The National Museum
The drought is over up north, and that is a good thing. Sydney got pummeled again, on its way to the wettest June in four decades. This following the awful dry; and the floods. The Portuguese training tall ship Esmerelda had to stand back out to sea in the thirty-foot seas. Her masts waved wildly as she surfed down the big rollers.
A rugby match was played in the worst of it, the entire field under water, the players looking like dolphins.
There is a big bulk container up on the beach- the Pasha Bulker, which now cannot be floated off for weeks, if at all. Everyone agrees it is a good thing that she was not an oil carrier. She is a good looking ship, with the paint still fresh. She looks embarrassed, all high and dry, and her crew is still with her, looking embarrassed, too.
Prime Minister Howard, positioning for the elections that must be held not later than January of next year, is now a believer in the perils of the climatic change.
I have been watching the television in the evening, since it is so dark and chill outside. Reports from the Northern Territories are not about the rain, but about abuse within the Aboriginal people. The stories are as tawdry as you can imagine, with the little and most vulnerable ones being sold off for whatever is offered; cash or alcohol.
As an American, I am not in a position to take a moral position on the stories except to feel empathy for the victims. The Indigenous People of our homeland have had quite a ride with the conquering culture, and this is the same dirty story of a once sufficient culture, abased and ground beneath the heels of the victors.
That was the way it was depicted at the National Museum. I wandered down to the market in City Centre and bought some foodstuffs that would keep in the mini-bar refrigerator. Combined with my hot water heater, that comprises my kitchen. I tried to get to work. Step by step, I have been moving the Novotel’s stuff out any my stuff in. I don’t think they will charge me just because some of the stuff is warm.
I was stern with myself, in keeping with the gray skies outside. It began to rain, and I sat down and reviewed a paper on automated decision-making, and nothing could make it interesting. I tried the client-and-identity target architecture paper, and that didn’t go much better.
Finally I shrugged, went downstairs to the desk and retrieved the keys to my rental car and drove through the University toward the National Museum. I had heard it was pretty good, one of the top three things to see in town, and it certainly was better than working on a Saturday. The sun breaking out of the clouds was what did it.
I pulled up in the lot, and gaped. It could not have been more different than the stern traditionalism of the War Memorial. It was the new architecture run amok, and hitching my jeans up, I realized I would be in for one of those educational experiences.
There was something that looked like a roller coaster that ran across the parking lot, and big slabs of industrial shape pierced by poles and truncated by blocks. There was plenty of whimsy, an abundance of whimsy, a tidal wave of it.
I had a feeling that was what was going to be presented inside, whimsy ladled with guilt.
It is an extraordinary building, opened only a couple years ago by Prime Minister Howard. The public spaces soar in wild angles. I liked the building, but I did not know quite what to make of the galleries.
The collection is approached through interpretive exhibits that feature the defeated fauna of the continent, and the environmental consequences of what the settlers introduced. It is a sobering story, this unique laboratory. The introduction of the rabbit, and the rat, and the other placental mammals that include Western Man.
There was a brief tribute to the age of Independence; a panel or two to Captain Cook; then a remarkable exhibit on the 1950s, and the rise of Suburbia.
There was a pink caravan, house trailer to Yanks, and a pristine Holden sedan, “built for Australia,” and the both quite iconic. There was more about the early televisions and suburbs than there was about the First Fleet, but there was far more about the Torres Straits peoples than there was about Captain Cook.
The struggle to give the land back to the Aboriginals is quite larger in coverage than anything that brought the English and their convicts to this faraway land. I suppose it is time, though guilt and whimsy do not make history as I understand it.
Of course, my history is not the history of the future, and this is clearly a museum with a teaching mission. I visited the place where Captain Cook was killed, in the Hawaiian Islands. It was long ago, but I wanted to see it and happened to be living in the islands. It was down a bluff, as I recall, and on a flat place of coral near the surf. It was quite pleasant and very peaceful and no one seemed to make a huge deal out of it.
Maybe that is where we are going, and it is time that we look back to who lived upon the lands we have appropriated for suburbs. It is possible that there could be time for the fuller story to be told, if the heavens do not open and the earth does not swallow us whole.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
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