed that the regular exhibits were included in the ticket. So I scratched that idea and decided to visit the whole museum on the same day. I was hoping, of course, that the King Tut exhibit wasn't going to be so engrossing that I would spend all of my time there and not have time for the regular exhibits. Sometimes I surprise myself and how naïve I can be. But then, Calgary is a small potatoes city and we don't get a lot of those big exhibits in town. So I guess I can be forgiven.
It was around about this time that I noticed the board with times for the King Tut exhibit. There were half hour intervals for entrance and you bought an entry time. On this day almost all the times were full and the others said that entrance tickets were limited. Well, that was good, I thought. There would be no huge rush of people. It would be controlled and not crushingly crowded. I decided I had better check out the situation for the next day. I didn't want to arrive and not be able to get in because it was sold out. I was told that a lot of school groups were coming in during the early part of the week and that it would be best to get a ticket beforehand. So I did. My time was 1:30-2:00, so I would have plenty of time to view the rest of the museum. Or so I thought.
The next day, I headed to the museum bright and early for opening time at 10:00. The Melbourne Museum is built right next to the Royal Exhibition Building, an old landmark and the building where the first Australian Parliament was convened. It's old and Victorian and speaks of the past.
By contrast, the Museum is a thoroughly modern building.
The two styles contrast, yet oddly complement each other as well and the two buildings work well so close together. (Althought it doesn't necessarily show in this photo.
Inside, the museum is engrossing. They have all the usual sorts of things that can be found in national museums. There is representation of the history of the country, the history of the previous peoples (in this case, the Aborigines), a broader representation of the world, as well as the natural world. But where many museums that I have visited are kind of dull, with visitors only looking and reading, the Melbourne Museum has lots for the visitor to actually do.
I began by turning left from the entrance and heading towards the Aboriginal area. At the back of the museum is an area where they have a little garden that espouses the cooperation between the Aboriginal groups and the museum to build an accurate look at Aboriginal history, culture, and contemporary contributions. In contrast to what I saw in the Kakadu National Park, it seemed that here, that cooperation was real. Inside the actual Aboriginal exhibit no photos were allowed as there are cultural taboos against the display of images of people who have died. But the two areas were fascinating. The first space was dedicated to Aboriginal women and their crafts. There were all sorts of bags, hats, mats, and other things made of traditional weaving materials and using traditional techniques. As I learned in Kakadu from Gander, the only way knowledge from the older generations to the younger generations is by direct teaching and only once the young have been deemed ready for learning. There were many weaving techniques that were apparently directly attributed to a particular person, were not passed on due to a lack of prepared youth, and have been lost. That's too bad as the work was so well done. In the second section there was a number of vignettes and scenes showing the Aboriginal connection to the land. This ranged from the standard exhortations about how the Aboriginal culture cares for the land and how they listen to nature to find the path forward, to a vehicle that had been acquired by local Aborigines and converted to a hearse. The hearse was then used to convey the remains of members of the bands that had died, even years before the Aboriginal culture had been formally acknowledged (and therefore those individuals had been buried in other places), to traditional lands for “proper” burial. But there was also a small theater where a series of documentary vignettes were being shown. These told individual stories of the Aboriginal people. A person from one band or another would tell their story, and most seemed to include their connection to the land on which they were born, to which they had a connection. They were not the stereotypical Aboriginal people, wearing loin-cloths and skins with paint and tattoos, carrying spears, and other such obvious signs of Aboriginal-ness. They were well acquainted with western culture and accepted a lot of it. They also had deep respect for their roots and culture. It was a real fusion of the two and an acknowledgement of the influence of both. And the vignettes seemed to suggest a true wish to portray cooperation and peace. I could have watched those little vignettes all day. However, there was lots more to see and experience in the museum, so I tore myself away and moved on.
There was a large section on the Pacific Islands, some of which I had visited. Then it was into the section for Melbourne history. This was the one blot on the museum that I would give. The rest of the museum was well laid out and had structure and obvious planning. The Melbourne section seemed like a minor explosion. It was almost as if the curators had gone into the archives, taken all the stuff relating to Melbourne and had just thrown it into the room. Then they went and put labels on everything and let people in to see it. It was chaotic and confusing. It didn't seem to have much of a vision. But they did have a real life and life-sized version of the Australian coat of arms.
There was also the Australian claim on Phar Lap, the race horse that was New Zealand born, but bought by an Australian and raced as an Australian horse before going to the US to make a big splash, only to die under mysterious circumstances after his first big race. In some sort of arrangement to try to reconcile the claims both countries made on Phar Lap, the national museum of New Zealand got his heart and skeleton, while Melbourne Museum has the rest of him. Sounds vaguely Biblical.
In the middle of the museum was a large indoor forest. Many of the native plants and trees were there, plus a river, too. It is quite amazing to see. Beyond the forest, on the other side of the museum was the natural history section. And this was astounding to me. There was a section on the human body including, oddly, an accurate representation of the various phases and products of the digestive system, right down to the very end product. Enough said on that, I think.
There was a dinosaur section with a very large pterodactyl.
And there was a huge collection of stuffed animals, all arranged by continent of origin.
That was amazing enough, but then there were these LCD scanner screens that were placed around the room. They had some kind of camera on them that could be pointed at various animals around the area. Once a desired animal was shown on the screen, the viewer could touch the animal, whereupon a whole set of information about the animal was printed on the screen. You could even download the information onto a phone or other bluetooth-equipped device. I wish we had this kind of thing when I was young. Technology can be so amazing.
I had spent a lot time in earlier sections of the museum though and I was unable to spend a lot of time in the natural history section, as my time for the King Tut exhibition was approaching.
I scurried down to the King Tut exhibition and waited my turn. I turned down the offer to have my photo taken in front of a green screen so that I could be photoshopped into some suitably Egyptian scene. I hate those things, but at least on this one I was asked if I wanted to. Usually they make you do the pose for those shots and then assail you as you are leaving to try to entice you with a reminder of your experience. Then I decided to rent the audio-tour and waited to enter. Now, I think it's a pretty good exhibit, as far as those sorts of exhibits go. They have it all set up quite nicely. The pieces are interesting, as are the stories that go with them. They did their best to balance the wish of many people wanting to go the exhibition (by having limited numbers of people entering the exhibit at any one time) with the need to pay for it by having as many people as possible go through the exhibit (by “limited numbers” I really mean not cheek by jowl, but almost). It was still a struggle at times to get close to anything past all the milling people. There was nothing remotely interactive about the exhibit beyond the traditional go in, look, read, maybe listen, and move on. And the audio-tour, although helpful for adding more information to the experience, was really just a disguised cash grab. There was nothing that wouldn't have been just as useful being printed at the spots. And there wasn't all that much to the audio portion for the price. I'm glad I went to see the exhibit. But I wouldn't go again. And compared to the rest of the museum, it is one of those times when it would have been much better to go to King Tut first and then the rest of the museum, for the hands on, interactive nature of the regular museum exhibits was so much better and left me somewhat disappointed.
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