Tuesday, December 28th, 2010
It kind of feels like a Sunday today because it is a holiday. I think I kind of explained this in my last post but over the Christmas break most of Australia is taking 4 days of public holidays. We also get 3 over New Years. This is because the usual public holidays (Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day) all fall on the weekend and most people didn't think it was fair that we weren't actually getting days off. So the Government decided that each State could decide what Public Holidays they were having. In the Northern Territory it was decided that December 25th, 26th , 27th, and 28th as well as January 1st and 3rd were going to be considered public holiday. Since my office falls under the NT Government umbrella I got the extra days off. Almost too bad because I would have made some REALLY good money to work those days.
Debi managed to get an extra week off (paid I might add) over the holidays as well and it appears the the construction business in Darwin all but shuts down until after New Year's so we all found ourselves with some free time on Tuesday.
We decided we would hit up the Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory today for a few hours. Admission is free so we picked up Tommi (you know......from Finland) and headed over to check it out. Not a bad little place. It really is a mixture of a lot of this and that. Here are a few pictures.
Wouldn't be a real museum without some dinosaur bones. This is the megalamia prisca (a lizard related to some major carnivores in Australia) and the bullockornis (taller and ate plants).
There was an entire section on Cyclone Tracy that levelled Darwin back on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day in 1974. A Level 4 cyclone, it killed 71 people, caused $837 million dollars in damage and destroyed more than 70% of the city's buildings. Most people were evacuated to more southern cities and initially only able bodied men were allowed back in (to help with the clean up and re-building). During this rebuilt new, more modern building techniques were used. Hopefully a Level 4 cyclone will not be heading Darwin's way anytime soon, but the city should far a little bit better this time around if it does.
These are a few of the crocodile skulls you can find in the museum......not all from Australia and not all from recent years. Shows the change and variation that you can have when it comes to crocs.
This is Sweetheart and although the name confuses people, Sweetheart is in fact a boy. Sweetheart ended up here after his unfortunate death. Sweetheart had the habit of taking bites out of aluminum boats and their outboard motors along the Finnis River in the Northern Territory (although no one was ever hurt) so it was decided for every one's safety he needed to be moved to a croc farm and put into breeding stock. Unfortunately when the trapped him, drugged him and tried to drag him aboard the transport vessel, he swallowed a whole lot of water and drowned. Poor "little" Sweetheart died and was presented to the museum to be put on display (this is not a model......this is actually Sweetheart). When captured Sweetheart was approximately 50 years old, weighed 780 kilograms (1,720 pounds), was 5.1 metres (16.75 feet) long and his stomach contained pig bones, two long necked turtles and the parts of a very large barrimundi.
This is the Maritime Gallery, which is full of all kinds of boats and canoes and that kind of thing. Not air conditioned out there so a little bit warmer than the rest of the museum.
This is a hand operated compressor from the mid-1900's. It was capable of supporting 2 divers simultaneously. This is the type of compressor that would have been used by the Royal Navy.
This exhibit was probably the one thing most people visit the museum for. ACDC, one of the world's great rock band, is as many people don't know, an Australian band. Yes, most of the band members (past and present) were born in the UK but they formed while in Australia so that makes them Australian. I couldn't take any pictures in the exhibit but mostly it was filled with old pictures and letters and song lyrics and stage costumes and posters and that kind of thing. I think a lot of people bypassed the rest of the museum and just came to check this out. One of their most famous songs Highway to Hell was said to be inspired by the 3,200 or so kilometres (around 2,000 miles) it took to drive from Melbourne to Perth, which is the home town of original but now deceased band member Bon Scott.
The other part of the museum where we couldn't take pictures was the Art Gallery portion, which you can imagine was filled with a lot of local indigenous art along with the stories of many of the artists. Always very interesting to see.
And that was the Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory. A small little place but certainly worth a look if you are ever in the area.
Julie
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