Museum Victoria - Discovery Centre

A shipload of Titanic enquiries

meg — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:03:00 +1100

Unsurprisingly, Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition at Melbourne Museum has generated an enormous number of enquiries, from folk coming forward with their own stories and artefacts to folk claiming ancestry to crew or passengers.

Photo: Jo Philo Source: Museum Victoria

Its also generated some unusual questions too, including:

can I have my wedding photographs taken on the Grand Staircase?
how do you make an ice wall?
what's the music playing in the background?

But I think today's question takes the cake - an email came in to the Discovery Centre inbox: Hi, I was in Melbourne last week and saw the Titanic exhibition. I loved one of the quotes on the wall in the iceberg room and wanted to get one as a tattoo, problem is I can't remember which quote it was and I live in NSW. Is there any chance you could send me a list of those particular quotes?

List sent:

"I hope we get out of this alright. I have a wife and 5 kiddies at home."

Robert Wareham, Steward

"We are dressed in our best and prepared to go down like gentlemen."

Benjamin Guggenheim

"For God’s sake, it’s your last chance. Go."

Ida Strauss

"Women and children first’ someone was shouting these last few words over and over again. They meant my own safety but they also meant the greatest loss I’d ever suffered, the loss of my husband."

Charlotte Collyer

You'll be pleased to know that the enquirer went with Ida.

On a scale of smallest to biggest

siobhan — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:09:00 +1100

One of the nicest things about working in the Discovery Centre, and at the Museum in general, is the opportunity to combine personal interests with work projects. I happen to be a big fan of snakes; more specifically, Australian pythons. When my pet python shed the other day, I thought it might be fun to compare the sloughed skin of my very small juvenile python with one of the bigger pythons we keep at the Museum.

Image: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Siobhan Motherway

Meet Penfold (do you remember Dangermouse?). He's a Stimson's Python (Antaresia stimsoni), which is Australia's second smallest python. The only smaller python is Antaresia perthensis, the Pygmy or Anthill Python. In this photo, Penfold is only a few weeks old. He'll get bigger, but he'll be lucky to reach a metre long as an adult. He currently weighs under 20g, and is about 36cm long.

Image: Max Strating  Source: Museum Victoria

And now, here's your humble correspondent having a cuddle with Olive, a member of Australia's second biggest python species (Liasis olivaceus)! She's a substantial lass; quite a different prospect from the casual one-handed approach you see in the first photo! Olive loves coming out and was trying to explore everywhere, thus the slightly disconcerted expression. I'm not sure what her vital statistics are in terms of weight and length, perhaps someone from Live Exhibits might tell us in comments.

Image: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

And their respective cast-offs. A great comparison, don't you think? Such diversity within a family.

We trekked down to Live Exhibits to get the shots of Olive and pick up her sloughed skin. This was the perfect opportunity to introduce our newest staff member Max and fantastic volunteer Mary to this department. Thanks very much to Tash and the other Live Exhibits staff for all your help!

Scienceweek 2010 happenings - guest blog by Nicole

siobhan — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:27:00 +1100

National Science Week this year runs from 14 to 22 August and Museum Victoria is holding some great events to celebrate. As part of this, last Saturday Melbourne Museum Discovery Centre hosted a presentation by our Live Exhibits team about Keeping Bugs Alive. In four packed-out sessions throughout the day Deanna and Jessie talked about what bugs are and explained the ins and outs of keeping bugs as pets. This included info about constructing a habitat, feeding and handling these fascinating creatures. Following the talk visitors got to view and handle some of our resident millipedes, praying mantises, phasmids and snails. It was a fun and fascinating day and we and our visitors all had a ball hearing the talks and getting to handle the bugs.

Image: Nicole Davis Source: Museum Victoria

Discovery Centre also has other activities happening throughout the week until next Sunday, including a Mega Touch Trolley (actually two big tables!) where you can handle and examine a huge range of specimens, including rocks & minerals, insects, fossils, animal skeletons and much more. The specimens are drawn from the Discovery Centre's interpretation collection which myself, Siobhan, volunteer Mary and library student David have been researching over the last few months.

Image: Nicole Davis Source: Museum Victoria

We are also hosting SCINEMA - Festival of Science Film - every day throughout the week in our seminar room. These films explore many different areas of the world Science through films ranging from several minutes to over an hour long. There are also great short pieces from Primary and Secondary students at schools throughout Australia. Information about the films can be found on the SCINEMA website.

Image: Nicole Davis Source: Museum Victoria

Rug

philip — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:48:00 +1100

We've been excited for a while, now, about the redevelopment of the Immigration Discovery Centre - the bigger space, the calmer mood, the interactive touch-screen device. Excitement has reached fever pitch now that the architects' plans have been handed over to the builders responsible for the project.

But for me it was the following image that shifted the mood from planning to action, from fantasy to reality. It's a photograph of a loom with a rug on it. And not just any rug - the rug that will welcome visitors to our beautiful new Discovery Centre at the Immigration Museum, soon.

Photo and Source: Cadrys

Frequently Asked Questions

siobhan — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 14:03:00 +1100

Whilst sitting at our desk and managing the enquiries coming in over the phone and website, we do get to overhear the visitors' reactions to a lot of our physical displays. We get the same ones quite often, so I thought I'd chronicle a few of my favourites here.

Image: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

"Bird-dropping spider?!"

Yes, really! This is my favourite almost-question. The tone of voice employed by the visitor is almost universally a mixture of amusement, fascination, disgust and disbelief. Isn't evolution brilliant? It has worked out best for this particular spider to look like poo - I imagine the other bird-dropping spiders don't mind.

Image: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

In reference to Murray, our favourite live exhibits cabinet denizen: "Is he real?" (Yes!) "...is he ALIVE?"

Yes! He's not very active, but he does like to come and bask on his upper branches and soak up a bit of the heat lamp. It's a hard life, eh?

Image: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

"Look at this giant bee! Is this real?"

Er, no. That's actually a large-scale model of a European Wasp. Something tells me that if the model were to scale, the Great Australian Barbecue would be an awful lot more fraught with danger than it typically is.

New things for our younger visitors!

siobhan — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:21:00 +1100

We had a visit from the lovely Olga today, bearing gifts from the also-lovely Leonie. Both these women work for the Museum Victoria Library, and are the ones who keep our shelves stocked with all manner of reference books pertaining to all the different areas that the Museum covers; Sciences, History and Technology, and Indigenous Cultures. Not only does our library need to address all these topics, but we also have to meet the needs of all our users. We get everyone from post-doctoral to primary school researchers in here, so we need books appropriate to these levels.

So when Olga came in with an armful of new picture books and another armful of new furry friends for our toy box, we were very pleased! Our new kids' books include stuff on Aboriginal tools, sustainability and dinosaurs. I even caught the animals having a storytime - here you can see our old friend Tree Kangaroo reading the story of Sam the Koala to all his new mates!

Photo: Nicole Davis Source: Museum Victoria

Farewell Leon! G'day, Jacky!

siobhan — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:27:00 +1100

All good things must come to an end, and so it was with Leon's time in the Discovery Centre. Fear not, he is doing perfectly well back out in the Live Exhibits department, but he was starting to exhibit signs of age-related wobbliness, startling us all by falling off the perch (literally, not metaphorically) a few times.

So Live Exhibits folk came to effect the changeover, taking Leon out the back, pulling out his lush greenery, and replacing it with a more austere decor of driftwood and dry grasses.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway Source: Museum Victoria

In Leon's place we have Jacky (Amphibolurus muricatus). Jacky is a Jacky Lizard, a species widespread over south-eastern Australia. Whilst he isn't nearly the colour-changing show pony that Leon is, he makes up for it by being a lot more active, with daring leaps from log to log and onto the sides of the enclosure. And, to be honest, he has a far more attractive tongue.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway Source: Museum Victoria

Meg's sad donation

meg — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 11:02:00 +1100

I recently lost my wee pet budgie, Smuggler.

Burying him in my courtyard just didn't seem right (particularly as I also have a cat who doesn't mind a bit of a dig in the yard). So I donated my Smuggler to the Museum Victoria ornithology collection.

Collection Manager Wayne did a post-mortem assessment of Smuggler and told me he was a beautiful specimen (I thought so too) in excellent condition. Apart from the fact that he was dead. So to preserve him for future study, Wayne injected him with 10% formalin and put him in a jar of 70% alcohol. I now have a pickled Smuggler and he will be with me at work always.

Smuggler's cage-mate Horus seems to be enjoying bachelorhood. Some would say a little too much. I thought about getting him another playmate, but decided against it in the event that Horus is in fact a homicidal maniac.

In memory of Smuggler - a short but fiesty life and an excellent little budgie.

Photo: Meg Lomax Source: Museum Victoria

Trams!

philip — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:46:00 +1100

"Does Melbourne have a tram museum?" asked a visitor to the Immigration Discovery Centre who'd had enough of ships. It does, yes. Two, actually, but both of them were closed, on this particular day, and neither was within walking distance of Flinders Street...

So we stayed in the Discovery Centre and did some research online, exploring Melbourne Museum's cable tram, in detail, then watching a curator describe the model on display in the Melbourne Story exhibition, which has its own virtual tour. Then we reminisced about the flying tram that starred in the opening ceremony to the 2006 Commonwealth Games, in Melbourne, and which was temporarily on display at Melbourne Museum. Further information was gleaned from the Marvellous Melbourne website's section about the development of Melbourne's tram network, which features a brilliant image of a tram-conductor's ticket punch. Then we ran search after search at the Victoria Railways website, enjoying its image gallery of Victorian Railways trams.

Distracted momentarily by an article about bugs on trams, we got serious with the Transport Collection at the History and Technology Collections Online site, where 5787 items were listed and described for our unwavering interest. Somewhere amongst all this we found an eerie image of a tram in Cairo (for all the world like a piece of Melbourne transplanted to Africa) and just sort of stared at it, for a while.

Photo: Sapper Galbraith  Source: Museum Victoria

Picture is unrelated

meg — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:32:00 +1100

Usually cats and moderately-sized bodies of water are mortal enemies, however in this case, there is a connection.

Photo: Meg Lomax Source: Museum Victoria

The delightful Bernie and his wife Lyn came in to the centre a couple of weekends ago with quite a curly one: Bernie used to drive trams across the Princes Bridge during the 70s and remembered an unusual wind-powered fountain that used to stand at the southern end of the bridge that is no longer there. Bernie just wanted to know what it was called. Bernie had done a fair bit of research himself and for the life of him couldn't find out the name of this fountain or any information at all about what had happened to it. It was like it had never existed. Could we? My curiosity was piqued. You can't just completely wipe a fountain from the pages of history. I started to look into it. I found frustratingly little. Then Jo's curiosity was piqued. There must be some mention of it somewhere. She started to look into it. Well...

For at least the next half hour, between the two of us, there was frantic Googling, there was Encyclopedia-of-Melbourne reading, there was phoning of the Arts Centre and getting their people on to it, there was negotiations with the State Library and getting their people on to it, there was investigations into the City of Melbourne about a certain Snowden Gardens in which said fountain may or may not have stood (turned out to be a red herring of sorts), there was essentially a collaborative research project across the main bodies of Arts Victoria, and then finally we (yep, us) stumbled across a history of the construction of the Arts Centre that mentioned the demolition of one 'Southgate Fountain' to make way for the spire.

When the picture finally came up on the screen and we said to Bernie "Is this is?", there was shock, there was disbelief, there was awe, and there was a "Yes". Research win.

Bernie and Lyn waited while I phoned Margaret at the Arts Centre back to let her know too, as promised.

And the cat? Unrelated to the fountain (fortunately for the cat), but did appear on the front of the very nice thank you card we received from Bernie and Lyn for our persistence.

Photo: Meg Lomax Source: Museum Victoria

The weirdest job I've ever had (except for the one with the rotting turtle).

siobhan — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:35:00 +1100

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: any job where you turn up bearing a jar of mosquito larvae and people are pleased to see you and grateful? That's a good job. A weird one, but a good one.

Some of this oddness has started spilling over into my home and social lives. I'm now quite used to people asking me "...and how's your family? And how's Leon?" in reference to the chameleon who shares our workspace. What's a little more bizarre is how my family will now dig up the ickiest of creepy-crawlies, and present them to me with evident delight. I got a phone call yesterday from my (quite sane, thank you) partner, who reported that he'd found a nice healthy brown house spider on his towel. Was he perturbed? Did he squish, or politely issue marching orders? Not in the least. "Does Simon want a brown house spider? It's in the freezer for you when you get home - look for the Vegemite jar".

Thank you, dear. A Valentine's gift calculated to appeal to only the nerdiest of museum nerds. My 4 year old gets in on the act too, with a reminder note left at my place on the couch. "MUMMY'S BROWN HOUSE SPIDER BRING TO WORK". Utilitarian and opportunistic approach to word order aside, allow me some maternal pride at the correctly-deployed apostrophe.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

If you lie down with dogs...

siobhan — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:41:00 +1100

I had to share my office today. But, to give my new officemate credit, she was quiet with an admirable attention to personal hygiene.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Meet Percival, the African Wild Dog (Lycaon pictus, or Mbwa mwitu in Swahili!). Dubbed "Percival" by workmate Bad Jojoasaurus (less quiet, but also good on the personal hygiene front), she was brought from the depths of the Mammalogy collection for the use of a visiting artist, Bronnie. We've had visiting artists before, sketching and photographing all sorts of things from swans to wombats. We do enjoy these visits, and we particularly like seeing the resulting artworks!

Artwork: Bronnie  Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

A lovely sketch, don't you think? Certainly restores some of the life to the old girl. Apparently these animals have the highest bite force (in relation to their body mass) of any Carnivora mammal... I think I'm glad Percival is a particularly quiet specimen.

Leon the tattoo

meg — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 10:28:00 +1100

The latest in the adventures of Leon...

A visitor from Israel was particularly taken with Leon the Chameleon recently. He was leaning against Leon's enclosure, entranced by him.

"He's a chameleon," I offered.

"I know," came the response, as he pointed to his shoulder - and he should know, he's got one tattooed on his arm.

I ran for the camera.

Photo: Meg Lomax Source: Museum Victoria

A Case of Mistaken Identity

siobhan — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:47:00 +1100

An enquirer came to the desk with an envelope, asking us to identify the reptile skin within.

This lovely elderly woman had found the specimen in the gardens at a local school, and was concerned as to what reptiles might be lurking where children play.

I opened the envelope and regarded the yellowed, torn skin. "Hmm. Doesn't look like snake skin to me," I said, poking it with a finger. "Ah well, we'll send it through to our herpetologist, and see what she can tell us!"

Once the enquiry was properly documented and receipted, the enquirer headed off, leaving my colleague and I to have a closer look.

"This doesn't even look organic to me." I leant in, and poked it again. "It almost looks like an old sausage skin," I said, handing it to my colleague. He looked, raised an eyebrow and took a sniff.

"You know, it smells like rubber. Perished rubber. And it's oiling through the paper."

"...what? No. AUUUUGH I TOUCHED IT!"

Once my colleague had finished mocking me between bouts of hyperventilation and picked himself up off the floor, he took on the task of emailing the enquirer with the news that the "reptile skin" was actually a discarded piece of rubbish, and definitely not any sort of snake skin - well, except in a coarse, vernacular, metaphorical sort of way.

Not exactly what the poor enquirer expected... but at least it provided us with some welcome levity, and a good reason to use our antibacterial hand gel.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway Source: Museum Victoria

...*shudder*.

New Year stick insects

philip — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:36:00 +1100

Sometimes we're contacted by eager collectors wishing to replenish our supplies of live bugs. Such was the case on the last day of the year, when a young woman contacted us to ask if we needed any Spiny Leaf Stick Insects. Sure enough, our Live Exhibits team was happy to take her boxload of bugs, each of which resembled a pile of sticks and leaves. In fact these critters are so adept at camouflage that they even move like leaves. Cool!

How many can you spot?

Photo: Philip Thiel  Source: Museum Victoria

You can learn more about these and other bugs at Museum Victoria's Bugs website. You can also see lots of similar critters on display at Melbourne Museum's popular exhibition, Bugs Alive. Yep, they're alive.