Way out West

Yep, fresh from WA, here comes the news from Perth. I'm over here this week to attend a Museums Australia/ Interpretation Australia conference called 'At The Frontier' - I'm guessing a whole lot of people in the museum world have come to Perth for this, come over like Brownes' cows. I have been part-funded for this by Melbourne Museum, where I work part-time, so that makes sense.

Today was Sunday, and quite blowy - a westerly I think, coming up the Swan River.

I was looking to hire a bike to get me around, so I thought I'd ask at that tall pointy thing ahead.

 Turns out that it is The Bell Tower, home of the Swan Bells and "probably the largest musical instrument in the world", and furthermore, because this weekend is Heritage Perth's Heritage Days, it's free to go in.  So I go in.  It's a pretty amazing place, you can climb stairs all the way to the top of those sail things and look down over the river or over Perth

 and see what's been going on here recently - oh, I do love that word, CHOGM.

Some of the bells are pretty big. Pretty big.  And today they were ringing constantly, and the whole place was shaking, almost subliminally, underfoot.  It was great.  And, the people there knew where the bike hire place was!

I dropped into the Old Court House Law Museum to see painter Thomas Hoareau talk about his picture 'John Gaven Parkhurst boy #422 - Appears a very good lad' from the exhibition 'Heroes or Villains of the Swan?' which just opened there last week.  15 year old Gaven was the first European hanged in Western Australia.

There were lots of open public buildings, including the Perth Town Hall where there was an exhibition about Perth hosting the 1962 Commonwealth Games, and 'leaving the lights on' earlier in that year for astronaut John Glenn to glipse as he passed over in Friendship 7.

Some of the public art really grabbed me, too, like Anne Neil's 2006 'Memory Markers'

On the border of the Stirling Gardens on Barrack Street.

As a ink-dip nib user myself, to see these big ones

 was pretty exciting. And around the corner on St George's Terrace, I was really amused by these

For which I couldn't find the name of the artist.  But look, the tip of the one lying on the ground

is even crumpled! - great, eh?  Well enough of all this art and culture and heritage - I need a way to get around, and David Byrne is always talking about how good it is to have a bike in a foreign land.  And you know?  He's right!

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Brian.  As in, "a brown like Brian".

Tomorrow, New Norcia. But not by bike.

What It Is? youtube episode #3 - Comics and Australian History

And here's the youtube episode of Monday night's 'What It Is?' - again, shot and chopped by film maker Daniel Hayward in double-quick time. Thanks, Dan!

And you can hear some of the song, 'The Curious Man', the Blandowski calypso recorded by The Death Adder in Berlin, which we missed on the night because of technical hitches.

'A Comic Book History of Australia' is what we called the show on the Readings website, but okay, yes, it was a bit specificker that that.  It was more about Victorian history.  Well, Melbourne history.  Okay, Melbourne history circa the 1850s.

And, when I got home and was chatting to Susan about it, she pointed out that the evening wasn't SO much about comics, either.  A bit, but not a lot.  It's probably more accurately about various forms of  'paper theatre'. Kamishibai.  Puppetry. 2-D sets. Masks.

Okay, so what about calling it 'An Evening of Paper Theatre in 1850s Melbourne'?

Call it what you will.

It is what it is.

Please do scroll down to the next post for still images and ruminations on the night.

Yours,

Bernard

Koichi incoming!

Last Wednesday, which was a week after I'd returned from Tokyo (actually nine days but who was counting such things?) I cycled into work at Melbourne Museum with a lighter heart because I was going in to meet Koichi Kubo, from the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. Below, I and my museum colleague Paola Luz after being showered in gifts by Koichi.

I am holding an extremely rare catalogue from Koichi's museum's exhibition of 'Moyashimon' (see my blog entry here), which Noriko Morii managed to track down for me. I am extremely interested in this exhibition, which used a popular manga as a way 'in' for audiences for an exhibition about fungi and mushrooms. Yes, I'm interested in it because it is comics/manga that provided the window through which the visitors saw this science, but even more because it's fiction though which we gain an experience of fact. As someone who makes theatre in a museum, this is a constant theme for me: bluntly, how much can/do/should you lie in the service of the truth? Although, of course, I don't think of fiction as lies any more than I think of facts as the truth.

We walked Koichi through the museum, showed him our so-new-you-can-still-smell-the-taxidermy exhibition WILD and divers other spaces in which functions (weddings, cocktail parties, corporate events) can be held - this is Paola's department. Why? Kubo-san trained as a biologist, but has been in Australia researching the way that Australian museums hire out their spaces for events, particularly after hours. A fact finding mission.

And if you're after facts at Melbourne Museum, you can't escape this one: that really, the entire gigantic place is really just ONE elaborate case for THIS collection item. Phar Lap. Well, his skin, anyway.

Bernard, Koichi and The Lap, Melbourne Museum November 2009. Photo by Paola Luz.

Sayonara, Koichi! Thanks for coming to Melbourne!