HAPPY AUSTRALIA DAY!Rather than just hibernating in the house today listening to the Triple J Hottest 100, since it's a Friday, Ma and I decided that we should go out and do something... something that didn't really involve crowds, overly large amounts of flag-waving or anything that resembled an official Australia Day celebration...
So we decided to hit the Museum and the Art Gallery instead. Get some culture and all that...
Turned out to be a very good idea. We haven't been to the Museum in about a billion years, and I haven't been to the Art Gallery in maybe seventeen years (at least from memory). We didn't end up doing the whole Art Gallery (we were running out of time), but we will definitely be going back...
The Museum was quite interesting too... there seemed to be less on display than I remember in some regards, like the fact that the whole dinosaur section was pretty much gone (and the area where it used to be was housing a visiting Da Vinci exhibition), but other parts were just the way I remember them from when I was a kid.
Like the whole stuffed animal section... those poor beasties, they've been there for about a billion years, and a few of them (the lion particularly) look like they were stuffed by someone with only a passing familiarity with what the animal in question was supposed to look like.
And I swear that the Egyptian room, which is actually one of my favourite spots in the whole Museum hasn't been altered in my lifetime at the very least.
One thing I did find interesting though... since they'd removed the old clunky elevator, they actually used the empty lift shaft as one long exhibition space for "The Kraken" (ie giant squid), which was kind of groovy, especially since they had the tentacles of the squid going all the way down the three floors of the shaft, and on the fourth floor a piece of glass/perspex in the floor so that you could theoretically have stood on top of the open shaft. Now normally I'm good with heights and whatnot, but I couldn't bring myself to stand at the top of a four storey elevator shaft.
I ended up taking something like 130 photos in the Museum (mostly due to the whole "Minerals" section, I got a little carried away)... possibly come soon to a Monday Montage near you, and the for most part my camera behaved itself... helped in part I think by the Museum setting I have, which seemed to deal with the whole low light thing quite well.
Unfortunately you're not allowed to take photos in the Art Gallery (which I think is just shitty, although I kind of understand why, both with the whole "forging" thing, and so that they can bend you over in the Gallery Bookstore and make you buy things), but it was very pleasant in there too... maybe more so because I've actually done the painting thing I was quite interested in looking at the works close up, seeing how various artists did things close up, then looking at them from a distance.
We only really wandered through the Australian Art section, but there were a few works, more in the 1920-1950's section that I just fell in love with... I need to take a note of their names next time, so that I can see if I can find anything on them online... especially one particular male nude sculpture from, I think, the 1930's that I was particularly impressed with.
Anyway, after we'd done the wander around the Gallery we wandered back to the car and stopped off for ice cream on the way, and I was more than a little surprised to see a poster for this music/dance thing in the window that just happened to have a very naked EnglishX on it (tastefully done, naturally)... luckily they had about six copies of the poster crammed into the same holder thing, so I lifted one. And it's definitely him. Adelaide, two degrees of Kevin Bacon...
And now I'm just waiting for the Hottest 100 to finish up... it's a great day.
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