Last night it rained, so the temperature
didn’t get as cold. Gott sei dank! Today I had scheduled to be a catch up day,
so I took my time getting ready to go. My ultimate destination is the Blue Mountains
National Park, but to get there I need to go through or around Canberra, the
capital of Australia. I am not so keen on visiting cities, but I took the time
to check what was worth seeing. Imagine that, the capital is the seat of the
National Museum of Australia. OK, I think that is worth going into the city
for.
Canberra looks very modern and
very understated. No huge monuments or parliamentary palace atop a hill, but a
lot of blocks of flats, many under construction, that no doubt house the many
bureaucrats who work in the city.
The museum is a supermodern structure,
which together with other museums occupies a small peninsula that juts into the
central lake of Canberra. First thing I saw coming in was a virtual reality
Antarctic Experience, which I totally had to participate in. Ryan, I wish you
were here; it was fantastic. The processing of the film was flawless, so you
could rotate your head 360⁰ around, and 180⁰ from horizon to nadir to horizon
without a flaw. I saw ice moving rapidly off Davis station, penguin colonies,
glaciers calving icebergs unto the ocean, the shimmering lights of an aurora
australis, the southern sky, and helicopter flights over the Antarctic ice
sheet. It was absolutely super!
The museum doesn’t tell a smooth story,
and does not have a geologic map of Australia! Bah! They do talk about how the
first Europeans described bizarre animals that could not possibly exist, such as
the platypus and the kangaroo, and the havoc that was caused by the introduction
of exotic species such as rabbits and sheep. To this day rabbits are considered
a nasty plague (but, alas, you cannot get rabbit at the supermarket).
Then followed a mish mash history
of Australia following the European invasion, to which I did not pay a lot of
attention. I will notice only that the caravan (the fifth wheel RV) became deeply
ingrained in the psyche of Australians in the 1950’s, a love affair that
remains strong in the 21st century.
The best part of the museum are
the two galleries devoted to the Indigenous Cultures, although it is with great
sadness that one learns that most of those cultures were trampled by the European
invasion. There are descendants of those First Nations, however, and although
some of them would be hard to distinguish amongst a crowd of Australians, they
are proud of their heritage, and in plaintiff but firm voices affirm their
right to be recognized. “We have not all died!” affirms one of their spokemen. The
Australian government took a huge step toward acknowledging this truth in 2007,
when parliament issued a heartfelt apology to the aboriginal people for having
taken their lands, for secuestering their children in the infamous Missions
from1750 to 1970, and for otherwise negating their value as the original
inhabitants of the land. Too little, too late?
From Canberra I drove to Goulburn,
which I thought was as good a place to spend the night as anywhere else. My days
are pretty short, with sunrise at 7 am and sunset at 5 pm, so I have to be
careful not to get caught driving at night, when the kangaroos take over the
highway.
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