Kate C

MV palaeontologist Tom Rich, along with colleagues Roger Benson, Patricia Vickers-Rich, and Mike Hall, today published a review of all the theropod dinosaurs known from early Cretaceous period deposits in southern Australia. In doing so, they present the first complete snapshot of local theropod diversity around 120-105 million years ago.

Theropods are a group of mostly carnivorous dinosaurs that walked on two legs and had three-toed feet. Included among the theropods are the infamous T.rex, the small and agile Deinonychus, the feathered Archaeopteryx and modern birds. Tom and his colleagues have been pulling theropod fossils out of Victoria's coastline deposits since the 1970s and in this review, they considered 37 bones and over 90 individual teeth. They conclude that the local Cretaceous theropod fauna comprised nine major groups (or taxa), including allosauroids, tyrannosauroids, spinosauroids and the recently-discovered ceratosaur.

Some of the fossils reviewed in this examination of southern therapod diversity. These are large theropod manual phalanges, or bones from the 'hands' of these dinosaurs.
Source: Benson et al.  

A summary cladogram (evolutionary tree) of the therapod dinosaurs, showing the relationships between the major groups within the suborder Therapoda.
Source: Benson et al.  

Like the unique fauna of Australia living today, our prehistoric fauna was distinctive too, with some groups dominating the fossil record and others seemingly absent. In the past, palaeontologists have considered several explanations why the types of dinosaurs that lived in Australia were so different to the types found in other continents, even our nearby Gondwanan neighbours. Did certain groups evolve in other continents after Gondwana had split up, so those groups never dispersed to Australia? Or were there patterns of regional extinctions reflecting the differences in climate between the continents as they drifted apart?

As more fossils are uncovered and studied, the picture gets a little clearer. It now appears that many high-level dinosaur taxa, such as the tyrannosauroids and allosauroids, emereged earlier than previously estimated and were distributed all over the world during the Jurassic. This suggests they've been missing from Australian records simply because our dinosaur fauna is poorly known. The Australian fossil record is patchy – whether it's because the fossils have not been preserved or simply not discovered or properly interpreted yet – and often only one or two bones represent an entire group of animals.

However the isolation of Gondwana and Australia from the rest of the world, and the unique conditions here, did help shape a unique assemblage at the species level. During the early Cretaceous, Australia was still attached to Antarctica and was much closer to the South Pole than it is now. Earth's climate was much warmer, the poles were free of icecaps and Victoria and Antarctica were covered in lush, ferny temperate forests. Long periods of winter darkness and extended summer daylight influenced the evolution of endemic dinosaurs whereas in other parts of the world, their distant relatives were contending with quite different environments.

Approximate position of Australia 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous era.
Image: Ron Blakey. Altered by Cally Bennet and Fons VandenBerg
Source: Colorado Plateau Geosystems  

The possibility remains that some dinosaurs, such as the long-necked quadrupedal sauropods, which were present in Queensland but have not been found in Victoria, could not survive in cool, dark Cretaceous southern Australia and and so they did not enter this area.

Links:

Benson RBJ, Rich TH, Vickers-Rich P, Hall M (2012) Theropod Fauna from Southern Australia Indicates High Polar Diversity and Climate-Driven Dinosaur Provinciality. PLoS ONE 7(5): e37122.doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037122

Monash University: The killer dinosaurs of south-eastern Australia

600 Million Years: Victoria evolves

Dinosaur Walk

MV News: Victorian tyrannosauroid found

It's Earth Day on 22 April 2012 and the Earth Day Network is seeking a billion pledges for 'acts of green' – individuals and organisations to commit to an act or activity, large or small, to contribute to conservation and environmental awareness.

One of the museum's customer service staff, Ella, is passionate about protecting the Southern Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius johnsonii). She's inspired MV Blog's act of green: to highlight this amazing flightless bird and the efforts to conserve its Queensland rainforest habitat. The species is listed as endangered in Queensland, and vulnerable on the IUCN Redlist.

Museum Victoria's Southern Cassowary. It is exhibition in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

The Southern Cassowary in the Wild exhibition has been in the museum's collection for over 100 years. Our records note that it was collected on 26 March 1885 in Queensland by an unknown collector and that we acquired it in 1887 from the Acclimitization Society of Victoria. In the 1880s, cassowaries were far more common; an estimated 1000 individuals are all that are left in the wild today.

Australian Cassowary, reproduced from The Birds of Australia, supplements by John Gould, London 1851, vol. 1 (5parts)
Image: Artist John Gould / Lithographer H. C. Richter
Source: Museum Victoria  

The name cassowary stems from a Malay word meaning needle, after the bird's the needle-like wing feathers. With its brilliant-coloured neck and glossy black plumage, the Southern Cassowary is Australia's heaviest bird. Its large body is fuelled by the fruits of over 200 species of rainforest trees and it has an important ecological role in spreading seeds. It's estimated that 70-100 plant species will only germinate once their seeds have travelled through the gut of a cassowary.

As humans have cleared Queensland forests for timber, agriculture and housing developments, we have removed and fragmented the birds' habitat. Fewer trees mean less food for cassowaries. The birds roam between forest patches that are now criss-crossed by roads and many are killed by cars each year. Domestic dogs are another cause of cassowary population decline. In 2011, Cyclone Yasi hit the Far North Queensland coast and severely damaged the remaining habitat occupied by a cassowary population at Mission Beach.

Preserving and regenerating suitable habitat is critical for the survival of this species. Rainforest Rescue is an organisation that purchases land in the Daintree River valley to turn into permanent conservation reserves. They also reconnect remnant forest patches by revegetating cleared land between them, forming continuous tracts of habitat full of cassowary food plants. Since 2007, Rainforest Rescue has planted over 26,000 native plants in the Daintree. It is a very long-term project because these plantings take many years to mature. Their hope is that one day the fruits of those trees will fill the bellies of a stable and thriving cassowary population.

Links:

Rainforest Rescue

Cassowary in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world 

Tucked away from public view, kept in unlit, climate-controlled storage, the museum has millions of zoological specimens. Most of these are insects and other invertebrates but thousands are fish, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. On top of that, we have huge tissue collection: tiny pieces of animal tissue preserved in a sort of genetic library.

Learning this, you might ponder: why do we collect and keep so many specimens, and often, multiple specimens of the same species? As Victoria's official repository for examples of our state's fauna, wouldn't one of each species be enough? And why would we want specimens from outside Victoria?

These are very good questions and there are several reasons why.

Defining a species

Let's say you were out hiking and you found a hidden canyon that wasn't on your map. Within the canyon, you spot an unusual butterfly that's not in your field guide. In fact, it's not like anything you have ever seen before. How would you verify that it is species new to science? You would need to compare it with properly identified examples of other species. You'd probably find those examples in a museum.

There are strict rules for describing and naming new species; the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature oversees the process worldwide. To describe a new animal species you must lodge a holotype – the irreplaceable, single specimen that stands as the official representative of that species. It might take a few specimens, called a type series, to properly describe the species but there is only ever one holotype. Museum Victoria counts several thousand holotypes among our collections, including the Leadbeater's Possum, the Baw Baw Frog, and numerous invertebrates.

However one specimen can't possibly represent a whole species: what about the other sex? What if males and females are very different? Or the animal changes over its life cycle? Or the individuals from over here are slightly different to the individuals from over there? To get a full picture of all the variation within a species, we need many examples of that species.

Multiple examples of a few species of butterfly. Each individual specimen records the variation within a species.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Changes through time

Preserving five individuals of our hypothetical new butterfly that you caught during your hike is a good start. You might have examples of slightly different sizes or varying wing patterns. But what about next month or next year? How early do the butterflies emerge in spring, and when do they disappear in winter? Maybe next year the canyon receives lots of rain, the butterfly's food plant is plentiful, and the population is twice as large and each individual butterfly is fatter. You'll need some examples of this, too.

Collecting specimens over time records all sorts of useful information. It can indicate the incoming wave of an invasive species or the decline of a rare one. Physical changes in the animals themselves – their size, colour, pattern – can reflect changes in their environment but it requires a large number of data points over many years to detect patterns and work out why those changes might be occurring.

The museum's wet collection contains specimens in alcohol. These are marine crustaceans.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Future research

Natural history collectors of a century ago could not have imagined how we would use their specimens today. They didn't even know that DNA existed, let alone that it would one day help define and analyse species. Emerging technologies mean that we can return to old specimens again and again and keep learning new things. So-called 'next generation sequencing' means we can now look at the entire genome of an individual, every gene in their cells, where just a decade ago we could only look at a few marker genes. Genetic analysis can identify cryptic species – ones that can't otherwise be distinguished from closely-related species – and is useful for forensic questions such as determining the origin of smuggled wildlife. Museum collections are the source of tissue and reference specimens for these activities.

The museum's banks of freezers contain thousands of tissue samples.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Just like those collectors of old, we can only guess at the importance of today's collecting. Perhaps our hypothetical butterfly might experience a population explosion in the changing climate and become an important indicator of local conditions. That data set begins with those five specimens you collected on your weekend hike.

Links:

Lyman Entomological Museum: Why so many specimens?

The John Curtis British Insects Collection

The Field Museum: From Finches to Ostriches

Leo Joseph, 2011. Museum collections in ornithology: today's record of avianbiodiversity for tomorrow's world, Emu 111, i–xii  (PDF, 417 KB)

Significant objects in our collections can remain more or less anonymous simply because they have been detached from their stories. They sit there, quietly waiting for someone to spend some time with them and join the dots.

Two researchers working with the Indigenous Cultures collections recently made an exciting discovery that returns two objects with incomplete provenance to a very important body of work. It began with Rosemary Wrench, curator of the Many Nations section in First Peoples, the new exhibition that is under development for Bunjilaka. While the exhibition focuses on south-eastern Australian Aboriginal nations, the Many Nations section celebrates Indigenous culture from across the country. Rosemary's task is to curate over 600 examples of Indigenous artworks, tools and artefacts that tell the stories of the people who made them, used them, and continue to do so today.

"When I started looking for suitable items, I eliminated all the restricted material first," explains Rosemary. "Then I wanted objects we hadn't put on display before. I considered 14,000 to 15,000 objects and systematically started going through the collection stores because there was no other way to do it."

Last year she opened a cabinet full of boomerangs. One of them was carved with an extraordinary scene of two Aboriginal men hiding behind a tree, watching Europeans and their horses. She showed it to Jason Gibson, an Australian National University researcher working on the Spencer and Gillen Australian Research Council project. "Straight away, Jason said 'I think that's by Jim Kite'." Jim Kite Erlikilyika [from Alyelkelhayeka, meaning "he slipped" or "glided away"] Penangke (1865-1930) was a Lower Arrernte man from the Charlotte Waters area. He joined Spencer and Gillen's 1901-02 expedition as an interpreter and is recognised as an accomplished artist.

Boomerang made by Jim Kite, or Erlikilyika. Above: Upper side decorated with images of two stockmen and their packhorses and two Aboriginal men watching on. Below: Line art of the carved boomerang.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

The boomerang was purchased by the museum in 1946 from the estate of Herbert Basedow, a geologist, explorer and medical practitioner who worked in Central Australia and known collector of Aboriginal art. It came with no documentation at all. "It was clear to me from the style that it was Jim Kite's work but I had nothing to prove it," says Jason. Last month, he began searching for the proof for the artist behind this boomerang and another, exquisitely carved with hopping mice, from the Basedow collection.

Boomerang carved by Jim Kite Erlikilyika with two Spinifex Hopping-mice (Notomys alexis).
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum victoria  

In a newspaper article in the South Australian Register, Jason found a detailed interview about Jim Kite's 1913 art exhibition. "In the interview, he described this boomerang with two men hiding behind a tree." Not only was the creator of the boomerang identified, but the story behind the scene.

Detail of boomerang showing the explorers of John McDouall Stuart's expedition.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Detail of boomerang showing two men hiding behind a tree.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

"According to Jim, these were Aboriginal people watching the first European explorer, John McDouall Stuart. When they saw a man dismount from his horse they were shocked because they thought the man and the horse were one entity. They'd never seen a horse and definitely never seen a white person." Jim Kite had captured a moment of 'first contact' from an Aboriginal point of view, making it an incredibly significant object. Erlikilyika was born five years after Stuart's arrival; the story he carved was told to him by people who saw it, whether they were members of his own family, or the people he interviewed when travelling with Spencer and Gillen. "Some people have described Erlikilyika as the first Aboriginal ethnographer because he was actively engaged with the interview process with Aboriginal people and made his own pictorial notes - markings to explain the Dreaming stories to Spencer and Gillen," continues Jason.

This discovery links previously unprovenanced objects back to Jim Kite Erlikilyika Penangke's story. Rosemary and Jason have also identified a whip handle and walking stick in the collection that they think could be the work of Jim Kite. Rosemary concludes, "it's very rewarding work, reconnecting these objects with their story."

Links:

Erlikilyika (1865–1930) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography

The expedition photographs of Herbert Basedow, National Museum of Australia

In their previous video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts reported the results of their mammal surveys of Wilsons Prom. They joined other MV scientists and Parks Victoria staff for the the rapid biodiversity survey, Prom Bioscan, of October 2011.

In this video, Karen and Karen talk about their work with the Mammology Collection at Museum Victoria and why the museum collects mammal specimens.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

View all Prom Bioscan blog posts

MV Animal Ethics Procedures

Mammalogy Collection

On Thursday 1 March, hundreds of people gathered outside Melbourne Museum from 5pm, apparently as curious as we were to see what would happen at the adults-only SmartBar event.

Crowd waiting outside Melbourne Museum for SmartBar to open.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

The idea of adults-only museum events is not a new one, but it's new to Museum Victoria. All over the world, history and science museums like us witness the same pattern: young people in their twenties don't visit much. Many museums have started holding special events to cater for the interests of this group. The Australian Museum launched their Jurassic Lounge three summers ago and it's a hit in Sydney. Closer to home, NGV and ACMI have launched successful adult programs, but would such a thing work for us?

Mark Norman talking about strange sex in the deep blue sea. Here he shows the SmartBar crowd a female argonaut or paper nautilus.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

David Perkins works in the museum's Public Programs department and helped organise SmartBar. "The whole point was to find if people were interested in coming to this type of event," says David, "And they were, more so that we ever expected." Online tickets sold out days in advance and people waited patiently to grab the last remaining door tickets. Over 1,000 people attended SmartBar and we were delighted that 83% of the audience were between 18 and 34 years old.

Erich Fitzgerald addressing the age-old question: just how accurate was Jurassic Park?
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

"The presentations were the most popular thing," says David. The talks covered the bizarre sex lives of deep-water animals, spotlights on specimens and chats with preparators, curators and animal keepers. They all had a blast giving visitors direct access to the museum's research activity and to talk about their work. The Science and Life Galleries became a social space and all kinds of enthusiasts came out of the woodwork, many of them commenting that they liked being in the museum with no kids around.

Bird's eye view of the crowd watching Wayne's demonstration in the Science and Life Gallery.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The phenomenal success of SmartBar is encouraging and the museum is exploring how we can hold it regularly. Because we weren't sure what to expect, there were a lot of surprises – mostly good, but there were some aspects that we didn't get right. The queues at the door were too long and it was difficult to get the sound right in the Science and Life Gallery with so much going on. A survey, a comment board and feedback on Twitter, provides us with lots of information about what to improve next time, and what was spot-on. We'd like to thank everyone who gave us feedback as it will help us get things right in the future. At this stage we are planning to have four a year to follow the seasons – so watch out for our winter SmartBar.

Nearly a quarter of the attendees had never been to Melbourne Museum before. What was it about this event that attracted them? And what has stopped them in the past? David thinks the focus was just right for this crowd. "Adult education is a dirty phrase. If you asked a bunch of people to sit in a class after work, it would be a hard sell. But if it's easy and casual you can take it at your own pace. You have a nice night and you've learned something."

Links:

Comments from the pinboard on Pinterest

SmartBar photos on Melbourne Museum's Facebook page

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."

This remarkably ordinary sentence, spoken by Alexander Graham Bell 136 years ago on 10 March 1876, comprises the first clear bi-directional transmission of speech via telephone. One of Bell's original experimental phones is set to go on display at Scienceworks in the upcoming Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention exhibition.

  Bell Double-Pole Magneto receiver (ST 035633).
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

This Bell Double-Pole Magneto receiver is not the one Bell used when uttering that famous first sentence but it is very similar. It too was made in 1876 prior to Bell's first public demonstration of the telephone at Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition in July of that year. It was used with the transmitter also in the museum's collection.

"These highly significant objects were originally brought to Melbourne by Bell's uncle, Edward Symonds, who visited his nephew's Boston laboratory in August 1876. Bell remained in contact with his uncle afterwards, and Symonds went on to assist in administering Bell's Australian patents," said curator David Demant. The transmitter, receiver and other Bell material were eventually donated to Museum Victoria in 1974 by Symonds' descendants.

"It is nowadays very hard to imagine life before the telephone, so deep has been its social and technological influence," said David.

Most workers on a smoko break shoot the breeze or maybe have a cuppa, but on rare occasions, smoko engenders creative genius. In the railyards of Newport in the late 1920s, a new sport emerged as workers improvised a game played with bits and pieces around the workshop. This uniquely Melburnian game, attributed to a Mr. Thomas Grieves of Yarraville, is called trugo.

Workers at the Newport Workshops, circa 1925. Perhaps a champion trugo player stands among them. (MM 8099).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Every aspect of trugo is linked inextricably to its railyard origins. The thirty-yard field of play is the ength of a railway carriage. Teams of players hit a rubber ring – a buffer from a train –backwards through their legs with a wooden mallet. If the ring makes it through the goal, which is as wide as the distance between train seats, it's a 'true go'.

Trugo clubs sprang up all over the blue-collar suburbs of Melbourne. The first were in the west – Yarraville and Footscray – but it spread to Brunswick, Preston, Prahran, South Melbourne and beyond. By 1938, the social pages of the Healesville and Yarra Glen Guardian were raving about the game that was "like croquet, only different". From boom times in the 1940s, many clubs have struggled to remain open in recent years. Preston Trugo Club is shuttered up and looking grim, while the second-oldest club at Footscray is gone and replaced with a housing development.

Trugo equipment from the MV collection is on display in the Sportsworks exhibition. A group of History and Technology Department staff decided it was time to learn first-hand how it was used, so at the end of last year, they visited Brunswick Trugo Club to meet club president (and trugo champion) Gerald Strachan. Curator Bec Carland was among the MV guests and loved every minute of it – the history, the community, and the game itself.

Ben ‘get outta the way’ Thomas with his strident trugo technique.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

She described the set-up of the game as a "beautiful ritual of measuring out. It takes about half an hour to set up each pitch and they measure them out painstakingly as everyone stands around chatting. You can see how workers set up this process that's a little bit drawn out to make the break go longer."

Michelle Stevenson and David Crotty attempting a 'true go'.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

"The rules are simple but they flew out the window after a little while because we were all having a go. There were some standout performances – it's really quite difficult." Bec said. "No one could get three for three yet Richard arrived late, picked up a mallet, hit three for three straight away."

Richard ‘4 for 4’ Gillespie and ‘Liza ‘strongarm’ Dale-Hallett on the trugo field.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

The clubhouse is carefully maintained by the club members and is filled with memorabilia, trophies, and a rack of hand-made mallets. There's even a vegie patch out the back and a club dog. "Gerald's got this beautiful dog that chases the buffers that go off straight," according to Bec. "He says, 'don't worry, if it's on track he won't go near it'. Every time he'd follow it half-way down and if the dog veered away, you knew it was true. And if he stayed with it, you knew it 's not going to go in."

Left: Brunswick Trugo Club's prizes are on display inside the clubhouse. Right: Hand-made wooden trugo mallets on racks at Brunswick Trugo Club.
Image: R. Carland
Source: Museum Victoria  

In January, Gerald put out a call for new players in the Melbourne Times. He and other long-time members are worried that the game won't survive unless younger people start playing. Said Bec, "there wasn't a point in the day when the club members weren't discussing its past and its threatened present."

If you'd like to try trugo, Gerald would love to hear from you.

Links:

Victorian Trugo Association

YouTube video: Trugo

Whether you know it best from the Bible, the Torah or Nick Cave's song The Mercy Seat, you might not know that the common phrase 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' has Mesopotamian origins.

Left: Acrylic eye prosthesis made by Loyer Artificial Eyes, Burwood,Victoria, circa 1999. (HT 23234) | Right: Porcelain artificial teeth made by DeTrey's Diatorics, circa 1925. (HT 11829)
Source: Museum Victoria

It describes principle of retaliation – a harsh system of justice that permits someone suffering an injury at the hands of another to return like for like. The concept was first documented in the Code of Hammurabi, an upright stone pillar inscribed with 282 Babylonian laws by King Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC). It was uncovered in modern-day Iran in 1901 and is exhibited in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. 

Code of Hammurabi on display in in the Musée du Louvre.
Image: Nick Olejniczak
Source: Used under CC BY-NC 2.0 from nicholasjon  

Detail of the cuneiform script on the Code of Hammurabi.
Image: Boris Doesburg
Source: Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from batigolix  

Museum Victoria is borrowing a cast of the code from the Australian Institue of Archaeology to display during The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia exhibition. The cast, purchased by the AIA in 1968, is an exact replica made in very limited edition by the Musée du Louvre.

Much of the code addresses contracts, payments, terms of transactions and marriage laws, but a handful of laws are paraphrased in the well-worn 'eye for an eye'. In the 1915 translation of the Code of Hammurabi by LW King, the contributing laws are stated explicitly:

196. If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.

200. If a man knock out a tooth of a man of his own rank, they shall knock out his tooth.

But it's not as simple as that. In Babylonian society, there were three distinct social classes: the freemen, the second-class citizens, and at the bottom of the heap, the slaves. If a slave suffered the injury, retribution was less about flesh and more about cash:

199. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave he shall pay one-half his price.

The Code's rules, penalties and payments are a fascinating (and often contradictory) glimpse into the lives and values of the Babylonians. For example, if you leased a field and your crops were lost to the storm god Adad, it was your own problem. Yet if you hired an ox to work your fields and it was eaten by a lion, the loss was borne by the ox's owner. If the ox's death was caused by a god, an oath to that effect absolved the hirer of any responsibility. (It sounds like ox-hiring was a tough gig in Babylon.)

King Hammurabi's legacy persists and many of the philosophies of his code still ring true today. It established concepts such as medical malpractice, penalties for negligence and the role of government in resolving family matters like inheritance and divorce. Another important idea enacted in the Code of Hammurabi was assumed innocence, whereby both parties in a legal dispute were required to provide evidence of their claims – even if the evidence was no more than an oath that a god killed your ox.

Links:

The Wonders of Ancient Mesopotamia exhibition at Melbourne Museum

1915 translation of the Code of Hammurabi by LW King (PDF, 128 KB)

Code of Hammurabi in the Musée du Louvre

Curator Michael Gregg, of the Maritime History department of the Western Australian Museum in Fremantle, recently visited the Scienceworks collection store to take highly specialised photographs of a model ship in our Transport Collection.

Michael Gregg with the model of pearling lugger Mary.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The model is an exact replica of the pearling lugger Mary that operated out of Broome and Darwin in the 1920s and 30s. It was commissioned and partly constructed by Lieutenant Commander Geoffrey Ingleton RAN in the 1930s to document a uniquely Australian type of vessel that was rapidly disappearing.

In 1913, the pearling industry was worth a fortune to Western Australia in exports. As Michael puts it, "Australia didn't ride on sheep's back, it was on the pearl oyster's back." In one year alone, 300 new luggers were registered. "At one stage, the guy who built this boat was turning out a new lugger every 14 days."

Michael is interested in the model because it captures details of design and construction that have been lost with the demise of the pearling lugger. "There are no Fremantle-built pearling luggers still in existence in their original form," explains Michael. This is in part due to mechanisation; the original Mary was herself fitted with an engine by the 1930s. But more significant was the illegal rebuilding of luggers and recycling of registration numbers by unscrupulous operators. World War II took a toll on the lugger fleet also, as boats were requisitioned by the Navy or destroyed ahead of a feared Japanese invasion..

"There were all sorts of shenanigans that went on with the pearling industry," Michael says. "The best way to run the industry economically was to import Malay and Japanese labour. Come the early 1900s, the White Australia Policy meant you could bring in indentured seamen to work on ships for up to two years but they were only allowed to work as crew, not boatbuilders." Pearling masters got around this technicality by signing up imported labour as crew, but quietly issuing them boatbuilding tasks as 'maintenance'.

There were three distinct types of pearling lugger built to cope with the different conditions in Broome, the Torres Strait and Shark Bay. The nature of these vessels – rapidly built to a standard pattern and considered reasonably expendable – means they were rarely preserved in model form. It was only Ingleton's interest in recording history that inspired the construction of this model, and it's being used now exactly as Ingleton intended.

Detail of the Mary model showing its beautifully detailed rigging and fittings.
Source: Museum Victoria  

"We were just gobsmacked when we discovered this model because we thought we knew of all the significant lugger material in Australia," says Michael. "We regularly trawl the net looking for references to pearling luggers. Because there was sufficient information in your Collections Online and it's searchable, it popped up in Google." One of the most exciting prospects for the model, and the reason for Michael's visit, is that he's using it to help develop photogrammetric software and techniques that will conserve Australia's maritime technology.

Michael Gregg at work taking photos of the pearling lugger model in the Scienceworks collection store, experimenting with a 3D camera.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Photogrammetry uses a series of photos analysed by a computer to build a 3D virtual model of an object. According to Michael, it's commonly used by police to help reconstruct road crashes. "It's great for working out the distance between two points in space, but we're really pushing the boundaries of what it can do." While the process will be most useful in recording full-sized ships, the Mary model invites some experimentation; he was using a 3D camera see if it would help simplify the laborious process of matching target points between different photographs. "It's much easier to work on a full-sized boat because you can stick targets all over it and nobody minds. With a museum-quality model, we can't do that. This is the first time I've recorded rigging simultaneously, too."

Michael sees photogrammetry as an incredibly useful tool for museums and more. Ultimately he hopes the software and techniques he and his colleagues are developing can do something absolutely extraordinary: use historical photographs to create something you can hold in your hand. The craze for stereoscopic photographs around the turn of the century produced countless images of one view from two slightly different angles, and these might one day allow 3D recreations of long-gone ships, buildings, artefacts and more. "It's very, very exciting."

Links:

Western Australian Museum - Maritime

Pearl lugger Mary on Collections Online

A long-time resident of Melbourne Museum's Mind and Body Gallery has retired from display to be replaced by an equally lovely, but more feminine, colleague. These two extraordinary 19th century anatomical models belong to the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney. Made from papier-mâché at the factory of Dr Louis Thomas Jerôme Auzoux, they were important teaching aids for budding anatomists at the university.

Left: Male Auzoux anatomical model as he appeared in the Mind and Body Gallery. Right: Female Auzoux anatomical model before she was installed in the gallery in January.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr Auzoux (1797–1880) was a French anatomist who, frustrated at the limited usefulness of genuine cadavers and wax models for learning about the human body, began producing papier-mâché models of humans, animals, organs and plants. Where a human cadaver could only be dissected once and wax models deteriorated from use, papier-mâché was durable, lightweight and could be used over and over again. His models were very popular and continued production after his death. The arrival of plastic in the 20th century superseded papier-mâché as a material, but for decades his models were unsurpassed.

They were formed in lead moulds under high pressure from a mix of papier-mâché, clay and cork. The surface was covered with veins made from linen-covered wire and then hand-painted, varnished and labelled. The handwork means that each model - and there are examples in museums worldwide – has a distinctive character and unique appearance.

Nurin Veis is the curator responsible for the Mind and Body Gallery exhibitions. "We've included a variety of multidisciplinary ways of looking at science and medicine," she explains. "This model is a great example where art meets science which is a rich area that many people are interested in. I think she's beautiful. All that work – each model is individually crafted, not like the plastic anatomical models that are churned out."

The new arrival peering out from the custom-made travel crate that carried her from Sydney to Melbourne.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dr Nurin Veis looking at the arm of the female anatomical model.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

The first thing you'll notice is that she is unusually proportioned with a small head and very broad hips. This remains an inexplicable curiosity; female Auzoux models are extremely rare and there aren't many to compare her with.

Nurin is fascinated by the model's odd shape and stance. "It's what they have and haven't fleshed out – her head is so small but they've made such a big issue of her hips. I can't help thinking that the external form was possibly done from sketches. It doesn't look like it's been modelled from life. The discrete way that she's trying to hide her body and all the things that it says about gender roles is very interesting."

The female model's torso opens up to reveal her internal organs but unfortunately there was not room in the showcase to permit this for display. Before she was installed, we took photographs of her insides. She is in wonderful condition for her age but for one thing: she does not have a heart. No one knows if her heart was lost, stolen or strayed; the Macleay Museum has no record of her ever having one.

Conservator Helen Privett opening the female anatomical model's torso to reveal her heartless core.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

The Human Body exhibition

Macleay Museum at Sydney University

Lack of human cadavers? Turn to papier-mâché medicine (New Scientist blog)

The papier-mache anatomist (Curious Expeditions)

"How fast can a mammal evolve from the size of a mouse to the size of an elephant?" This question introduces a new paper published today by a group of international researchers led by Alistair Evans of Monash University, including Dr Erich Fitzgerald, Senior Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at MV.

The world's largest mammal by weight, the Blue Whale, is about 61 million times heavier than the world's smallest, the Etruscan Shrew. Erich and his colleagues are interested in how such a range of body sizes evolved within the mammals, particularly the rate at which such evolution occurs.

Previous investigators have calculated rates of evolution using narrowly-defined parameters, whether within a shorter time scale or within a limited taxonomic group. This study is the first to tackle the larger picture, using data from a variety of species that lived over the last 70 million years.

The researchers found that it takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for terrestrial mammals to increase their mass 100-fold. To increase by 5,000-fold, it takes at least 10 million generations.

In contrast, the researchers found that land mammals can decrease in size more than ten times faster than the time it takes to increase to the same degree. Hypothetically, it could take 5 million generations for a species to evolve from rabbit size to elephant size, whereas in just half a million generations it could shrink back down again if selective pressures directed it thus. Smaller body mass gives a competitive advantage under certain conditions; this phenomenon, known as insular dwarfism, is seen in the now-extinct dwarf elephants that were stranded on Mediterranean islands by rising sea levels.

Left: Children riding on Queenie, an Indian Elephant, at Melbourne Zoo in 1917 (MM 004061). Right: Rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus.
Image: Unknown | Alex J.
Source: Museum Victoria | Used under CC BY 2.0 from a_jo.  

Interestingly, aquatic mammals such as whales evolved large body mass much faster than land mammals, taking about half as many generations to achieve the same scale of increase.

Says Erich, "Whales can get bigger because the water supports their bodies and so their maximum size is not limited by gravity." He explains that a huge body can also be an advantage for aquatic mammals because it loses less heat.

"There doesn't seem to be any slowing-down in evolution of maximum body size in whales. Land mammals may have reached a plateau enforced by gravity, but it's conceivable that the Blue Whale is not the largest possible whale. Nevertheless, energetic demands of feeding a body larger than that of a blue whale may mean that, in reality, the blue whale is as large as animals get."

Large land-dwelling mammals have a variety of solutions to the problem of gravity, explains Erich. "Some of the changes we see are extreme thickening of bones, changes in locomotion and major changes to organ systems." A gigantic rabbit wouldn't just be a large version of today's feral bunny; in fact, it would probably be unrecognisable as a rabbit. Fossils of an extinct giant rabbit described in 2011 show that it had a stiff spine to support its bulk, which meant it would not have been able to hop. Accordingly, we might need to rethink the way we portray the Easter Bunny.

Links:

Evans, A.R. et al. The maximum rate of mammal evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published ahead of print on January 30, 2012.

Speed limits on the evolution of enormousness (Wired Science)

Science reveals the secrets of super-sized mammals (The Age)

Dr Erich Fitzgerald

Golden moles are burrowing mammals native to southern Africa that are completely blind. Yet, their fur produces "a rainbow of colours when viewed from various angles, much like the surface of a compact disc," according to Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals. This raises the question: why would an animal that lives in the dark, and can't see anyway, be brightly coloured? Kevin and his colleagues, including MV Research Associate Dr Karen Rowe, have published a new study in Biology Letters that considers the implications of how and why iridescence evolved.

Golden mole specimen from the Museum Victoria collection.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Many insects, reptiles and birds use iridescence to attract mates, but this depends on keen eyesight on the part of the viewer. Analysis under scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy showed that the golden mole's colourful sheen is produced by the same mechanism as other animals: microscopic surface structures that refract light. The minute layers of scales on the surface of each hair are "most likely to reduce drag and damage while the moles swim through sand and soil," explains Karen. "The colours they produce are merely a by-product."

Hairs from these four golden mole specimens were analysed with scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy in this study.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The only other known example of mammal iridescence is the 'eye shine' seen when torchlight reflects from the retina of nocturnal animals, a useful trick for spotting animals in trees. With more investigation, the researchers may find other species with true iridescence and thus piece together the story of its evolution.

Links:

Holly K. Snyder, Rafael Maia, Liliana D'Alba, Allison J. Shultz, Karen M. C. Rowe, Kevin C. Rowe and Matthew D. Shawkey (2012) 'Iridescent colour production in hairs of blind golden moles (Chrysochloridae)' Biology Letters

World's first iridescent mammal discovered

Media release

Collection Manager David Staples has recently returned from a six-week voyage with a team of British scientists studying the marine life on seamounts and hydrothermal vents in the southern Indian Ocean.

Hydrothermal vents are associated with active spreading centres of tectonic plate boundaries and are often referred to as black (or white) smokers because of the mineral-rich, super-heated fluids they spew into the water column.

A diverse and unique fauna lives in association with the vents and a short clip of what was seen on one of these vents at about 3km depth can be viewed here. Yeti crabs, sea spiders, scaly-foot gastropods, mussels, worms and shrimp can be seen moving quickly at the periphery of these high temperature plumes.

Video used with the kind permission of Dr Jon Copley, National Oceanography Centre, Southampton.

Links:

Mountain life beneath the sea

Black smoker in Dynamic Earth

Dr Joanne Taylor has had a busy few months; just before Christmas the book that she co-edited was published, and now she has been selected as a 2012 Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) Rubenstein Fellow!

This prestigious fellowship is awarded by the Smithsonian Institution to support scientists to upload information about the species they study into the EOL. As a Rubenstein Fellow, Jo will be adding over 400 species of squat lobsters to this amazing resource about the world's biodiversity.

In 2009, Jo started a postdoctorate project to produce the first comprehensive book about this group of colourful crustaceans. The resulting book, The Biology of Squat Lobsters, was published by CSIRO last year.

Dr Jo Taylor in late 2011 with her hot-off-the-press preview copy of her book, The Biology of Squat Lobsters.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Congratulations Jo!

Links:

MV News: New squat lobster species

MV News: Butterflies of the sea

Encyclopedia of Life

The Biology of Squat Lobsters, edited by Gary C B Poore, Shane T Ahyong and Joanne Taylor. CSIRO Publishing, 2011.

Our CEO received a wonderful letter late last year from a member of the public who was particularly delighted with the help he received from the Discovery Centre to identify the spider that had taken up lodgings in his window. Here's part of the letter:

My wife and I, both Age Pensioners and Empty Nesters, live in a two-storey rectangular 1960s house.To avoid having to walk up and down sixteen stairs to find out what the weather is outside I installed an outside thermometer on the south side, which is viewed through the kitchen window at eye level above the sink.

This turned out to be an ideal spot for a Black House Spider to nest and spin its web. It was high enough to catch prey yet was a hideaway against bird strike. I was curious just what the spider was, and that's when I started asking questions of your staff. And they came up trumps! I won't name names as everyone I have spoken to over the months has been the same - 100% helpful.

The result is that I have watched the complete life cycle of this female - mating, nesting, offspring leaving - something not normally available to a householder. Two days a week we mind two sets of three primary school grandchildren after school, from different families, and I have been able to let them watch and ask questions and develop their own curiosity. I can guarantee that there are now six children who will not kill a spider as a natural reflex.

I enclose a photo of the first mating attempt - he was breakfast next day. Two days later another male repeated the ritual, he was gone next morning, but the inscrutable smile on the face of the female told its own story. She produced three clusters of eggs, but once the spiderlings had left the last clutch she then changed her former careful habits. Usually she only emerged from behind the thermometer at dusk but on the fateful afternoon was busy repairing the web in clear view and bright light. Vale Mother!

I do thank you and your staff for the interest and care you have displayed. It has generated an interest I hadn't explored before, and the long-term benefit of educating the next generation cannot be overstated.

Two Black House Spiders next to the outside thermometer. Our letter-writer describes this photo as "the last sighting of the male who became breakfast next day, his ambitions unfulfilled."
Source: Anonymous  

What a lovely letter to receive. Well done, Discovery Centre! If you have a critter you'd like identified, send the DC staff a request via the Ask the Experts form. Your query might end up featured in a Your Questions blog post!

Links:

Black House Spider

In October 2011, 50 scientists and volunteers performed a rapid biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory in partnership with Parks Victoria. In this video, Dr Karen Rowe and Dr Karen Roberts talk about the mammals of Wilsons Prom, particularly the small mammals: native rats and antechinus.

 

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Prom Bioscan

Paradise Valley

Historian at the Prom

Hunting for herpetiles

Crayfish climbing trees

A beautiful cloak woven from flax and kiwi feathers might seem like an unusual piece of sports memorabilia, but in 1889 this is exactly what the museum acquired from the visiting New Zealand Native rugby team. This team toured Australia, New Zealand and the British Isles as a money-making venture at the height of international fascination in the exotic colonies, giving the world their first glimpse of New Zealand's now-renowned rugby talent.

ANU scholar Keren Ruki recently completed a one-month internship in MV's Indigenous Cultures department examining and researching the cloak and other collection objects from New Zealand. The cloak is exquisitely made and in beautiful condition but was largely undocumented. Keren's research means we now know much more about the cloak and its story.

Keren Ruki with the kiwi feather cloak housed for more than a century in Museum Victoria's collection.
Image: Rod Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Keren first visited Museum Victoria several years ago when she was researching Māori cloak construction for her own art practice. Born in New Zealand but raised in Australia, Keren describes feeling somewhere between the two cultures and drawn to the weaving techniques of her ancestors. "I felt a big urge to go home to find out who I was," she says, explaining her trips back to New Zealand to learn how to weave. Some weaving techniques have been lost in time but keen detective work helps to recover them and keep them alive. "Cloaks in collections teach me how things are made. If you've got an object, it's never dead. You can relearn how to make it."

Now embarking upon a master's degree in liberal arts, an 1854 Student Scholarship helped bring her back to Melbourne for a closer look at this cloak in particular. It was woven top to bottom using an off-loom weaving technique that is unique to Māori weavers called whatu. In a laborious process, the maker(s) used mussel shells to extract fibre from the native flax plants, drew the fibre out into string, and wove the string across the warp, locking each kiwi feather in place. It would have been highly prized when it was made and thus chosen to accompany the New Zealand Native team on their tour.

This kiwi feather cloak was purchased by the museum in June 1889.
Image: Rod Start
Source: Museum Victoria.  

The 1888-1889 rugby tour was a triumph for the New Zealanders. They won 78 of their 107 games. As Keren puts it, "They took the game back to the masters and flogged them at it. The rugby field was one of those places where we could have a fair go. It was a great equaliser in a sense, even though it was a colonial game." The players wore black shirts with a fern motif, later adopted as the national team colours and still used today. It was also the first time that the haka was performed at the rugby, perhaps even while wearing this cloak.

The tour coincided with the Great Exhibition movement when the world was hungry for objects from faraway places. "Cloaks and the Māori were such a novelty, that's why the team came here – there was a market for them," explains Keren. However the tour was not as lucrative as the captain and organiser Joseph Warbrick had hoped. It was expensive to feed and transport 26 players and there were injuries due to the gruelling schedule of games. Cultural items were sold off to museums as the team returned to New Zealand. This cloak was bought by the (then) National Museum of Victoria on 10 June 1889, the day before the New Zealand Natives slaughtered the Victorian team in a rugby match. Another cloak was purchased by the Australian Museum.

1888-1889 New Zealand Natives football team before playing Queensland in July 1889.
Source: In the public doman, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.  

Keren's research is not complete; she's still hoping to uncover the whakapapa or ancestry of the cloak – who made it and where it came from. "It's from the Ngati Kahungunu tribe from the Kaimanawa Ranges in the North Island. There might be other ways to follow the threads of cloak through cloaks in other collections. The maker might be a Warbrick relative."

It's wonderful to hear that she will continue seeking the stories behind the Māori treasures in Australian Museums. "To have a look at my own cultural material is really important and it's very significant to the Māori community in Australia. It's been an amazing journey for me because everyone's opened up their doors."

This year's round of 1854 Student Scholarships is open for applications until 31 March 2012.

Links:

Pacific Island Ethnographic Collection

We love our MV Members. We appreciate their ardent support of our museums, we love that they help us plan exhibitions and to improve what we do. But why do our members choose to join Museum Victoria?

Chris and Janet Wright have held a family membership for many years and also donate to MV. We asked them a few questions to find out why.

The Wright family on the House Secrets monster couch.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

What made you decide to become MV Members?

Our children were babies and pre-schoolers and we wanted to pop in for an hour or so every few months. We'd meet relatives and their kids there, and stay for a little while. It was fun, stimulating and educational. Membership was an economical way for the whole family to go to the museum. We've stayed on as members both to keep the value for money, but increasingly to support the work of the museum. Janet has a personal connection to the museum, with one of her friends working there when she was at university, and the collection houses some of Chris's grandfather's firearm collection. Our daughter Annie did work experience there during her secondary school.

What do you value about Museum Victoria?

Having access to the world of knowledge, and to the world of finding out, is central to our way of life. We value that MV makes science accessible, interesting and attractive to Victorians, and it supports the work of scientists in our state. The Immigration Museum preserves wonderful stories of the history of so many Victorian families and the staff there continue to add to our knowledge.

Do you have a favourite memory or experience from your visits?

I remember as a little boy going to visit the museum when it was housed in the State Library Building on Swanston St. I was completely fascinated with the working models - these were to-scale replicas of various machines - steam engines, motors, dynamos, generators, 4 and 2 stroke petrol motors, diesel motors - all in their own wooden / glass display case, with a lovely white button in a brass bezel on the front. When you pushed the button: THINGS HAPPENED!!! The motors went around, the electric motors whirred - quite a miracle for an eight-year-old to see!

The Wright family in the Perception Deception exhibit at Scienceworks.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

When we visited Scienceworks as a family, we'd all try to race Cathy Freeman - we'd laugh at the skeleton pedalling and wonder at mechanics of the Pumping Station. The Immigration Museum brought back memories for Janet - when she was seven she went to the US on an ocean liner. The mock cabin brought all those memories flooding back.

The Wright family racing Cathy Freeman at Sportsworks.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Are you an MV Member? What draws you back to membership each year? Do you have a favourite museum memory you'd like to share?

Links:

MV Members

Donate to MV

Scienceworks: What's On today

You can see the work of MV's preparation department before you even walk in the door of Melbourne Museum. Hanging in the front window there is a food chain of predators chasing a school of fish. Our preparators created over one thousand individually painted fish for the school and the brilliant prehistoric animal models in the Science and Life Gallery are their work, too.

One of specialist tasks of the preparators is taxidermy: preserving the skin of an animal specimen and preparing a mount that records exactly how the animal looked in life. Taxidermy is truly an art that takes many years to learn and even longer to master. At Museum Victoria, our master taxidermist is Senior Preparator Dean Smith.

I paid him a visit as he was putting the finishing touches on a taxidermy mount of a male koala. This individual was the unfortunate victim of a road accident; Dean reported that its skull and jaw were fractured from the impact. It's a reminder for all of us to drive carefully in areas where animals roam, but this koala will now have a second life as a teaching aid in the museum's Discovery Program, our mobile outreach service. Says Dean, 'it will go to the elderly, the disabled, little kids... they will be able to touch a koala.'

Senior Preparator Dean Smith with his handiwork.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dean learned how to prepare mounts from a former taxidermist who worked at the museum for 40 years. He's now passing on his skills to other staff in the Preparation Department, describing it as 'the cycle of learning'.

This beautifully prepared koala specimen will join the Discovery Program in 2012.
Source: Museum Victoria  

From start to finish, a specimen like this takes several weeks. First Dean removed and tanned the skin. He cast an exact copy of the koala's body and stretched the skin over the cast, pinning it it place. He recreated the fine structure of its head beneath the skin. After three weeks of drying, he cleaned the fur and airbrushed the fleshy details of its ears and mouth. The result is an exquisite specimen that is incredibly lifelike.

Close-up of the koala specimen, showing Dean's amazing attention to detail.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Later this month, Dean will be working on a Wedge-tailed Eagle for the Discovery Program. He says that birds are much more difficult to prepare than mammals because their feathers lose their structure. 'You have to sit for hours and comb the feathers.' We'll cover the process here on the MV Blog.

Links:

Wildlife Victoria

Infosheet: the Koala

What's that smell?

This week the Australian Academy of Sciences (AAS) released a study that presents some interesting figures on the declining number of year 11 and 12 students in Australia who are studying science – it was a hot topic in the Museum Victoria offices!

The name of the report, The Status and Quality of Year 11 and 12 Science in Australian Schools, may be a bit dry, but the findings are very relevant to us all.

One of the main recommendations was to involve students in science at an earlier age and to make learning about science an active experience as opposed to a spectator experience. This approach is very dear to the museum, so as the year draws to a close, we asked some of our experts in science education to give their highlights of programs that actively engage students in science.

Priscilla Gaff, Program Coordinator - Life Sciences, Melbourne Museum

'I enjoyed the program, because even though it was about science it was turned into something fun,' said a Year 9 student after participating a new science and multimedia program at Melbourne Museum, 600 million years in 60 seconds.

Ouch! The science-loving teacher within me is astounded that the quote doesn't read more along the lines of 'because it was science it was fun'. But the realist within me knows that that actually this quote offers cause for celebration, especially in light of the new report from the AAS showing the dramatic fall in the number of students choosing to study science.

In 600 Million Years in 60 Seconds, groups of three students are given a mission: to produce a 60 second science clip about evolution to show to the rest of their class... in 25 minutes! And they do it – fabulously! – using the real objects and research on display in 600 Million Years: Victoria evolves.

Secondary school students using cameras and movie-making kits as part of 600 million years in 60 seconds.
Image: James Geer
Source: Museum Victoria  

The education program movie-making kit.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

This program offers this age group exactly what the report recommends: science education that captures the interest of year 7 to 10 students. It allows students to be creators and investigators, rather than simply consumers of facts.

Pennie Stoyles, Public Programs Manager, Scienceworks

Two years ago the team at Scienceworks changed the ways we communicate with students about science. The aim was to develop programs that encourage students not to think of science in a fixed way, but rather approach it as one does problem-solving – by making mistakes and learning from them. This is how Scienceworks promotes 'active science' in education.

For example, our Experiment Zone provides hands-on enquiry-based science and maths activities for students from across Victoria – and it features chemicals and robots (what more can you ask for?). In 2011 we've seen students from years 3 to 6 investigate soil chemistry by devising a fair test to measure water retention.

Benjamin Quint studies a model robot controlled by an iPad from the Robot Reboot education program at Scienceworks.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria  

Middle year students have used data loggers to measure, record and analyse physical phenomena and to better understand graphing as a scientific and mathematical tool.

Life sized models and puzzles inspired students to actively learn about problem solving as a mathematical process... and then we have the previously mentioned robots.

Robots were used to find 'hidden treasure' in a program where students also learn about problem solving and the use of robots in the mining industry. The idea was to get students programming the robots, and in the process making mistakes and trying again.

The skills learnt in these programs encourage engagement with science, and help students to translate the information into real life problem solving.

Mirah Lambert, Online Learning Manager, Museum Victoria

A student from Lara Primary School participating in the Biodiversity Snapshots fieldwork project.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

It seems almost everyone has a mobile device nowadays, so why not tap into that in learning? Biodiversity Snapshots is a mobile tool that enables students to observe and report biodiversity in their school, local park or bushland. It contains a field guide with more than 650 species, observation reports and the ability to upload data.

Biodiversity Snapshots was developed by Museum Victoria to assist students and teachers to take field trips and report on their local fauna. It is intended that a broad range of environments in south-eastern Australia will be surveyed, including urban, bushland and coastal areas.

With nearly 1000 observations reported, and almost 200 species identified, Biodiversity Snapshots has demonstrated that through the use of mobile technology, primary and secondary students can build environmental awareness and become real citizen scientists.

At Museum Victoria, we encourage students to investigate, construct and test explanations about the natural world using real specimens, experiments and new media. We hope that by continuing our work in this area we can help more students get excited about science!

Links:

Bridge Building

Biodiversity Snapshots

The Status and Quality of Year 11 and 12 Science in Australian Schools (PDF, 2.41 MB, via Australian Academy of Sciences)

Jan Molloy's profound contribution to Victoria's multicultural community was recognised at the 2011 Multicultural Awards for Excellence ceremony at Government House last week. She received a Service Delivery to Multicultural Victoria Award, which was presented to her by Premier Ted Baillieu.

Jan Molloy and Premier Ted Baillieu at Government House for the 2011 Victorian Multicultural Awards for Excellence.
Source: Museum Victoria  

These awards are presented annually to celebrate the contributions of individuals and organisations that promote the social, economic and cultural benefits of Victoria's multicultural community. The Governor, Alex Chernov AO QC, and Mrs Chernov presided, and guests included the Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship, Nicholas Kotsiras, plus more than 500 members of the state's multicultural community.

Jan Molloy and Minister of Education Martin Dixon at Government House for the 2011 Victorian Multicultural Awards for Excellence.
Source: Museum Victoria  

L-R: Linda Sproul, Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Citizenship Nicholas Kotsiras and Jan Molloy at Government House for the 2011 Victorian Multicultural Awards for Excellence.
Source: Museum Victoria  

After more than two decades of teaching, Jan joined Museum Victoria in 2006 and she coordinates humanities programs at the Immigration Museum. Over the years, Jan's passionate belief in the power of education to build strong communities has driven several innovative programs for teachers and students, including:

Narratives Across Cultures: a partnership program with both Deakin University and VUT leading to an ALTC research project 'Teaching and Learning in Public Spaces'

Cultural Diversity Quest: a partnership program with DEECD celebrating cultural diversity in our secondary schools, culminating in an exhibition at the Immigration Museum for Cultural Diversity Week 2010

Small Object Big Story: A program in which participants learn research techniques, explore their personal histories, uncover the stories embedded in familiar objects, and learn how to share their discoveries through exhibitions and publications. This program formed the basis for Making History.

Congratulations Jan Molloy!

Links:

Immigration Museum education programs

MV Blog: Making History with the experts

Where would we be without our donors? Thanks to the generosity of our supporters and donors, Museum Victoria's collections (and thus, the collections belonging to all Victorians), research, exhibitions and facilities are much enriched. To acknowledge our donors and express our gratitude, we held an official thankyou event at Melbourne Museum last month.

Guests viewing Twycross collection objects at the donor thankyou event.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Sarah Myer (Trustee, Yulgilbar Foundation and Myer Foundation, wife of Baillieu Myer) and Tim Hart (Director IMT) at the event.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Recent donations to Museum Victoria include:

• An omnicycle from 1880
• An important collection of butterflies
• A slab of tiger eye that features in Dynamic Earth
• Pendle Hall Dolls' House
• Support for a research fellowship
• Assistance with the upgrade of the Immigration Museum Discovery Centre
• The Twycross Collection of decorative arts
• Support of the Bunjilaka redevelopment

On the evening, Senior Curator Lindy Allen toured the guests through the Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic exhibition and specially selected Twycross Collection objects were on display.

Lindy Allen (Senior Curator - Anthropology Northern Australia) talking to donor Ross Field and his wife in the Ancestral Power exhibition. Ross donated a significant selection of butterflies to MV.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Many of our donors have given objects of tremendous personal significance to the museum, and it is quite an honour to be entrusted with them. Financial support has enabled valuable research projects and much-needed exhibition renewal. As MV CEO Patrick Greene said, "It was wonderful to meet so many of our generous supporters, and be able to thank them personally. Whether the donation is a priceless object or financial support, it is greatly appreciated and supports the work of our exhibitions, research and programs."

Martin Carlson (Treasurer, Hugh D. T. Williamson Foundation), with Will and Margie Twycross beside selected items from the Twycross collection they donated to MV.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Donate to MV

Seated around an enormous pile of industrial offcuts and repurposed bits and pieces, MV staff launched themselves In-Flight last Friday in a special after-hours aeroplane construction session.

Staff working on their planes. Completed planes are suspended above them.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

In-Flight is one of three parts of Another Country, a project at the Immigration Museum by Filipino-born, Brisbane-based artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, that comprises displays, workshops and art installations. The series examines what it's like to leave your country and make a new home elsewhere.

"We make art-making as fun as possible. In-Flight asks people to create their own little aeroplanes. Of course, when you talk about aeroplanes it's about going from point A to point B. But at the same time there are a lot of other things that go into it – it becomes an object of memory, it could also become an object of fear. So one way to demystify this object is for us to get people to come and make their own little aeroplanes."

"It's good to have non-artists create things. If you get them involved not just as a passive observer but as an active participant, then that's the best way to get interested in art."

-Alfredo Aquilizan, interviewed on 3RRR FM

Artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan who created In-Flight as part of their Another Country series.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

It's rare for grown-ups to have a chance to play like this, especially at work. Recycled rubber bands, icy pole sticks, bits of plastic and cardboard tubes became wonderful model aircraft to join the installation of planes suspended above the work table. Some staff rejected any pretence of aerodynamic qualities while others painstakingly replicated real aeroplanes, complete with engines, landing gear and propellers.

MV staff with the planes they made for In-Flight.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

You can make a plane, to take home or to join the In-Flight installation, at the Immigration Museum until 31 January 2012.

Links:

Another Country series

MV Staff In-Flight flickr set

Following on from the student hand-in trifecta post, here are two more Masters projects recently completed by students working in the museum’s Natural Sciences Department. Both students performed genetic analysis on local lizard species.

Pete Smissen examined the geographic movement of the Lace Monitor (Varanus varius) over time. About 25,000-20,000 years ago, Australia experienced its Last Glacial Maximum, when the climate was colder and drier than it is currently.

Pete's fieldwork with Lace Monitors. Left: Weighing an animal in the field. Right: A Lace Monitor basking in a sunny tree.
Image: Peter Smissen
Source: Peter Smissen  

Analysing mitochondrial DNA (which is only passed down maternal lines), Pete found that there are three genetically distinct groups of Lace Monitors in Australia that have been evolving independently since the time of the Last Glacial Maximum. This suggests that the species persisted through these cold times in small refugia then dispersed broadly as temperatures increased. When he looked at fast-evolving nuclear DNA, (which is inherited from both parents), he found similar population clusters across Australia, but little genetic structure in a smaller geographic area in Gippsland. This lack of structure is a different pattern to that found in many other species, but is consistent with Lace Monitors being large, mobile, generalist animals.

Luisa Teasdale examined the variable colouration found in male Tawny Dragons (Ctenophorus decresii). Some males have vibrant orange patches on their throats while others are quite drab.

The four distinct throat colour morphs in Tawny Dragons.
Image: Luisa Teasdale
Source: Luisa Teasdale  

By analysing digital photographs for colour and pattern combined with genetic tecniques, she found evidence that there are four distinctly different morphs that seem to be genetically clustered. This suggests that even though there is one interbreeding population, the lizards breed preferentially with their own morph. Her work poses some interesting questions about how the four morphs differ in other respects, such as behaviour or life history, and what keeps them separate even within the same population.

Congratulations to Luisa and Pete for completing their fascinating projects!

Links:

Information for prospective students

Lizards of Victoria infosheet series

A YouTube video, Octopus Walks on Land at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve is doing the rounds at the moment and generating a bit of online discussion about this fascinating behaviour.

Dr Julian Finn filmed a similar event in Broome a few years back where a small, unnamed octopus (Abdopus sp.) crawled between rock pools at low tide. He says that it's not uncommon for intertidal octopuses to roam between pools in hunt of prey such as crabs or fish. They may also flee their tide pool to escape the attention of bigger, hungrier octopuses! In this video, he explains more about these terrestrial adventures.

Watch this video with a transcript

Like all cephalopods, octopuses breathe through gills and won't survive for long out of water. Julian has only seen octopuses crawl over dry land where the chance of them being trapped out of water is minimal. In captivity, it's not unknown for octopuses to turn up in strange places after breaking out of their tanks – including one that was found in a staircase!

Links:

MV Blog: Blue-ringed octopus project

MV News: Argonaut buoyancy

MV News: Tool use in Veined Octopus

Congratulations to Katie Smith, Natalie Calder and Skipton Woolley for handing in their postgraduate theses in the last fortnight. All three have done major pieces of research that combined new field studies with Museum Victoria Natural Sciences collections.

For her PhD, Katie Smith assessed the hybrid zone between two closely-related south-eastern Australian tree frogs, Litoria ewingi and Litoria paraewingi. A hybrid zone is an area where the geographic distribution of two species overlap in a narrow contact zone. They subsequently share habitat and sometimes cross-breed.

Top: Litoria ewingi calling. Bottom: Litoria paraewingi. Can you spot the difference between these two species?
Image: Katie Smith | Fran Lyndon-Gee
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the 1960s, Murray Littlejohn first reported hybridisation in these species in the Kinglake area, collecting specimens and recordings of the male advertisement calls in the 1960s. Katie built upon Murray's work, performing genetic and acoustic analysis on the original specimens and recordings and recent samples to compare the hybrid zone then and now. Says Katie, "it makes you realise what a good job Murray did! It's amazing that he even worked out they are different species because their appearance and calls are so similar."

Main: Murray Littlejohn recording frog calls in the 1960s. Inset: Katie Smith recording frog calls for her PhD.
Source: Murray Littlejohn | Museum Victoria  

Katie found that the hybrid zone is quite stable which is particularly interesting because the Kinglake area has changed dramatically over the decades through agricultural and residential development. Her fieldwork, completed before the 2009 bushfires, can't comment on the effect of fire on the hybrid zone but she hopes that ongoing surveys will keep an eye on the situation. When she handed in her thesis, her colleague Susi made a special batch of hybrid frog cupcakes to celebrate!

Hybrid frog cupcakes for afternoon tea!`
Image: Susi Maldonado
Source: Susi Madonado  

Natalie Calder's Masters thesis investigated how larval fishes use tide cycles to disperse in Port Phillip Bay. She worked at Governor Reef, near Indented Head on the Bellarine Peninsula, measuring where these tiny hatchlings place themselves in the water column.

As Nat explains, "Upon hatching larvae are translucent, lack scales and are usually less than 1mm long. Studies throughout the first half of the 20th century assumed that larvae were passive particles, at the mercy of tides and currents, with little or no control over where they dispersed."

Three larval fishes. Top: Zeidae (dory family) without fins, jaws or pigmented eyes. Middle: Hemiramphidae (garfish or halfbeak family) in relatively late stage of development, with visible muscle bands. Bottom: Triglidae (gunard or sea robin family) with partially-developed fins, well-developed eyes but still-visible egg yolk sac.
Image: Natalie Calder
Source: Museum Victoria  

Since then, scientists have observed that fish larvae display more complex behaviour, and Nat's research contributes to this body of knowledge. She found that fish larvae are quite selective and effectively 'surf' the tides in and out of Port Phillip Bay by exploiting properties of the currents. They rise in the water column to catch fast-moving surface waters during incoming tides, ensuring they stay in the bay rather than be swept out to sea. This better understanding of how larval fish disperse could help ensure the network of marine protected areas are sufficiently connected to keep fish populations healthy.

Another major piece of Masters research with implications for marine reserves was completed by Skipton Woolley, who used marine worms called polychaetes to model the biodiversity of large-scale ecological systems. Using data from museum collections and from new fieldwork in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, he tested whether polychaetes are a good group to use when assessing biodiversity. The idea is that it's not often practical to count every species in an ecosystem, but if the diversity of one group correlates with biodiversity overall, they become a handy indicator that can be used to compare between regions.

By examining 342 species from seven families, he found that that polychaetes are indeed a useful group, because where you find numerous species of polychaetes, you find numerous species of other animals, such as echinoderms and crustaceans. Thus, concludes Skip, "worms are amazing!"

A scaleworm from Skip's Masters project, Iphione muricata (family Polynoidae). The numerous white hairy structures, or chaetae, are what give this group their name - the polychaetes.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Amazing too are our students who contribute so much to the museum's research work. Well done Katie, Nat and Skip!

Links:

Information for prospective students

MV News: Victoria frogs and bushfires

WA Museum: Marine Life of the Kimberley Region

During the recent Prom Bioscan biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory, Dr Joanna Sumner led the herpetology (reptiles and amphibians) group. She and her troops - Katie Smith, Claire Keely, Susi Maldonado, Maggie Haines and Parks Victoria's Steve Wright – used a combination of trapping and active searching to find nine skink species, three elapid snake species and five frog species over several survey sites.

  Claire and Susi checking funnel traps opposite Lilly Pilly Gully carpark.
Image: Jo Sumner
Source: Museum Victoria

Reported Jo,

We captured, tissue sampled and released 59 individual reptiles and amphibians. Tissue samples will be put in our frozen tissue collection and used in research on species identification of some these groups. The overall diversity of reptile species in the Prom is very low compared to other areas in Australia. We sighted all three snakes previously recorded, 50% of known frog species and 75% of skinks known to the area. We did not record any of threatened species previously recorded on the Prom however, such as Litoria raniformis and Egernia coventryi.

If you're ever wondered what herpetology fieldwork looks like, here's a video from Wilsons Prom where Jo explains how she traps skinks and takes tissue samples.

Watch this video with a transcript

Each year, the MV library develops a particular area of the book collection. This year it's the Indigenous section receiving attention, which will assist the team working on the redevelopment of Bunjilaka and the researchers of the Indigenous Cultures Department. Over 50 books, many of them out-of-print and very rare, were purchased from Grants Bookshop for an average price of less than a modern day paperback. With increasing costs for interlibrary loans, purchasing our own copies for MV makes sound financial sense, too.

Display in the MV Library of the newly-aquired books about Indigenous culture and history.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Research associate Jason Gibson talked about the nature of these books, some of which date back to the 1940s. "They often take a classical anthropological perspective, that you don't see much of any more. There were problems with this approach but in terms of the detail captured, it's fantastic." He explained that these books were largely written by non-Indigenous anthropologists attempting an objective, scientific analysis of Indigenous people. "It was often the first time Indigenous languages, traditions and cultural practices had been documented in written form and therefore these texts have become very important for Native Title research as well as museum studies."

Librarian Leonie Cash laments the closure of many of Melbourne's second-hand bookshops that makes these books even harder to obtain. Even now when books are becoming available in electronic form, physical books are still popular for researchers who spend much of their day looking at a computer screen and would prefer to read from paper.

L-R: Jason Gibson, Hayley Webster and Rose Bollen looking at the new books.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The books are on display in the MV Library for staff to peruse and borrow. Of particular interest is the acquisition of the first edition of an American Philosophical Society publication of 1941 Aboriginal Australian String Figures, including string figure illustrations of the bandicoot, python, boomerang, and canoe.

Links:

Indigenous Cultures collections

MV Blog: Following the travelling Tjitingalla

On Wednesday a small team - five scientists and two rangers - were allowed into into the protected heart of Wilsons Prom as part of the Prom Bioscan project. The Vereker Creek Reference Area, colloquially known as Paradise Valley, is largely untouched by recent human activity. It is afforded the highest level of conservation protection and access is strictly limited to infrequent scientific research. The purpose of keeping areas such as Paradise Valley closed is to maintain a pristine reference point against which the impacts of human activity can be measured.

The area contains a stand of Antarctic Southern Beech trees (Nothofagus cunninghamii) and thus the possibility of Gondwanan wildlife. Rare and endangered mammals might still persist there. It's a very exciting opportunity for the specialist team but the first obstacle is getting there. There are no tracks to Paradise Valley, just a long hike through swordgrass taller than their heads after being dropped by helicopter on Five Mile Beach.

Wayne and Richard in their helicopter suits waiting for their turn in the chopper.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

I didn't make the cut for the team going in to Paradise Valley, but there was enough room in the helicopter for a couple of us to tag along for the drop-off, which was an adventure in itself. Seeing the Prom from the air was simply amazing.

The beautiful Five Mile Beach seen from above.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

Jim Whelan of Parks Victoria and our pilot Ed in the helicopter.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria  

Helicopter taking off for Five Mile Beach carrying field gear and three days' food in a sling beneath it.
Image: Melanie Mackenzie
Source: Museum Victoria

Tomorrow I'm heading to Sealers Cove with about half of the MV scientists for more survey work. We'll be back in the middle of next week with much more to report on the Prom Bioscan.

Lantern slide, about 1920, looking out over Sealers Cove (BA 2950)
Image: A.G. Campbell
Source: Museum Victoria  

Museum Victoria has partnered with Parks Victoria for a two-week intensive biodiversity survey of Wilsons Promontory National Park. The Prom Bioscan project, from 16 to 28 October, is targeting terrestrial, freshwater and marine wildlife and visiting some remote and rarely-visited sites. This rapid census will help Parks Victoria assess the environmental impacts of recent extreme weather events: the 2005 and 2009 fires and the floods in early 2011. On 23 September the southern part of the Prom reopened to visitors after six months of flood repair. Many riparian zones (near creeks and rivers) have changed proundly since the flood, their vegetation and beds scoured away the 370mm of rain that fell in one day in February.

Wilson's Prom is one of Victoria's oldest National Parks. It was first designated a National Park in 1898 due to its unique wilderness, stunning natural beauty and its ease of isolation from the mainland. Its habitats - heathlands, swamps, grasslands, forests and more - house numerous species of plants and animals.

A skink from Wilsons Promontory.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

A lacewing caught at Wilsons Promontory.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria  

Researchers have worked here for decades to document the life and environment of the Prom. The Prom Bioscan is a special case: it's rare to have so many experts working simultaneously across the park. Over 40 Museum Victoria staff and volunteers and 15 Parks Victoria staff are participating.

Karen, Lara and Karen checking mammal traps.
Image: Michela Mitchell
Source: Museum Victoria  

In the first few days, the scientists have observed 69 species of birds, two types of rats, Gondwanan snails, numerous skinks and much more. Some specimens will become part of the Museum Victoria collections whereas others are released after a small tissue sample is taken for genetic research. The days in the field are long, especially for those who follow animals that are active at dawn and dusk, but the stunning surroundings more than make up for it.

Granite boulders, wildflowers and blue sea at Wilsons Promontory.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria  

You can follow #PromBioscan on Twitter. Tweet your questions for MV scientists about the project to @museumvictoria. 

Links:

Parks Victoria: Wilsons Promontory National Park 

The travelling exhibition On their own - Britain's child migrants opened at the Immigration Museum on Thursday. Created by the Australian National Maritime Museum and National Museums Liverpool, UK, the exhibition recounts some of the experiences of over 100,000 British children who were sent to Commonwealth colonies and dominions from the 1860s to the1970s. They were taken from orphanages and children's homes to populate Australia, Canada and African colonies with "good white stock" in schemes that were largely hidden from public scrutiny until the late 1980s.

About 7500 children were sent to Australia. Some of the children left desperate circumstances and found their new home to be a land of opportunity. But for many child migrants, the experience was brutal.

Harold Haig, Secretary of the International Association of Former Child Migrants and their Families, speaking at the exhibition launch.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Guests in the Immigration Museum atrium for the official launch of On their own - Britain's child migrants .
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Harold Haig, Secretary of the International Association of Former Child Migrants and their Families, spoke at the exhibition launch. "Many child migrants faced an assault course of adversity rather than a preparation for adult life. The children were often led to believe that they were orphans; that their parents were dead. This was a particularly cruel deception that extinguished the hopes of many parents and children of ever being reunited." The British Consul-General, Stuart Gill, spoke about his participation in the formal apologies delivered by the Australian Government in 2009 and by the British Government in 2010. He considers them among the most powerful but emotional duties of his position, yet concealment by both Governments of their policies for decades meant that just a few years prior he had never heard of child migrants.

Stuart Gill, British Consul-General and Maggie Gill in the exhibition.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Now, it is hard to believe that the schemes that brought unaccompanied children as young as three years old to these shores were not more widely known. Settled mostly in rural institutions, the children were expected to provide farm and domestic labour. Hugh McGowan left Glasgow as an adolescent and was placed at Dhurringile Training Farm in Tatura, and later Kilmany Park Home for Boys in Sale. He says, "I was fed, I was clothed, I was somewhat educated, I was housed. [But] there are things that happened to me as a seven year old boy and as a 15 year old boy that I just didn't discuss with anyone." Mr McGowan speaks frankly about the abuse and deprivation that he suffered because he feels that it's important for people to know what happened to him. He left institutional care at the age of 17, permanently shaped by his experiences, and found it difficult to relate to people in his personal and professional life. "I didn't understand them because I wasn't the product of a loving family, whereas they were."

Hugh McGowan looking at a photo of four child migrants on their way to Fairbridge Farm School.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

Says Mr McGowan, "the exhibition is precisely what it should be. It's an accurate reflection of what happened. Some of us have survived, but a lot of us haven't." Parts of it are quite harrowing. Curator Kim Tao had the difficult task of sifting through stories, good and bad, to include in the exhibition. "Despite them being such difficult and painful stories, the [former child migrants] really wanted to share them and put them on the public record and recognise that this was such an important part of Australia's migration history." She mentioned the exhibition's website which has a message board, and that people are still coming forward to talk about their experiences for the first time. Through the Child Migrants Trust and other groups, former child migrants support one another as adults much they did as children, when, in the absence of parents and families, they became de facto families for one another.

Exhibition curator Kim Tao (centre) with former child migrants Sandra Anker and Hugh McGowan.
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria  

On Their Own - Britain's child migrants is at the Immigration Museum until 6 May 2012.

Links:

Child Migrants Trust

'Innocence lost in lucky country', The Age, 11 October 2011

Inside: Dhurringile boys (National Museum of Australia)

Exhibitions about science and technology are notoriously difficult to keep up-to date because those scientists just won't stop discovering and inventing things! Curator Kate Phillips encountered an example of this last week, after someone spotted a discrepancy between two Melbourne Museum exhibitions, Darwin to DNA (2000) and 600 Million Years: Victoria Evolves (2010).

Both exhibitions compare the similarity of DNA between chimpanzees and humans. The earlier exhibition states that there is less than two per cent difference while the more recent exhibition declares a 96 per cent similarity. While the numbers don't seem to agree, they're not necessarily incorrect because they compare different aspects of the genomes.

Young adult male chimpanzee.
Image: Frans de Waal, Emory University
Source: Used under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 from Wikimedia Commons.  

Kate explains:

"The discrepancy comes about because these two exhibitions were developed ten years apart and the understanding of DNA has changed over that time. In 2001 the draft human genome was published and a final version in 2004. In 2005 the draft chimp genome was published and could be accurately compared to the human one. The percentage similarity that came out of this comparison was 96 per cent. Before this time the similarity was probably based on comparing known genes, and therefore was working with less information."

"However the percentage you come up with also depends on how you make the comparison – on which bits of the genome you compare and that could also account for the discrepancy. If you compare genes, we are more similar, if you include the non-coding sequences, we are slightly less similar. Really 98 per cent and 96 per cent are both indicate great genetic similarity."

Chromosomes of a human male. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and chimpanzees have 24 pairs.
Source: National Human Genome Research Institute  

We love that someone noticed this because it means that people are reading exhibition text closely, and keeps us on our toes. It's also, as Kate concludes, a pointed demonstration of "the scale of scientific discovery in the area of genome research over the last ten to twenty years."

Links:

The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium (2005) 'Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome' Nature, Vol 437 pp 69-87.  (PDF, 4.3 MB)

Media release from NIH News, 'New Genome Comparison Finds Chimps, Humans Very Similar at the DNA Level' (2005)

Artist Joceline Lee has spent her last few Wednesdays in the basement of the Royal Exhibition Building among the palaeontologists, geologists, rocks and fossils. She is working on drawings for her first solo exhibition, Rendered Bones.

Joceline draws skeletons and anatomical forms in pen and ink which makes palaeontological specimens the ideal material for her. When I visited her at work, she was drawing an echidna skeleton that she'd selected from the collection. She was accompanied by her mentor Rob Delves, a sculptor who has worked with Joceline for seven years at Art Day South. This project is run by Arts Access Victoria in Melbourne's south-east to give artists with disabilities opportunities to develop their artwork through workshops, mentorships, collaborations and exhibitions.

  Joceline Lee and Rob Delves working on an echidna skeleton in the Museum Victoria Palaeontology Department.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Rob said that when she first came to Art Day South, her drawings were intricate and very tiny. "Her linework was amazing in these little drawings and they just said 'skeletons'." He started bringing her photographs and models of animal skeletons about three years ago, and Joceline was hooked. "Then we brought in bigger things and it's grown from there." In July this year, MV's Discovery Program visited Art Day South bringing a tortoise shell, a huge model dinosaur leg, fossils and more for the artists to explore.

Joceline works slowly but steadily for hours at a time, with each drawing taking two to three weeks to complete. Rob loves her unique style of drawing. "She goes off in beautiful directions, with all this contrast... dark and fine lines."

Rendered Bones is part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival program from 4 to 9 October in the No Vacancy Project Space in the Federation Square Atrium. Be sure to visit the exhibition if you'd like to see Joceline's distinctive interpretation of fossils, bones and skeletons.

Flyer for Rendered Bones exhibition.
Image: Arts Access Victoria
Source: Arts Access Victoria

Links:

Melbourne Fringe Festival: Rendered Bones

No Vacancy Gallery: Rendered Bones

At 2pm today it was exactly 100 years ago, on 28 September 1911, that the No. 8 Steam Pumping Engine in the Spotswood Pumping Station was fired up for the first time. You can still see the it in motion in the Engine Room but these days it runs in demonstration mode, powered by compressed air.

Steam Pumping Engine - Austral Otis, No.8 Pumping Engine, MMBW Spotswood Sewerage Pumping Station, 1911 (ST 038266).
Source: Museum Victoria  

Built by local company Austral Otis, the No. 8 Engine was a modified copy of the earlier Hathorn Davey engine. It is one of five surviving engines at the Pumping Station which remain some of the most sophisticated steam engines ever built in Australia. It took four men to run the No. 8 Engine: an engine driver, a greaser, a pump attendant and a fireman. It was one of the engines that moved sewerage from Melbourne to Werribee following the welcome introduction of Melbourne's sewerage system in the 1890s.

Original blueprint for an Austral Otis Steam Pumping Engine.
Image: Austral Otis
Source: Museum Victoria  

Of the bank of engines, one or two were run continuously with additional machines brought on to handle peak sewerage flow. The Pumping Station log books show that from 1912, the No. 8 Engine was used heavily for the first decade of its life. In the 1920s and 30s the old steam engines were progressively replaced by electric engines which were cheaper to run. No. 8 was used less often, but was still important for managing peak periods.

There was a regular flow pattern coinciding with the daily cranking up of industrial and domestic activities. Curator Matthew Churchward describes a peak on Mondays when many women did the week's laundry. The superintendant would also keep a close eye on the weather and impending rainfall, and counted raindrops to predict how many staff would be needed to manage the stormwater that would be on its way to Spotswood within a couple of hours. During big storms, all the engines might be running to prevent sewerage from entering the Yarra River.

During its working life from 1911 to 1947, the No. 8 Engine pumped the equivalent of four billion toilet flushes out of the city. It was a filthy job but vital to the health and quality of life of 20th century Melbourne. If you're at Scienceworks today, be sure to wish this gleaming hulk of pistons, valves, cranks and pipes a happy birthday!

Workshop volunteer and casual engine driver Graeme Kerrs running a pumping engine demonstration in front of the No. 8 Engine.
Image: James Geer
Source: Museum Victoria  

Links:

Centenary of the Austral Otis Steam Pumping Engines

Spotswood Sewerage Pumping Station

MV Blog: World Toilet Day

On 30 September, the exhibition Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art opens at the National Gallery of Victoria. It features 200 early paintings from the artists of Papunya Tula, recognised as the founders of the Western Desert art movement forty years ago.

The exhibition is co-curated by NGV's Judith Ryan and Dr Philip Batty, Senior Curator of Anthropology in MV's Indigenous Cultures Department. He spent three years at Papunya (about 240 km north-west of Alice Springs) as an art teacher at Papunya School and a community development officer. He got to know many of the original Papunya Tula artists in the late 1970s.

Central Australian decorated Stone Knives. Quartzite Stone Blade with Decorated Wooden Handle. Museum Victoria. These set of knives were produced by the Warumangu people (Tennant Creek) and collected by Baldwin Spencer in the early 1900s.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Philip has lots of stories from this time, including the tale of a two-week trip across the desert with Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, one of the most prominent Papunya Tula artists with a unique style of painting layers of dots. Tjupurrula grew up in the bush and first encountered European people when he was eight or nine years old.

"We were going on a trip to his traditional Country... he hadn't been back there for a number of years.

"We were driving off into the desert in the middle of nowhere, right off any roads, with no maps and not much food or water. We were relying on his knowledge of Country to take us to waterholes.

"He'd say we drive this way for a while then he'd clamber up on the back of the truck look around and as he looked around he'd sing a traditional chant. And after 5 or 10 minutes of singing, he'd say right, now we go this way. We'd drive for a while, and then he'd do the same thing. Each evening we'd end up at a little waterhole, often only a metre or so across.

"In his head he had this map of all these different songlines going across his part of the Country. The songs name geographical sites through the journey of a particular ancestor. When he was singing he was reminding himself where he was. It was a very practical business."

Their final destination was Tjupurrula's ancestral home, Tjikari. "It was a small mountain and we had to climb up in silence, carrying particular bushes. As we were coming up the mountain, Warangkula was shouting out to the ancestor in a cave, swearing at the ancestor in his language, Pintupi Luritja. I'm not quite sure what was going on but think he was trying to scare the ancestor away."

Tjukurrtjanu includes a wall full of shields from the Museum Victoria collection decorated with iconographic designs; artefacts such as these are the origins of Western Desert art, but the story is not quite so simple as transferring traditional ceremonial symbols to the new mediums of boards, canvases and acrylic paints.

Central Australian Decorated Shields. Carved and fluted beanwood (Erythrina vespertilio) with applied earth pigments.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Says Philip, "I see it as cross-cultural form of art, as a result of Aboriginal-European collision. Long before the 1970s, Aboriginal people were manufacturing artefacts and paintings for sale to tourists, missionaries and museums. In the days before social security it was an important source of cash."

"Papunya Tula artists were addressing a market, but that doesn't diminish the complexity and interest of their paintings. They drew heavily on traditions and they also expanded that of iconographic language to create new approaches, particularly in those early paintings."

Links:

Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art

Central Australia Collections at MV

Papunya Tula Artists

When Natural Sciences Collection Manager Dermot Henry heard a radio report about efforts to salvage gold from the Royal Charter shipwreck, the story rang a bell. "I had recollections of seeing a little gold specimen that had come from a shipwreck." Sure enough, in the Geology Collection he located a small nugget with a curious label explaining that it was a survivor of the Royal Charter, which was lost off the coast of Wales in 1859. The typed label probably accompanied the nugget on display at the former Industry and Technology Museum. It reads in part:

One of the passengers had a part of his property in a belt round his waist, and in swimming ashore was dashed against the rocks and the belt burst where this was picked up but his life was saved after being three times washed back into the sea off the rock. Name of above passenger W. J. Ferris.

The ship was just three hours from its destination in Liverpool when a terrible storm drove it onto rocks. Carrying over four hundred people and gold worth millions in today's money, the loss was a terrible one for Australia and England. Many of the passengers were returning home after striking it rich in the central Victorian goldfields. Just a handful of people survived including the man on the label – William J. Ferris, a Ballarat shopkeeper.

The gold nugget that survived the Royal Charter shipwreck. It is 17mm long and weighs about 4g.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Dermot tracked the specimen back to a donation to the Public Library, Melbourne, from Mr Gordon Thomson, reported in the Argus in 1874. "We don't know how Thompson ended up with the gold," says Dermot. The report says that the two men met in Ireland but the nature of their transaction is not recorded.

Thomson himself was quite a character with a habit of collecting curious things. Irish-born into a wealthy family, he spent much of his life travelling the world and amassing ethnographic objects. His "very fine mansion" in Belfast called 'Bedeque-house' held "rich stores of curiosities and relics gathered from many lands." Among the relics were at least two treasures from Victorian history from his first visit to Melbourne in 1835, when the city was in its wattle-and-daub infancy. There he befriended William Buckley, who absconded from imprisonment to live with the Aboriginal people of Port Phillip Bay for more than 20 years. Buckley gave Thomson a greenstone axe-head that had "passed 20 years of its life of usefulness in Buckley's belt." The axe head and the Royal Charter gold specimen ended up in the Belfast museum along with hundreds of other objects Thomson collected on his travels.

When Thomson decided to return to Melbourne to live, he requested that the Belfast museum return the colonial objects, believing that they rightly belonged in their home country. Thus, in 1874, they travelled back over the oceans and were deposited in Melbourne public collections. We still have the gold but Buckley's axe has been missing for many years, its whereabouts unknown. Thomson built another 'Bedeque-house' in Dudley Street, West Melbourne. His 1886 obituary mourned the "death of one of the oldest Melbourne residents."

Links:

'Gold rush ship yields its treasures' - The Age, 18 July 2011

Report of Thomson's donations, The Argus, 23 Octopber 1874

Thomson's obituary, 'Death of one of Melbourne's Oldest Residents' - The Argus, 8 Jun 1886

William Buckley on Australian Biography

Further reading:

Winifred Glover, In the Wake of Captain Cook: The Travels of Gordon Augustus Thomson (1799 - 1886) Ulster Historical Foundation, 1993

MV's new conservation sound studio opened for business at the end of August. Conservator Sarah Gubby hosted an open day to herald the event and to show staff this wonderful new facility.

Sarah demonstrating the Edison phonograph to MV staff at the sound studio open day.
Source: Museum Victoria

Sarah joined the museum as a paper, image and audio-visual conservator in February 2010. Among other things, she's been working with MV librarians to assess the condition of our rare books collection. In recent months she has been planning the new sound studio, which will assist her to preserve the museum's many recordings, such as interviews, oral histories, music, films and more. Some of these recordings exist on fragile media like wax cylinders, while others are in more stable formats that are now obsolete and haven't been played for years.

Before now, there weren't any dedicated spaces where staff could play back AV material. "There were pockets of room, but acoustically they weren't very good," explained Sarah. The new studio is a soundproofed, dedicated space where AV material can be played back in privacy, which is especially important for culturally sensitive items. Sarah has decked it out with a bank of both old and brand-new equipment that can accommodate almost any medium or format. This means that playback and digitisation can now happen in-house. The studio will also be useful for creating new recordings such as podcasts.

The bank of AV equipment in the conservation sound studio. The older equipment, such as the laserdisc player, was first used in the museum's production studios.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Said Sarah, "Certain forms of AV materials are robust enough to travel out of the museum for copying, such as video and movie reels, but there are lots of very fragile and old pieces. Wax cylinders are particularly fragile. If conditions are too dry, they become brittle; if too humid, they become languid and malleable. And the more you play them, the more they wear down."

Sarah will assess whether AV items are sturdy enough to play, how they will be played, and she'll work with curators to determine whether their content should be transferred to a digital format. The studio contains all the cleaning and playing gear needed to do so. "To get good sound, you need to have clean equipment – a clean record and clean needles. So we've bought various types of very soft brushes and cloths to remove dust and a special record-cleaning machine." The studio's new turntable can play twelve different speeds and there is a variety of needles and differently weighted cartridges.

Sarah with the new record-cleaning machine.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The studio itself is a small room with an eclectic mix of furniture. Much of it Sarah salvaged from other parts of the museum, but there is one large cabinet that is definitely not standard office furniture. "I picked it up for a bargain from a Chinese antiques sale," she said. "It's the only thing I could find that would close and fit the Edison horn in it for storage. It's got good mass to it as well – I was adamant that I needed a very solid surface for the turntable. That's important, to help minimise reverb."

The unusual cabinet in the studio is large and heavy enough to accomodate both the enormous old Edison horn and newer turntable.
Source: Museum Victoria  

I asked Sarah which material she was most excited about working on. She didn't hesitate to say "the interviews and other sound recordings in the Indigenous Cultures collections. Those, and the birdsongs in our Sciences collections. It will be exciting to unlock their content after all this time, and share it with new audiences." These recordings will be invaluable for research and interpretation, so watch (or rather, listen out for) this space!

Links:

Edison phonograph cylinders on Collections Online

My friend Jen recently introduced me to a card game called Chook-Chook! through a much-loved set passed down from her great aunt, still played with competitive vigour at family gatherings. Described as "an interesting & amusing parlor game for young and old", it's actually a raucous free-for-all in which you trade chickens and sell their eggs followed by convoluted accounting in shillings and pence.

After a couple of rounds of this splendidly noisy and frantic card game I was hooked and wanted to know more. It seemed there might be a set somewhere in the museum's collections, and sure enough, we have a lovely set.

 Chook-Chook! box. The label shows a farmer running after a squawking chicken. (HT 4667).
Image: Joanne Ely & Sally Jones
Source: Museum Victoria

According to BoardGameGeek, Chook-Chook! was published in 1920. I've now seen three different types of packaging; this early one on Flickr looks to be the oldest and perhaps original style. Jen's set looks a bit more recent than that and her dad remembers playing it with his cousins in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There are advertisments for Chook-Chook! peppered throughout Australian newspapers in the National Library of Australia's Trove newspaper archive but its publisher and country of origin are unclear.

I think it's probably a local game since the word 'chook' seems a very Australian term (although it does have UK origins). I wonder too whether any other country would devise a game where you play at being a poulterer and you squawk chicken breeds.

The cards of Chook-Chook! The English Game is one of the breeds of chicken that players rear.
Image: Joanne Ely & Sally Jones
Source: Museum Victoria

If you'd like your own game of Chook-Chook! (and I heartily recommend it) the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds a scan of the cards once hosted by the former Melbourne City Museum. However it's missing a scan of one crucial card – the one that tells you how much your eggs sell for each month. Here it is from MV's Chook-Chook!:

The all-important Chook-Chook! card detailing monthly prices for eggs.
Source: Museum Victoria

Do you know anything about the origins of Chook-Chook!? 

Links:

Wellcome Library blog: From the Game of Goose to Snakes and Ladders

Just a quick jaunt from Melbourne Museum is the hallowed Melbourne Cricket Ground, spiritual home of sport in this city, Since 2008 it has also housed the National Sports Museum. I dropped in to the NSM last week to visit several Museum Victoria collection objects borrowed for their displays.

In the Champions gallery, the Australian Racing Museum tells the story of thoroughbred horseracing in Australia through objects, pictures and sound. The skeleton of the racehorse Carbine is on loan from MV but more recently, one of Prue Acton's amazing Melbourne Cup Day outfits joined a display of race day fashions across the eras. At one end there is a full-length white dress worn by Florence Martha Cullen in 1890 when she watched Carbine win the cup; at the other end is an outfit worn by Gai Waterhouse just a few years ago. There's also an outfit worn by Fashions on the Field judge Beatrice Sneddon in 1965.

Jacket & Skirt - Prue Acton, `Concorde', Melbourne Cup, 1984 (SH 942111). The ensemble also includes a matching belt, hat, gloves and bag. Just the jacket, skirt and belt are displayed at the National Sports Museum.
Source: Museum Victoria  

Prue Acton's 'Concorde' ensemble from 1984 was based on a Cubist or Geometric design. Lorinda Cramer, Collection Manager at the Australian Racing Museum, chose the outfit for display. "It's an amazing piece and I loved the lines in it," she said. "It's so perfectly constructed with pinstripes that match beautifully. It's an engineering feat!"

The jacket's shoulders are spectacularly wide in classic 1980s style. "It really speaks of the era," said Jackie Fraser, Assistant Curator at the National Sports Museum. MV conservators helped with the installation and according to Lorinda, "it was great fun padding out the shoulders! It surprised us all... there was so much fabric in them." Textiles age rapidly under bright light and require special care to protect and support them. "The conservators spent a lot of time getting it just perfect," said Jackie. "The cases have low lighting so that some textiles can be on display for up to a year."

Lorinda (left) and Jackie putting the Concorde ensemble back in place in the Champions gallery showcase after changing the ensemble behind it.
Source: National Sports Museum  

Downstairs from the Champions gallery, curator Helen Walpole was working to finish installing a new temporary exhibition. Now open, Hidden History of the MCG tells the story of the Melbourne icon with treasures from the collections managed by the Melbourne Cricket Club. Did you know that a brass ship's bell announced the end of the football before the siren was introduced? Or that the first architect's sketches of the Great Southern Stand were doodled on a paper napkin?

In one showcase, two seagull specimens borrowed from MV and photographs illustrate birdlife interrupting play. When seagulls aren't begging for chips in the MCG stands, they're "being hit by cricketers and getting in the way of footballers," said Helen. She clearly has a soft spot for the specimens, explaining "we've named them – JL, or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and Steven – Steven Seagal. JL looks a lot more calm and Steven looks like an aggressive action hero."

Curator Helen Walpole with seagull specimens nicknamed Steven Seagal (left) and JL (right).
Source: Museum Victoria

The two mounts were prepared by MV's Dean Smith and Jim Couzens with their usual care. "There is so much detail in them. Where the feathers meet the beak is just astonishing; beautifully done," Helen admired.

The National Sports Museum is open 10.00am – 5.00pm daily. It is closed Christmas Day and Good Friday.

Links:

Video of Carbine's assembly on the National Sports Museum's Facebook page

'Concorde' ensemble on Collections Online

MV News archive: Having a lend

MV News archive: From Melbourne to Maine

Imagine that your face was articulated so that your jaw could split down the middle and expand sideways until the tips were out as wide as your ears. Imagine that you could move all the bones of your face... not just the soft tissue, but the bones themselves.

Sound bizarre? Alien, even? Yet this is exactly what happens every time a Blue Whale takes a gulp of water. The filter-feeding whales, otherwise known as baleen whales or mysticetes, have feeding adaptations that are unique among mammals. Their intriguing evolutionary history is the subject of Dr Erich Fitzgerald's research, and today he's published a paper that overturns a long-held belief about how the baleen whales evolved.

Illustration of the biggest mouth in history at work. The Blue Whale can expand its mouth to gulp huge volumes of krill-filled water.
Image: Carl Buell
Source: Museum Victoria

For several years, he has worked on an extraordinary 25 million-year-old species known from fossils that were found in the 1990s near Jan Juc on Victoria's west coast. Called Janjucetus, this early baleen whale predated the evolution of baleen – the hairy structure used by modern baleen whales to filter tiny crustaceans from the sea. Instead, Janjucetus had the large eyes and ferocious teeth of a hunter.

Dr Erich Fitzgerald holding the jaws of Janjucetus with Melbourne Museum's massive Blue Whale skeleton in the background.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

There are two key changes in the skull that permit the filter feeding of modern whales. The first is a lower jaw that can split down the middle. In humans, the seam (or symphysis) where the two halves of the jawbone meet at our chin is fused, thus our jaws are rigid. In contrast, baleen whales have greatly elongated jawbones that do not meet in the middle. The second change is in the width of the upper jaw; baleen whales have evolved a wide mouth, allowing them to engulf massive volumes of water.

"Previously it was thought that the origins of both features were intimately linked to filter-feeding and that's what differentiated baleen whales from toothed whales and dolphins," explains Erich. His research has just overturned this theory since Janjucetus had a wide upper jaw yet its lower jaw had a tightly connected, immobile symphysis. "So, the loose symphysis is not typical of all baleen whales, it's a later innovation. The earliest baleen whales could not expand and contract their lower jaws so were anatomically incapable of filter-feeding, yet they had these wide upper jaws."

The fossilised jaws of Janjucetus, clearly showing the immobile symphysis at the tip.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

What Erich describes is an elegant example of an exaptation, where a feature evolved to serve a particular function but was later co-opted into a new role. Erich believes that its wide jaw helped Janjucetus to suck in large singe prey items, such as squid or fish, and didn't evolve for filter-feeding at all.

Says Erich, "Charles Darwin reflected upon this in The Origin of Species. He wondered how you could go from a whale that has big teeth like Janjucetus does and catching fish and squid one at a time, to something like a modern Blue Whale that feeds en masse. This is the kind of fossil palaeontologists dream of finding because it shows a transitional form."

"It's an exciting discovery, but actually not as surprising as you might think," concludes Erich. "Evolution by natural selection implies that we should expect to find these kinds of fossils in the rocks." The next question he looks forward to answering is how whales shifted from suction feeding to filter-feeding. "I think we're really close to finding a transitional series of fossils that illuminate this."

Erich's paper about this discovery, 'Archaeocete-like jaws in a baleen whale', is published today in Biology Letters.

Links:

Video: Erich discusses whale evolution

MV News: Ferocious fossil

Dr Erich Fitzgerald's staff biography

Baleen and toothed whales

Following Dr Mark Norman's Warrnambool pub chat about chemistry and communication in deep sea animals on 2 August, the second Backyard Science at the Pub rolls into Bendigo tonight.

Geologist Dermot Henry will explore the origins of crystals and minerals found in central Victoria. The geological processes that made central Victoria such a booming gold-mining area also produced all kinds of other fascinating minerals; studying these helps us understand the rich chemistry of the Earth.

 Fluorapatite, Dolomite and Quartz minerals from 1,200', Diamond Hill area, Bendigo.
Image: Frank Coffa
Source: Museum Victoria

Dermot has worked at Museum Victoria since 1982 and has managed Museum Victoria’s Natural Science collections since 2001. He was responsible for the development of geological themes and content and the selection of specimens for the Dynamic Earth exhibition at Melbourne Museum.

Backyard Science at the Pub is part of National Science Week 2011 and will be held Tuesday 16 August 6pm – 8pm at The Foundry Hotel, 366 High Street, Bendigo. For enquiries or to register your interest, please email or telephone 0412 607 525.

A group of miners at 'crib time', Bendigo, Victoria, circa 1908 (MM 6962).
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Backyard Science at the Pub event on Facebook

Super Science Month

Dermot Henry's staff biography

When Dr Tony Martin joined MV palaeontologist Dr Tom Rich and volunteer Greg Denney on a four-week examination of Victoria's Cretaceous coastline last year, he was hoping to find dinosaur burrows. He didn't expect that he'd find the most significant dinosaur track site in southern Australia instead.

Dr Martin of Emory University, Georgia, was at Museum Victoria recently to examine some trace fossils in the collection. Trace fossils are his speciality and he's spent many years studying the burrows, tracks and trails of prehistoric animals preserved in the fossil record. Decades of searching for tracks at palaeontological sites worldwide means that he has an eye for spotting these subtle and sometimes cryptic trace fossils.

Late in the day during the third week of the Cretaceous Walk, Dr Martin saw something unusual in a slab of rock. Because of the low light he didn't trust his eyes and starting feeling the surface. "I was in awe at first," he says. "One of the things I did was I put my fingers into the indentations and thought OK, that's a track. Then I traced back and found two more, identically sized, making this the first Victorian trackway we know of where there's an actual sequence of steps."

Dr Tony Martin with the dinosaur trackway he found on Melanesia Beach.
Source: Museum Victoria

Until that moment, only four individual dinosaur tracks were known for all of Victoria. But that wasn't the only discovery of the day. Greg Denney long-time local collaborator on the Dinosaur Cove digs, spotted something else. "He saw there was another slab nearby of the same thickness, with the same layers, but upside down. He grabbed a piece of driftwood and flipped it over - and there were seven more tracks on it."

All up, the two slabs have increased the number of Victorian dinosaur tracks by 85 per cent. "They're only about 1.1 square metres but it was a busy little piece of real estate, because there are approximately 24 tracks within that." Some of the footprints are partial tracks and many are very faint but they still reveal a lot about the Victorian environment over 100 million years ago. The dinosaurs in question were small predatory dinosaurs, ranging from about the size of a rooster to the size of a cassowary. They belonged to a group of animals called the ornithomimosaurs, or bird-mimics. Dr Martin postulates that the individuals may have been different ages, and they were walking over swampy areas left on receding snowmelt floodplains in springtime.

In March 2011, Museum Victoria retrieved the two slabs for the palaeontology collection as they were at risk of being lost from erosion and burial. A scientific paper by Dr Martin, Dr Rich and three other experts that describes the amazing find was published in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology yesterday. As Dr Martin summarised it, "I've made other discoveries in my life, and I wouldn't like to rank them, but this one's way up there. It's one I feel very satisfied with that it added quite a bit to what's already a huge wealth of information that's come out of this part of the world."

In this video, Tom Rich talks more about the trackway and the effort to remove the slabs from Melanesia Beach.

Watch this video with a transcript

Links:

Martin, A.J., Rich, T.H., Hall, M., Vickers-Rich, P. & Vazquez-Prokopec, G. A polar dinosaur-track assemblage from the Eumeralla Formation (Albian), Victoria, Australia. Alcheringa, 1–18.

The Age: 'Walking in their footsteps on Victoria's dinosaur trail'

Dinosaur Walk

Over recent months, Volunteer Sandra Morrow has photographed more than 600 exquisite items from Pendle Hall, the extraordinary dolls’ house that joined the Museum Victoria collection last year. There are no immediate plans to put the house on display but you can still view it in detail, as records and pictures of each piece are newly-listed on History and Technology Collections Online.

Sandra also recorded the reassembly of the dolls’ house once all the individual pieces had been registered, photographed and assessed by a conservator. She’s compiled a time-lapse video of the reassembly for which she used reference photographs of the house in Tasmania that were taken before it was packed up and moved to Melbourne.

The eagle-eyed among you will spot that she’s not wearing gloves. Most heritage collection objects are handled with gloves to protect them from the oils and sweat that accumulate on our hands. However gloves can make it difficult to handle very small objects like the miniature candlesticks and pantry goods of the dolls’ house. In these cases, very clean gloveless hands are the safest way to pick up the tiny items.

Links:

MV Blog: Introducing Pendle Hall

Collections Online theme: Pendle Hall Dolls' House

Since 2008, Melbourne’s architectural gems have thrown open their doors for one weekend a year as part of Melbourne Open House. This year the Royal Exhibition Building is among the 75 theatres, tunnels, halls, houses and more that will welcome visitors on 30 and 31 July, 2011.

Interior of the Great Hall of the Royal Exhibition Building with a view of the decorated dome.
Image: John Broomfield
Source: Museum Victoria

A new interpretive display on the mezzanine level will provide Melbourne Open House crowds with more information as they admire the REB’s magnificent murals and arches. It includes wonderful historical pictures of the life and times of Melbourne’s World Heritage building – photos of it in the glory days of International Exhibitions, through to its many uses during the mid-20th century, its restoration and World Heritage listing in 2004.

A newly produced documentary exploring the recent reconstruction of the 1880’s parterre beds, scroll garden and ‘German’ garden will be shown in the REB theatrette.

Royal Exhibition Building exterior, December 2008.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Melbourne Open House: Royal Exhibition Building

Royal Exhibition Building website

A photograph by museum entomologist Dr Ken Walker has just won a coveted place in the annual international Leica calendar. In 2012, the company’s calendar will feature microscope photographs, and Leica put out a call for entries. Ken’s photograph of the head of a tiny, undescribed lichen moth in the genus Chamaita (family Arctiidae) was one of 12 selected.

The winning photograph of the head of a male lichen moth.
Image: Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria

The photograph, as well as being incredibly beautiful, is an important diagnostic tool.  This species is a pest in palm plantations in New West Britain, Papua New Guinea. To assist those who need to identify it, the species has its own page , featuring the winning photograph and others, on PaDIL (Pests and Diseases Image Library).

Says Ken, "It’s a great recognition for the photographic skills we have developed here over the past six years to have an image to be used in the high-quality calendar." The competition was open to anyone using Leica microscope and camera equipment; the prize is a Leica EZ4 dissecting microscope. This prize will go right back into PaDIL’s suite of specialist technical equipment to create more photographs like this one. 

Links:

PaDIL

The Australian node of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is now live!

BHL is a project started by a consortium of American and English museums and herbaria that wanted to make historical biodiversity texts available online. These important books and journals are scanned, uploaded to the Internet Archive, and made available through the first BHL website. It's especially useful to scientists needing historical information about species, distributions and taxonomy, but it's also a fascinating site for anyone interested in natural history or rare books. Museum Victoria is managing the Australian part of the project in conjunction with the Atlas of Living Australia.

Since late last year, MV Online Developer Michael Mason has been creating a mirror site of the USA/UK original, ready to receive scans of Australian books later this year. At present, the Australian site provides everything the original site provides but with a different interface. "We started with the US model and changed the appearance and some parts of the functionality," says Michael.

Online developer Michael Mason.
Source: Museum Victoria

The first difference you'll notice is the local influence; the page is adorned with beautiful illustrations of Australian wildlife by Gould and Australian books are featured. Michael has also worked with designer Simon O'Shea to overhaul the way the book viewer looks and works to make it more user-friendly.

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia website.
Source: Museum Victoria

At present, the 34,596,227 pages in the BHL-Australian node come from libraries in US institutions so there is plenty of Australian content yet to be added. First off the rank in this national project are some of the in-house journals that have already been scanned by other museums including those of the Queensland Museum and the Western Australian Museum. Museum Victoria, with new book-scanning equipment, will be leading the development of new scanning projects starting with the complete archive of Memoirs of Museum Victoria containing the first scientific descriptions of many Victorian animal species. This will be very handy for biologists worldwide who don't have ready access to hard copies of this journal. Later on, rare books from MV and the libraries of other Australian institutions will be scanned and uploaded.

The high-quality scans are not just useful, but often quite beautiful. You get the whole book – covers, library labels, marbled endpapers and marks of age – not just the text within. Michael's favourites are the 1600s books in Latin with fantastical illustrations. "You'd never get to see these in a library, they're too fragile and valuable," he says. BHL puts these wonderful books in the hands of anyone.

Links

Biodiversity Heritage Library Australia

Biodiversity Heritage Library

MV News: BHL visitors

A common question about the Tutankhamun exhibition is whether King Tut's funerary mask and mummy are on display.

Tutankhamun’s funerary mask and mummy are two of the most valuable artefacts in the world and the Egyptian Government has ruled that neither can travel outside Egypt because they are too fragile. The object pictured on promotional material for the exhibition is actually Tutankhamun’s canopic coffinette, an exquisite miniature replica of King Tut’s sarcophogus. Four of them were discovered in his tomb, each holding vital organs. The canopic coffinette that is on display in the exhibition at Melbourne Museum held his liver. Like the funerary mask, it too displays the face of the Boy King.

 Tutankhamun's golden canopic coffinette, which held his mummified liver. A cropped image of this exhibition artefact features on promotional posters.
Source: Egyptian Museum, Cairo

The funerary mask is display in Cairo at the Egyptian Museum and has not left Egypt since the 1970s. It is quite different to the coffinette and sarcophagi not only in size, but because it portrays his head and shoulders only and does not show his hands holding a ceremonial flail and crook.

Tuthankamun's famous funerary mask, on display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Image: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
Source: Used under CC BY-SA 3.0 courtesy of Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

As for his mummy and sarcophagi, these could never be displayed in the exhibition because they have never left the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Nevertheless, a replica of his mummy and a multimedia projection of the many layers of sarcophagi can be seen at Melbourne Museum in the National Geographic gallery, which is located outside the exhibition entrance.

GIVEAWAY

We have two tickets to Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs to give away to a blog reader. To enter, leave a comment on this post by noon (local time) on Friday 16 July with your answer to this question:

What would you ask Howard Carter if he were still alive?

Links:

kingtutmelbourne.com.au

FAQs about Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Photographer David Paul sent me some proof sheets of several hundred Redheads matchbox lids that he photographed recently as part of the ongoing documentation of the museum's objects. They were collected during the 1950s-1970s by Bill Boyd and form part of the William Boyd Childhood Collection, which includes most of the Bill's childhood possessions. Bill was an avid collector, and fortunately for us, his mother Lillian kept his collections long after Bill had grown up.

Like David, I think the illustrations on the matchboxes are beautiful and fascinating snapshots of the time. There are several sets – marine creatures, native animals, famous explorers, Queensland's centenary (1959), history of transport and flags of the world, mythology and more. Redheads are now made in Sweden but back then were made by Bryant and May (or Brymay). Brymay was an English company that began manufacturing locally in 1909 in a factory in Cremorne, Richmond.

Six Redheads matchbox lids featuring marine animals, circa 1966. Top L-R: California Sandhopper, Bushy-backed Sea Slug, Long-finned Squid. Bottom L-R: Portuguese Man-of-war, Sandworm, Gooseneck Barnacles.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

Special packaging, swapcards and bonus toys are a marketing idea that has proved successful for years. Pester power is nothing new: children badger their parents to buy a certain brand of tea, breakfast cereal or matches so that they can complete the set. In the pre-war mania of cigarette card collecting, there are stories of kids who would wait outside shops and pounce on emerging adults to beg for the cards from their newly-purchased pack of smokes.

Bill Boyd's matchboxes started me thinking about the nature of childrens' collections. Lots of kids collect things – stamps, coins, swapcards – but why?  I know a family where each child was charged with nominating something to collect so they'd have something to keep themselves amused on road trips. Another colleague collected stamps and reckons his mother introduced him to the hobby so he'd learn about geography and organisation. And why do some people continue their collections while others abandon them? I collect entirely different things now than I did as a kid, but that probably reflects financial independence.

Six Redheads matchbox lids from the 1970 series featuring icons from each Australian state. Top L-R: The legend of Ned Kelly, Australian Rules Football, Cultural Centre (NGV). Bottom L-R: Myer Music Bowl, Native Lyrebird, The Golden Past, Bendigo.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

I wonder how Bill got so many matchboxes? Perhaps he swapped them at school or family friends saved them for him. I imagine he didn't have much money to buy what he wanted and matchboxes were free and readily available. When smoking was more popular and before the invention of disposable cigarette lighters, there were probably matches in every pocket.

For Bill, perhaps they were important because they were objects that no one else controlled – no one else chose them on his behalf, or could tell him how to arrange or store or preserve them. These sorts of things are very important when you're a powerless kid and grown-ups dictate almost everything about your world.

What did you collect when you were a kid? How did your collection start? Do you still have it? Perhaps you'd like to upload it to Collectish?

Links:

William Boyd Childhood Collection

Tom Smith's complete Redheads matchbox collection 

History of Redheads matches

Curators Michael Reason and Deborah Tout-Smith were delighted to welcome Judith Durham, lead singer of the 1960s folk-pop group The Seekers, when she dropped in to today to see her dress in The Melbourne Story exhibition. "It's mind-blowing. That's my dress, and it's on display in the museum!" she exclaimed as she saw it for the first time in many years.

Judith Durham next to her dress in The Melbourne Story, on loan from the National Film and Sound Archive.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The dress is on loan from the National Film and Sound Archive and is featured in the Melbourne music history section. Judith donated it and other outfits to the NFSA some years ago. "I love it. It was so suited to me as a person," she said. She was pleased to give Michael and Deborah some more information about how and when she wore it.

Judith bought the dress from a South Yarra boutique to wear for a Channel Nine special program called The World Of The Seekers. It became an iconic outfit when a photograph taken during the film shoot at Como House appeared on the cover of The Best of The Seekers 1968 compilation album.

Links:

MV News: A dress of its own 

The Melbourne Story

The body of an enormous female Leatherback Turtle was brought to Melbourne Museum on Thursday last week after washing up at Airey’s Inlet.

The two metre female Leatherback Turtle in the Preparation Lab at Melbourne Museum.
Image: Veronica Scholes
Source: Museum Victoria

A member of the public spotted the ailing turtle while it was still alive. Local authorities called the Melbourne Aquarium, which runs the Turtle Rescue and Release Program that rehabilitates tropical turtles that have strayed into cold southern waters. Unfortunately the Leatherback Turtle was too unwell to save and it lived just a few more hours. It was brought to Melbourne Museum early on Thursday morning for post-mortem examination to work out why it died.

Melbourne Aquarium vet, Dr Rob Jones, says it’s only the second Leatherback Turtle to wash up in Victoria since 1999, with smaller species such as Green Sea Turtles and Loggerhead Turtles more commonly assisted by the successful Turtle Release and Rescue Program.

Dr Jones examined the turtle on Thursday afternoon. “The age is difficult to guess,” he explains. “She had an inactive ovary, so she was possibly still immature or had laid eggs within the last six months. But at two metres long, the size suggests she was mature.” He found a small ulcer in her intestine that was probably from parasite, and signs of dehydration, but no clear cause of death. “It was disappointing not to be able to find the answer.”

The skeleton of the turtle will become part of the Museum Victoria research collection, since complete skeletons of this species are rare. The museum will also retain soft tissues for the DNA collection and barnacles and mussels from its shell for the Marine Invertebrates collection.

Barnacles on the turtle's shell.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

The Leatherback Turtle (Dermochelys coriacea) is the largest living turtle and has the widest distribution of the sea turtles. Their soft shells are unique; other species have tough protective plates called scutes as a kind of external armour, but Leatherback Turtles have small bones embedded in tough leathery skin. Another distinctive feature of these animals is their diet – they eat mostly jellyfish and have evolved a mouth full of fleshy spines to grip their soft prey. They migrate long distances in search of food, often visiting southern waters near Victoria between January and May when the sea is warm.

Inside the mouth of a Leatherback Turtle. The fleshy spines are adaptations to a jellyfish diet.
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria

Leatherback Turtles are critically endangered and have suffered serious declines due to human activity. They are often drowned in fishing nets or choke when they mistake plastic bags for food.

Marine wildlife in need of rescue should be reported to the Department of Sustainability and Environment. 

• Report stranded, entangled or sick penguins, turtles and seals to DSE on 136 186. 
• Contact the Whale and Dolphin Emergency Hotline on 1300 136 017 if you find stranded, entangled, sick or injured whales or dolphins.

Links:

Melbourne Aquarium Turtle Rescue and Release Program

WWF: Leatherback Turtles close to the brink

Shark Bay World Heritage Area: Leatherback Turtle fact sheet

BIRD: Leatherback Turtle

In March this year, MV scientists spent 10 days surveying the biodiversity of the Lake Condah area in a program called Bush Blitz. The project could never have happened without the collaboration and assistance of the Gunditjmara community, the Traditional Owners of Budj Bim lands around Lake Condah.

On Friday last week, the museum was pleased to return the hospitality and show a group of Budj Bim rangers and Traditional Owners around the collection stores and laboratories of the Natural Sciences Department.

Budj Bim rangers in the Ornithology store, surrounded by the museum's collection of bird specimens.
Source: Museum Victoria

Head of Sciences, Mark Norman, led a tour through the ornithology, entomology and marine collection stores. The bird collection was their favourite but the giant squid in its huge tank of ethanol was a special highlight too.

 Mark Norman showing an amazing but somewhat pungent giant squid specimen.
Source: Museum Victoria

Today’s visit was a chance to show the rangers what has happened to the Lake Condah specimens they helped to collect, and the sort of research done in the museum. We hope they’ll visit us again soon. Until then, here's a reminder of the significance of Lake Condah and the aquaculture practiced there by Gunditjmara people for thousands of years. In this video, Joseph Saunders explains eel farming and traditional life at Lake Condah.

Links:

Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape

Poking around in Victorian coastal tide pools is good fun. You can feel the sucker feet of a sea star as it walks over your hand, or watch crabs scuttle about grazing on algae. But one thing you should never do – and I remember being told this from a very young age – is bother a blue-ringed octopus. Blue-ringed octopuses (genus Hapalochlaena) are some of the most venomous marine animals in the world yet we don’t know much about them.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay during the day.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

There are currently four species of blue-ringed octopus recognised but MV curator Dr Julian Finn reckons he’s about to change this. He has just received a three-year grant from the Australian Biological Resources Study to sort out how many species there are worldwide. From his preliminary studies, he estimates there could be closer to 20 species with over half of these living in Australian waters.

With joint investigators Dr Mark Norman, Head of Sciences, Dr Jan Strugnell from La Trobe University, and Professor Chung Cheng Lu of National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan, Julian will use comparative anatomy and molecular techniques to confirm how many species there are. He’ll map the distribution of each species and produce an identification key to help others identify blue-ringed octopuses.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay at night.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Julian will also assay the venom of each species to determine which are the most toxic to humans. The bite of a blue-ringed octopus delivers a hit of tetrodotoxin which is found in the octopus’s saliva. Tetrodotoxin has a devastating effect on the nerve system; it blocks sodium channels and causes breathing difficulties, numbness and paralysis. There is no antivenom and without immediate medical intervention, the risk of death is high. Thanks to this project, we’ll better understand one of our most notorious marine creatures and have more information to assist with treating blue-ringed octopus bites.

Southern Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena maculosa) photographed in Port Phillip Bay at night.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Australian Venom Research Unit: blue-ringed octopus

How do museum curators learn more about the objects in their collections? Often it’s a lot of detective work and research, but sometimes a lucky encounter can reveal the rich background that underlies the item in question. Recently, this was the case when curator Liza Dale-Hallett wanted to know more about a domestic wine press that was acquired from the Di Benedetto family after thirty years of wine-making in their Thornbury backyard.

The parts of the press were in storage and piecing them together was a puzzle. “I needed to make sense of how to put all that together, so I rang around wine-making suppliers,” explains Liza. When she reached John Mitris of Costante Imports, Liza learned that John’s father-in-law, Giovanni Costante, was an important pioneer in making and importing wine presses in Australia. The two men visited us to help assemble the Di Benedetto wine press and to talk about the tradition and local history of domestic wine making.

John Mitris and Giovanni Costante with the Di Benedetto wine press.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

Giovanni explained that the 1960s Di Benedetto wine press, or torchio, is a traditional design comprising a wooden cylinder around a central shaft that holds a turning mechanism. The cylinder would be filled with grapes and stacked with wooden blocks. By turning the handles, the wooden blocks apply pressure to the grapes and the juice drains through a mesh filter into a wooden bucket.

John and Giovanni show curator Liza Dale-Hallett how the blocks fit into the wine press.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

Giovanni shows Liza how the filter fits to the base of the wine press.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

John and Giovanni with the long handles fitted to the wine press, demonstrating how two people work together to turn the screw.
Image: Taryn Ellis
Source: Museum Victoria

Giovanni began building presses much like this one in 1957 to supply the Italian migrant community that grew quickly after World War II. With a background in engineering, he salvaged some of his raw materials from unwanted metal from cotton gins and railyards. As his business expanded, the screw mechanism was superseded by a ratchet mechanism which takes up less room and is easier for one person to operate.

The press was used by the Di Benedettos each year and was central to a social event where the whole family would help out to press the year’s grapes. Giovanni explained this tradition is common in Italian families and reflects the importance of good food in Italian culture. “Australia is a sandwich nation. In Italy at 12 o’clock we all sit at the table. Two hours rest, then back to work. I never ate by myself when in the family.”

He ceased manufacturing wine presses about 12 years ago as the market dropped, yet in recent years, the business has witnessed a renewed interest in preserving food at home, thanks in part to the growing foodie culture and influence of European immigrants on the Australian palate. John explained that children of European migrants are also updating the family equipment to make it easier to use, and wanting to learn the techniques to keep the tradition going.

Links:

Origins: Italian migration

Costante Imports

Women with clever hands from three parts of Australia – Arnhem Land, Wagga Wagga in NSW and Victoria – shared their passion and skill in basket-weaving today, to mark the opening of the travelling exhibition Women With Clever Hands: Gapuwiyak Miyalkurruwurr Gong Djambatjmala.This exhibition features vivid and intricate fibrework by women artists of Gapuwiyak in Arnhem Land.

Three of the artists – Lucy Malirrimurruwuy Wanapuyngu, Kathy Nyinyipuwa Guyula and Anna Ramatha Malibirr – are at Melbourne Museum for the exhibition opening and to demonstrate their craft. Curator Dr Louise Hamby worked on this exhibition with the artists and the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery. She explained that fibrework of this region had its own characteristic style and the purpose of the exhibition was to share this with other communities in Australia.

Following the launch of the exhibition on Friday morning, the three groups of women exchanged stories about their work, techniques and materials and examined baskets and other fibre objects in the MV collections.

Curator Antoinette Smith showing fibrework collection objects to the visitors.
Source: Museum Victoria

The Gapuwiyak artists use the natural fibres from plants that that grow in their area, such as pandanus, which is a real challenge to collect because of its rows of sharp spines and its habit of growing in wet, buffalo-riddled country! The outer layers of pandanus are stripped away and the core is dyed with local materials.

The Women of Wagga Weaving (WOWW) group brought in an array of works produced by Wiradjuri Elders and other women. Melanie Evans spoke about how much the women love the opportunity to meet regularly, share their work and learn side by side. They have met with the Gapuwiyak artists several times through the collaboration between the Gapuwiyak Cultural Centre and the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and been deeply inspired by it. A small group of Wiradjeri women with Melanie Evans and Linda Elliott from the Wagga gallery also travelled to Gapuwiyak in 2010.

Women from WOWW talking about their fibrework.
Source: Museum Victoria

Three Victorian artists also spoke about their work: Vicki Couzens, Bronwyn Razem and Marilyne Nicholls are renowned fibre artists with works in major private and public collections. They told stories about learning their art and how it is sacred to them, and the importance of sharing the knowledge and giving guidance and instruction about these skills to younger people.

This glimpse into culture and skill of basket-making made me aware that these women are not just craftspeople and artists, but botanists, ecologists and geologists. Each variety of fibre comes from a particular plant, which is understood in terms of its country. Finding fibre means understanding soil types and the environment the plant requires to grow, as well as the biology and anatomy of the plant to know when and which parts to harvest. The preparation – stripping, drying, dyeing – is yet another level of knowledge.

The Gapuwiyak artists will hold a weaving demonstration at Bunjilaka at Melbourne Museum today. Come along and see how it is done!

Women With Clever Hands is on show at Bunjilaka until 28 August 2011.

Links:

Women With Clever Hands at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery

The amazing French film Oceans opens in Melbourne on 26 May. This documentary about the wealth of life in seas was filmed over four years by a global team. MV’s Julian Finn and Mark Norman worked with the film crew as scientific consultants for several of the animals filmed. Two of these animals - Nomura's Jellyfish (Nemopilema nomurai) and a blanket octopus (Tremoctopus gracilis) are often found together in the near-surface waters of the open ocean.

Underwater cameraman Yasushi Okumura filming a female blanket octopus.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Blanket octopuses are so-named because of the membranous webs that the females possess on two of their arms. This is a defence mechanism: a two-metre-long female blanket octopus can use her webs to mislead potential predators about her size and shape. If this doesn’t intimidate them, she can also shed off pieces of her web – ‘like sheets of toilet paper,’ according to Julian – which in turn stretch out into long, tangling filaments.

Detail of the female Tremoctopus web, showing the bands where bits of it can break off as a defence mechanism.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Another extraordinary thing about blanket octopuses is the size difference (or dimorphism) between males and females. We discussed size dimorphism on the blog recently but here’s the most extreme example we know of. In Tremoctopus, the male can be up to forty thousand times smaller than the female by weight!

Female Tremoctopus.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Now from the miniscule to the massive. Nomura’s Jellyfish is one of the largest cnidarians in the word. When these creatures invade Japan’s coastal waters, thousands of jellyfish can clog fishing nets, making the nets so heavy that fishing boats have overturned trying to recover them. Oceans includes footage of Julian diving with one so you can see for yourself just how huge they are.

A still from the film Oceans showing Julian Finn swimming with a giant Nomura's Jellyfish.
Source: courtesy of Galatee Films

Julian believes that Tremoctopus are able to survive in hostile environment of the open ocean through association with jellyfish, probably feeding on the small fish that live amongst the tentacles and within the bell of giant Nomura’s Jellyfish. Male and small female Tremoctopus harvest the stinging tentacles of another variety of jellyfish – the Portuguese Man-of-War (Physalia spp.) – to use for their own defence and/or prey capture, suggesting a long association between two quite different types of animals.

Special offer for MV Blog readers:
We have 200 two-for-one passes up for grabs courtesy of Hopscotch Films. For the chance to receive one, enter the draw here.

Links:

M. D. Norman, D. Paul, J. Finn & T. Tregenza. First encounter with a live male blanket octopus: the world’s most sexually size-dimorphic large animal. New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, 2002, Vol. 36: 733-736

Tree of Life: Tremoctopus

Oceans preview trailer

From 20-22 May, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre proudly presents the Melbourne leg of the 2011 Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival, featuring new Indigenous films from Australia and around the world. It's playing at the Capitol Theatre and ACMI and all films are free.

This year – the festival’s twelfth - the Message Sticks family is the largest yet. There are eleven host venues nationally, from the launch at the Sydney Opera House and screenings at Blacktown Arts Centre last week, to outdoor sessions at Darwin’s Deckchair Cinema in August.

Actress, writer and director Pauline Whyman has a role in Here I Am, the headliner film by Beck Cole, and is travelling as MC and host of this year’s festival. She spoke about the unique nature of Message Sticks, which is the only Indigenous film festival in Australia. “What also sets it apart from other festivals is that it’s accessible to anyone and everyone. It takes really great cinema to communities at no cost.” 

Message Sticks 2011 promo from Blackfella Films on Vimeo.

Links:

Session details

Blackfella Films: Message Sticks 2011 tour

YouTube: Beck Cole and Kath Shelper interview about Here I Am at Adelaide Film Festival

The City Gallery at the Melbourne Town Hall is crawling with possums, owls, moths and other twilight creatures in the new exhibition, Crepuscular. Here you can observe the animals that often escape our notice as we rush home from work or retreat from winter to cosier climates indoors.

Curated by honorary Museum Victoria associate, John Kean, the exhibition includes specimens and Prodromus illustrations on loan from MV, and specially-commissioned taxidermy by Dean Smith (who also works as a senior museum preparator). There are also new artworks by local artists Alexis Beckett, Mali Moir, and John Pastoiza-Pinol, and I couldn't tear my eyes away from the exquisite portraits of invertebrates by botanical artist Dianne Emery.

Emperor Gum Moth eggs, caterpillar, adult, cocoon and imago, Opodiphthera eucalypti 2011. Watercolour on Kelmscott vellum 25x 20 cm
Image: Dianne Emery
Source: Dianne Emery

Crepuscular presents a fascinating picture of the life in urban Melbourne that exists and persists despite – but sometimes because of – human activity. For every loser there's a winner: clearing habitat has caused the loss of many species (such as quolls, which remained in remnant populations at Kew's Studley Park until just a few decades ago) but plantings of exotic trees have been a boon for others. An abundance of fruit trees drew in the Grey-headed Flying Foxes for the first time, while Powerful Owls have emerged from the forests to take up residence in city parks and grow fat on the possums.

Crepuscular is on at the City Gallery until 6 July 2011. Be sure to find the spot in the room where all eyes are upon you...

Links:

City Gallery at Melbourne Town Hall

Question of the Week: Emperor Gum Moth

Emperor Gum Moth on Caught and Coloured

The Age: 'Critters of the night shift'

I loved the Far Out, Brussel Sprout books when I was a kid. Do you remember them? They stood from the other children’s books because they were filled with all the cheeky rhymes and sayings that kids actually used in the playground, rather than the sterilised stuff that teachers and parents wanted us to read. These books were compiled by Dr June Factor, writer and folklorist, and founding editor of the journal Play and Folklore.

Play and Folklore is devoted to recording and discussing what children do when largely free of adult direction or control—their colloquial speech, songs, games, rhymes, riddles, jokes, insults and secret languages. Established in 1981, it has been published online by Museum Victoria since 2001 and the April issue just released celebrates the journal’s 30th anniversary.

Paper football made from newspaper was constructed at Carlton North Primary School in the mid-1980s. Footballer Peter McKenna describes playing with a newspaper footy as a child in the 1950s in the April 2011 Play and Folklore.
Image: Jennifer McNair
Source: Museum Victoria

Dr June Factor and Dr Gwenda Davey began publishing the then-titled Australian Children’s Folklore Newsletter out of the Institute of Early Childhood Development that later became part of the University of Melbourne. Keen observers of children, Dr Factor and Dr Davey began collecting and preserving their folklore in the 1970s. This became the Australian Children’s Folklore Collection (ACFC) which they donated to Museum Victoria in 1999. In 2004, it became the first MV collection to be placed in on the prestigious UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register.

Slingshot made from a tree branch, circa 1980-1983. Found on the steps of the Institute of Early Childhood Development, Kew, by Dr June Factor. It had been left there by children who often used the empty car park as a playground at weekends. In the background are index cards used by Dr Factor to record children's rhymes.
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria

Deborah Tout-Smith, Senior Curator of Cultural Diversity, is the curator for the ACFC and oversees the production of Play and Folklore. “Children’s folklore is amazing repository of cultural information. In the past a lot of study into children has been adults looking at children [whereas] children’s folklore is a cultural world children themselves preserve and articulate,” said Deborah. “June Factor pointed out that information is handed on between children and never enters the adult world. Sometimes we see remnants of old ideas and practices that have disappeared in the adult world but still continue in children’s folklore.”

The study of children’s folklore has been important while researching the newly-opened exhibition at the Immigration Museum, Identity: yours, mine, ours. “We find the roots of prejudice in the ways children start to notice difference,” explained Deb. “There are distinct phases of understanding that can end up hardening into prejudice, or can become part of embracing difference.” Both the ACFC and Play and Folklore capture children’s culture from around the world and while they have a distinctly Australian flavour, they include the layers of influence from migrant children over the decades.

Links:

Play and Folklore archive (1981-current)

Collections Online: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

Infosheet: Australian Children's Folklore Collection

It's not every day that motorists share a freeway with prehistoric flying reptiles! Two huge models of pteranodons - with wingspans of six metres - crossed Melbourne by truck yesterday, ahead of their display in the upcoming Scienceworks exhibition Explore-a-saurus.

Pteranodon on a tuck arriving at Scienceworks.
Source: Museum Victoria

Moving crew wheel a Pteranodon model into the Scienceworks building.
Source: Museum Victoria

Did you see this unusual cargo make its trip from Coburg to Spotswood?

Explore-a-saurus will open to the public on June 1. You can pre-purchase tickets online now.

Links:

Explore-a-saurus

MV Blog: Developing a dino exhibit

National Volunteer Week (9-15 May 2011) is a celebration of the priceless contribution of the thousands of volunteers to charities, organisations, communities and institutions across Australia.

There are 529 active volunteers at Museum Victoria and their ages range from 17 to 91 years. They help manage the 16 million items in our collections, they run activities for visitors, they lead tours at each of our venues, they restore steam engines, and much more. To thank these generous people, MV throws a celebration in National Volunteer Week each year. Yesterday afternoon, volunteers gathered at the Melbourne Planetarium at Scienceworks to mingle, share food and drink, and enjoy a Planetarium show.

MV Volunteers assembled at this year's thank you event in National Volunteer Week.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

Barbara Horn, Director of Museum Operations, read out some statistics about our volunteers. In 2009-2010, volunteers donated an incredible 52,639 hours of their own time to Museum Victoria. At Melbourne Museum, they helped visitors construct 6,792 cardboard models of the Titanic and 11,650 Earth Capsules in Dynamic Earth, plus 1,200 Mobile Skeletons as part of Humanoid Discovery at Scienceworks.

Two remarkable volunteers – Vic Wilks and Tom Brereton – have each reached the milestone of more than 10,000 voluntary hours. Both started at Scienceworks in 1992 shortly after the building opened. Tom, who regularly announces the steam engine parade at Machines in Action Days, joked that they’d known each other “for a year or two.”

Scienceworks volunteers Tom Brereton (left) and Vic Wilks (right) have racked up over ten thousands hours each.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

Vic explained what has inspired him to volunteer for nearly two decades. “In retirement, you need something to stimulate your brain. It’s also the social side of it, meeting all the other volunteers and staff and also contribute something back... hopefully it provides some benefit to the community and the museum in the process.” As a local Williamstown resident, he sees Scienceworks as an important community hub. “It was one of the first things we got in the western suburbs that provided something to the people. Most other museums and art galleries are in the city or the east side.”

A big thank you to all Museum Victoria volunteers - we simply couldn’t manage without them.

Links:

Volunteering at MV

Early this morning, there were a few people on the Melbourne Museum plaza staring at the front of the building, watching a team of abseilers cleaning the glass facade. It's quite amazing seeing people dangling off the building, especially when you're at your desk and an unexpected visitor drops in!

Crew of window cleaners at work on the facade of Melbourne Museum.
Image: Forbes Hawkins
Source: Museum Victoria

People on the plaza watching window cleaners at work.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

A view from the inside: window cleaner at work at Melbourne Museum.
Image: Forbes Hawkins
Source: Museum Victoria

The crew will be onsite for a few days to clean all the hard-to-reach windows around Melbourne Museum.

In the early hours of Saturday 7 May, an intruder stole an important cultural object from Melbourne Museum. Police are investigating the theft, and Museum Victoria appeals for its safe return.

Central Australian spearthrower stolen from Melbourne Museum.
Source: Museum Victoria

The item is a spearthrower from Central Australia. It is approximately 80cm long and is made from mulga wood. Carved into the item is a series of circles and lines depicting waterholes, creeks and claypans in Pintupi country.

If you have any information about the stolen object, please contact Melbourne Museum or the police.

Nick Alexander from CSIRO Publishing visited the MV Library last week in search of gliding mammals. He’s working on the production of an upcoming book by Stephen Jackson called Gliding Mammals of the World.

The book will cover certain groups of mammals - squirrels, possums and lemurs - that have evolved traits for soaring between trees, such as extra folds of skin along the sides of their bodies. Victorian gliding mammals include Squirrel Gliders, Sugar Gliders and Yellow-bellied Gliders.

In Gliding Mammals of the World, 19th century artworks from our rare books will accompany an introduction to the historical context of gliding mammal studies. Some of the early European natural history illustrations are, in Nick’s words, 'rather fanciful' but the new book will be beautifully illustrated by Peter Schouten who is renowned for his accurate and naturalistic wildlife illustrations.

You can look forward to the publication of Gliding Mammals of the World later this year.

Links:

CSIRO Publishing

Stephen Jackson

Peter Schouten's site 

Have you noticed the unusually high population of golden orb-weaving spiders (Nephila edulis) in Melbourne this year? They're usually very rare this far south but I’ve spotted dozens of them in the inner-city suburbs over recent months. Our online visitors have too; in the past three months, we’ve received over 50 comments on this Question of the Week about these spectacular spiders.

Discovery Centre gets a lot of queries about spiders and whether they’re dangerous, often after they’ve received a lethal dose of insect spray, so it’s delightful to see that most of the recent comments simply marvel at the size, beauty and architectural skills of these spiders. Lots of people have told us they are quite fond of their backyard Nephila and some have even given them names! We’ve heard about Bertha, Gloria, Holly, and, I confess, I’ve named the one that lives near me Nefertiti.

Nefertiti the large female Nephila edulis.
Source: Museum Victoria

Because people are so interested, I thought I’d dig up a bit more about Nephila edulis. They are more often found in northern Victoria, NSW and QLD where there has been a bumper spider season, too. Professor Mark Elgar from the University of Melbourne has studied these spiders for many years, travelling to Euroa each spring to collect specimens for behavioural studies. He recently commented in the Shepparton News that high summer rainfall “has provided a lot more food for flying insects, which become food for spiders. They really are much more abundant than I've seen for a long time and next year we'll see the same thing.”

Nefertiti sits in her large golden web all day, unlike the nocturnal and more common Garden Orb-weaving Spider (Eriophora sp.), which tears down and rebuild its web almost daily. Nefertiti leaves her web up until it’s so ratty that it needs to be repaired and her home is adorned with a rather gruesome array of dead insects. Professor Elgar and his colleagues showed that this vertical band of detris is a stockpile of food but also serves another intriguing function; it attracts more food. The spiders deliberately incorporate bits of rotting vegetation to make their larders irresistable to flies.

The underside of a large mature female Nephila edulis on her web. In the background is her egg sac and hanging in her web is a detrius band of dead insects.
Source: Museum Victoria

Another fascinating aspect of Nephila biology is the difference in size between males and females. While females are generally much larger than the males, within males there is a big variation in size. Professor Elgar and colleagues investigate how this has evolved. It’s a complex question with no definite answers and lots of factors to consider.

A pair of golden orb-weaving spiders illustrating the difference in size between males and females. The tiny male is on the left while the large female, feeding on a moth, is on the right.
Image: Bill & Mark Bell
Source: Used under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) from Bill & Mark Bell

Male N. edulis have two strategies when it comes to approaching a female. The risk of being mistaken for her lunch is pretty high so it pays to be careful. One tactic is to crawl onto the web on the same side as the female, while another is to approach from the opposite side and cut a hole in the web. Small males are more common than large males and they tend to use the first strategy. They also mate for longer and father more of the female’s offspring. However there are costs to being small, too: smaller males are more often eaten by females than large males. Furthermore, if there are a number of males loitering around the edge of a female’s web, large males beat small males in the battle to reach the female.

I don’t know if she was courted by a large or small male (or both - these spiders mate several times), but Nefertiti has laid a clutch of eggs in a golden silk sac. In spring her eggs will hatch and her babies will disperse on the wind to start the whole cycle again. Keep an eye out for them later in the year! Meanwhile, if you’d like to see a golden orb-weaver up close, visit the Orb Wall in Bugs Alive! at Melbourne Museum.

The golden silk egg sac of Nephila edulis.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Victorian Spiders

B. T. Bjorkman-Chiswell, M. M. Kulinski, R. L. Muscat, K. A. Nguyen, B. A. Norton, M. R.E. Symonds, G. E. Westhorpe and M. A. Elgar. 2004. Web-building spiders attract prey by storing decaying matter. Naturwissenschaften 91:245-248

J. M. Schneider, M. E. Herberstein,  F. C. de Crespigny, S. Ramamurthy and M. A. Elgar. 2000. Sperm competition and small size advantage for males of the golden orb-web spider Nephila edulis. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 13: 939-946

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton is dominating the media at present but I imagine it's keeping the souvenir industry just as busy. Commemorative tea towels, spoons, biscuit tins and more are issued at every royal milestone. Some people are serious collectors of royal memorabilia while others of us merely dabble, often for its kitsch value.

Like many workplaces, staff at the museum tend to have a favourite, personal coffee mug. There are not one, not two, but three much-loved royal wedding coffee mugs belonging to people who work in the online department:

 Staff mugs commemorating three different royal weddings. From left to right: my Charles and Di mug, Dave's Charles and Camilla mug, and Reuben's Kate and Wills mug.
Source: Museum Victoria

But wait... have a close look at the mug on the right... that's not Prince William!

Do you have any royal memorabilia? Why do you think it is so popular?

Links:

Royal wedding commemorative medals on Collections Online

Aston Gibbs, Acting Manager, Collection Location Systems.
Image: Emma Hutchinson
Source: Museum Victoria

Why is Aston so happy? She’s jubilant at the completion of the History and Technology Lantern Slide Collection Rehousing project!

Collection managers, database gurus, History and Technology curators, conservators, photographers and many others joined in a huge, coordinated project to rehouse the museum’s entire lantern slide collection – that’s over 10,000 individual items – into new, custom-made storage systems. Lorenzo Iozzi, senior collection manager for the image and AV collections, has been coordinating this mammoth task for months, culminating in an intensive, week-long effort to ready the collection for its move from Scienceworks to collection stores at Melbourne Museum.

Eloise Coccoli, Assistant Curator for Collections Online, keeping the lantern slides in order.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

Collection Registration Officer Emma Hutchinson with the new storage system for the lantern slides.
Image: Lorenzo Iozzi
Source: Museum Victoria

Staff photographing lantern slides.
Image: Ria Green
Source: Museum Victoria

MV's lantern slides are a fascinating, eclectic snapshot of all manner of topics from the Victorian era to the early 20th century. Comprising a light source, a lens and a transparent image, magic lanterns were the precursor to the slide projector and were very popular entertainment before the advent of film. Some of the more complicated projectors had multiple lenses and projected slides with intricate moving components. The video below demonstrates a magic lantern show.

The museum's collection has come from a number of sources; the Francis Collection, containing over 5500 items relating to pre-cinematic technology, comprises is a large portion of it. Before the relocation project, some lantern slides were stored in wooden crates that were as old as the slides themselves, unregistered and inadequately described simply because there were so many of them.

It’s a huge achievement for all involved:

• they rehoused, registered and barcoded the entire collection of 10,600 lantern slides
• they photographed 3,400 lantern slides to preservation standard
• they prepared 2,000 object records and 4,600 photographs for upload to Collections Online

And you know what? Not a single one of the fragile glass slides was broken in the process! Congratulations, team!

The huge crew who all pitched in for the lantern slide project.
Image: David Paul
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Lantern slides on Collections Online

The Magic Lantern Society (UK)

There are a lot of sparkling gems and minerals on display in Dynamic Earth but on Tuesday morning there was a new temporary exhibit with an unusually personal label...

Engagement ring planted in an exhibition showcase in Dynamic Earth.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

But who put it there? And why?

Simone sees the showcase.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

It was all part of an elaborate surprise marriage proposal by David to Simone. She thought she was visiting the museum to take some promotional photographs. All seemed perfectly normal until she spotted the showcase containing an engagement ring and the label asking 'Simone, will you marry me?'

Congratulations David and Simone! It was a lot of fun for the museum to be in cahoots with the lucky groom-to-be.

The newly-engaged couple, David and Simone.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

During the recent Bush Blitz biodiversity survey at Lake Condah, there was one insect that intrigued even the staunchest vertebrate biologists — the Mountain Katydid (Acripeza reticulata).

In this video, Patrick, Rowena and David from Live Exhibits talk about these unusual katydids and how they're establishing a colony of them at Melbourne Museum.

Watch this video with a transcript

Katydids are in the family Tettigoniidae, otherwise known as bush crickets or long-horned grasshoppers due to their very long antennae. The name 'katydid' comes from the noise that they make by rubbing their wings together which, in some species, sounds like katy-did, katy-did.

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

Links:

Mountain Katydid on Caught and Coloured

MV Blog: Bush Blitz finds

Wonderful news – MV's Access All Areas Podcast Adventures just picked up the award for Best Audio/Visual/Podcast category in the MW2011 Best of the Web awards!

Dr Andi Horvath created this podcast series in 2008. Since then, she's taken listeners through parts of the museum most people don't get to see, including research laboratories, exhibition openings, collection stores and more. The audio format is perfect for interviews, poems, noisy collection objects, noiser wildlife, and even the odd scandal from the depths of the museum's past.

A screenshot of the Access All Areas site.
Source: Museum Victoria

Big congratulations also to ACMI for winning not only the Education category, but the highly-coveted overall Best of the Web prize, for their excellent video studio site, ACMI Generator.

The Best of the Web awards are presented in conjunction with the annual Museums and the Web conference, which this year ran from 6-9 April in Philadelphia, USA. Judged by a panel of museum professionals, these prestigious awards attract international nominees of a very high standard.

Links:

Access All Areas Podcast Adventures

Access All Areas on iTunes

List of MW2011 Best of the Web winners

Museums and the Web 2011

MV marine biologist Dr Jo Taylor has reported a tropical stowaway in the warm waters around the Newport Power Station - the Sand Shrimp, Crangon uritai.

Sand Shrimp Crangon uritai blends in perfectly with the sandy habitats in which it lives.
Image: John Eichler
Source: Museum Victoria

This little crustacean with its cunning camouflage is common in East Asian coastal regions and is not native to Australia. Although other species belonging to the same family (Crangonidae) are common in Australian waters, including Port Phillip Bay, this is the first occurrence of this species anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere.

Reported this week in the online scientific journal, Marine Biodiversity Records, Jo and her co-author Dr Tomoyuki Komai suspect the shrimp was accidentally introduced to Port Phillip Bay. This new sand shrimp probably hitch-hiked in ship ballast while in its tiny larval form. It's only the second confirmed introduction of a shrimp to Australia.

Dorsal and lateral view of the Sand Shrimp.
Image: David Staples
Source: Museum Victoria

Three specimens were found in 2008 by members of the Marine Research Group and were identified after comparisons with specimens at the Natural History Museum and Institute in Chiba, Japan. Jo has alerted local biologists and ecologists to keep an eye out for the newcomer so we can track its movement, if any, in local waters.

Links:

Article in Marine Biodiversity Records (abstract only)

Infosheet: Introduced marine organisms in Port Phillip Bay

Sand Shrimp on PaDIL

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs opens to the public this morning, and to ensure she was the first person into the exhibition, a very excited visitor has been waiting at Melbourne Museum since 7:40am.

 Pam and Brian at the front of Melbourne Museum.
Source: Museum Victoria

Pam and her husband Brian have travelled all the way from Albury to be here for the first session. Pam is clearly a big King Tut fan; she's even wearing him around her neck!

Tickets for the exhibition are selling fast and many sessions are sold out. Be sure to pre-purchase your tickets online.

Links:

kingtutmelbourne.com.au

In this video, Head of Sciences Mark Norman and Gunditjmara Elder Ken Saunders talk about the recent Bush Blitz project at Lake Condah.

Watch this video with a transcript

More Bush Blitz video is coming soon!

Bush Blitz is a three-year national project to document plants and animals protected in Australia’s National Reserve System. Bush Blitz is a multi-million dollar partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and the Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots. It involves Australia’s top scientists from museums, herbariums and research institutions across the country.

Links:

Bush Blitz

Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project

ABC Mission Voices: Lake Condah

The story of Leadbeater's Possum is so interwoven with the history of Museum Victoria that there was no better place to celebrate it than at Melbourne Museum last Sunday.

This tiny, highlands marsupial was first described by the museum's director, Sir Frederick McCoy in 1867, who named it Gymnobelideus leadbeateri after our first taxidermist, John Leadbeater.

By the 1900s, it was thought extinct. No one saw it for decades. Charles Brazenor, later to become director of the museum, published a plea in 1946 for naturalists to find the creature to no avail. In 1961, a young museum employee changed the fate of Leadbeater's Possum. The amazing story of its rediscovery is recorded in this short film by Curator of History of Science, Rebecca Carland:

On Sunday 3 April, exactly 50 years after his first glimpse of a wild Leadbeater's Possum, Eric was honoured at a ceremony jointly organised by Parks Victoria, Friends of the Leadbeater’s Possum and Museum Victoria. On behalf of the museum and the people of Victoria, Robin Hirst presented Eric with a print of Leadbeater's Possum from the Prodromus of Zoology.

L-R: Robin Hirst, Director of Collections, Research and Exhibitions; Eric Wilkinson; CEO Patrick Greene and curator Rebecca Carland.
Image: Liza Dale-Hallet
Source: Museum Victoria

Eric handed a young sapling of Mountain Ash as a symbolic baton of care to a representative of the of the group HELP (Help the Endangered Leadbeater's Possum). Four Year 7 students started HELP in 2009 to raise awareness of the plight of the species and to gather funds to assist in its future survival. Eric spoke about the inspiring work they've done so far, and the important role of the next generation in protecting our state's faunal emblem.

Jo Antrobus from Parks Victoria with students from St. Margarets School, Berwick, special guest speaker and environment ambassador Sheree Marris and Lake Mountain mascot Lenny Leadbeater. Lake Mountain is home to most of the remaining Leadbeater's Possum habitat.
Image: Liza Dale-Hallett
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

YouTube video - Leadbeater's Possum: Our state emblem under fire

The Age article: Hello, possums! Breed saved from extinction 50 years on

Leadbeater's Possum on Collections Online

Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum

There are records of seven species of frogs here in the Lake Condah region; all seven are relatively common across south-eastern Australia. Last week, MV frog experts Josh Hale and Katie Smith tracked down six of the seven species within a day or two. The last one, the Southern Toadlet (Pseudophryne semimarmorata) is proving elusive but Josh is back this week to keep looking.

On rainy nights, we’ve seen frogs hopping around the base camp. Bush Blitzers have found them by turning over rocks where they shelter during the day. They've also been identified by the distinctive calls of the males.

Pobblebonk or Banjo Frog (Limnodynastes dumerilli) at Lake Condah Mission. This frog was found moving over mown grass.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

The Southern Smooth Froglet, Geocrinia laevis.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Many of the frogs we’ve seen are young juveniles, which means they were tadpoles over the past season. Josh remarked on the unusually large numbers of young frogs and attributes this to the very wet summer; the same conditions that have kept the vegetation unseasonably green. It’s an indication that frogs can build up populations quickly here and recover after years of drought.

Green morph of Brown Tree Frog, Litoria ewingii. This species is more often brown.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Brown Tree Frog, Litoria ewingii, in its more common brown morph.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

“Many frogs all round the world are declining so to see healthy breeding populations like this is really encouraging,” says Josh. Frogs make up an important part of the food chain and become prey for birds, mammals and reptiles.

Striped Marsh Frog, Limnodynastes peronii. These frogs are remarkably well camouflaged.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Spotted Marsh Frog, Limnodynastes tasmaniensis.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

Links:

Frogs of Victoria

This morning Patrick Honan from Live Exhibits instructed the Bush Blitz team to keep an eye out for Mountain Katydids (Acripeza reticulata). These are large, robust long-horned grasshoppers that are usually found in cold high-altitude areas so Patrick was surprised to see them recorded in a previous ecological survey of Lake Condah. Ranger Brad Williams and botanist Val Stajsic brought in two specimens from Muldoons that they’d found on Tuesday, suggesting that they’re reasonably common here.

Muldoons is property adjacent to the Lake Condah Mission site but getting there is not straightforward. There was a bridge decades ago dating back to when it was the hunting ground for people living on the mission. Matt Butt, the Coordinator of Land Management, explained that the bridge was washed away in a heavy flood in the 1940s. The road into the property was built only five years ago and the terrain is incredibly rocky. It’s also incredibly beautiful; the bush is largely intact since the ground was too rocky to be any good for agriculture. The ground is dotted with rock-lined sinkholes in the lava flow from Mount Eccles (known to Gunditjmara people as Budj Bim, meaning ‘high head’). Some of the sinkholes are full of water where Remko Leijs, from the South Australian Museum, has sampled the small crustaceans that live in the groundwater. Later in Bush Blitz some of the MV marine scientists will put on their SCUBA gear to film the wildlife of these water bodies.

Most of the MV biologists were at Muldoons for a couple of hours this morning and found some amazing animals. And yes, one of them was a Mountain Katydid plodding through low grass just a metre away from the road. She’s a female and particularly fat, possibly because she’s full of eggs. She’s gone back to Melbourne Museum with the Live Exhibits staff where they hope she will be the start of a captive colony for display.

Female Mountain Katydid found at Muldoons.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Budj Bim rangers Simone Sailor-Smith and Deb Rose caught a beautiful Jewel Spider (Austracantha minax). Another amazing find was a Peripatus or velvet worm. These are ancient animals that share some characteristics with worms and some with arthropods, and haven’t changed much in millions of years.

The tiny and beautiful velvet worm found at Muldoons.
Image: julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

We also found scorpions, centipedes, beetles, lacewings, ants and lizards. Where possible, the team is only collecting the first specimen that is caught and releasing subsequent finds. For birds and mammals, the surveys are by sight, by ear or through capture and release. The birders spent a few hours this afternoon at Lake Condah and reported breeding Musk Ducks plus three Reed Warblers which is interesting because they have usually flown north by this time of year.

One of the hungry tiger leeches that are common in swamps, on low shrubs, and clinging to Bush Blitzers!
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Of course, all this time we're spending in swamps is great for one local animal - the leech. We've all become quite good at spotting and flicking leeches before they latch on to feed, but some of us have still become hosts for these blood-sucking parasites...

Peter Lillywhite with a leech feeding on his neck.
Image: Berlinda Bowler
Source: Berlinda Bowler

Bush Blitz is a three-year biodiversity discovery program supported by the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots.

The only way to learn about the biodiversity of an area is to get out there and look. That’s exactly what a team of scientists, including 24 MV staff and volunteers, is doing at the Lake Condah area in south-western Victoria for the next nine days.

The expedition is part of Bush Blitz – a three-year project to document the flora and fauna of Australia’s National Reserve system. As a partnership between the Australian Government, BHP Billiton, Earthwatch Australia and Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) AusPlots, Bush Blitz teams have identified about 350 new species on eight trips so far. The current trip is especially significant because it’s the first one to be held in an Indigenous Protected Area – the Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape, comprising about 3,000 hectares over several properties.

Open woodland at Kurtonitj, one of the properties that comprise the Winda Mara owned and managed areas.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

This country is the traditional homeland of the Gunditjmara Nation. Within its rocky, volcanic landscape are ancient structures including eel traps and stone houses. For thousands of years this was a site of major aquaculture efforts where Gunditjmara created pools and channels to cultivate and harvest eels. However Europeans arrived in the 1830s and within 30 years, the Aboriginal population had been decimated and displaced. The Government established Lake Condah Mission to house the people who refused to leave, but in 1919 the mission was closed and in the 1950s the land was reassigned to returning WWII soldiers. But this is a tough mob; in 1996, the Gunditjmara community persisted and they lodged a claim for native title to their lands. It was finally granted in 2007 and Lake Condah was returned to Aboriginal people.

A kangaroo eyeing off the Bush Blitz crew at Kurtonitj.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

Until 1 April, Bush Blitz will be taking a snapshot of the life of this region. There are botanists from the National Herbarium of Victoria and entomologists from the South Australian Museum and the University of New South Wales among the Bush Blitz crew. We’re counting and photographing and collecting to learn more about what lives here – which will, in turn, aid its protection. Working with the Elders of the community and the Indigenous rangers means that the scientists will learn about the ecological knowledge of the Traditional Owners, too.

Three MV biologists spotlighting for frogs on the first night at Lake Condah.
Image: Mark Norman
Source: Museum Victoria

Uncle Kenny Saunders came to talk to us the night that we arrived and gave us a warm welcome. He spoke about the spiritual and cultural importance of the area to the 300 or so Gunditjmara living locally and the much larger population of Gunditjmara now living across Australia. After telling us his stories he left us with an inspirational challenge – that he hoped these scientific surveys would give him more stories to tell about his country.

Links:

Bush Blitz

Lake Condah Sustainable Development Project

ABC Mission Voices: Lake Condah

So you've bought your ticket and popcorn, picked up your 3D glasses and chosen your seat at IMAX Melbourne. For you, it's a time to sit back and relax. However, in the projection booth at the back of the cinema, it's a highly-skilled dash to prepare the next film for screening.

David Booty, Senior Technical Advisor for IMAX Melbourne Museum, might be the projectionist setting up your film. He's been in the IMAX business since 1988 and sometimes has just seven minutes between shows to change over the huge reels of IMAX film. In this video he tells us about the unique projection system while he's rushing around to set up the next show.

17 March is St Patrick's Day, a national holiday for the Irish and widely celebrated by communities of Irish descent worldwide. A quick search on Collections Online turned up a photograph of a St Patrick's Day parade along Spring Street, Melbourne, in 1925.

There was certainly no parade through town today when I visited the site. In fact, the only events I can find celebrating St Patrick's Day this year involve Melbourne's many Irish pubs. Still, it gave me an interesting chance to compare how the three buildings in the 1925 photograph have changed.

 Two photos of the same site in Melbourne taken 86 years apart. Top: St Patrick 's Day parade passing the Windsor Hotel and Spencer's Old White Hart Hotel, 1925. Photo taken by The Allen Studio. (MM 6348) Bottom: The same Spring St site in 2011.
Source: Museum Victoria

In the top photo, the White Hart Hotel still stands on the corner of Bourke and Spring Streets. This was demolished in 1960 and replaced with the Windsor Hotel's north wing. The Imperial Hotel in the right of the frame dates back to the 1860s - and before this site was occupied by buildings, apparently it was used by a circus!

Links:

MV Blog: Benalla, then and now

2005 Irish Festival at the Immigration Museum

Origins: History of immigration from Ireland and Northern Ireland

Last week, just in time for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Eliza Duckmanton's Recipe & Remedy book was added to Collections Online. This blog post pays tribute to her in the most delicious way.

Eliza Duckmanton was a bush nurse and mother of 12 who lived in Dunkeld, Victoria. She created the book in 1870 and its contents - recipes for cakes, pickles, jams, jellies and biscuits - reveal what pioneer women cooked for their families. Eliza's book of clippings and handwritten recipes is also dotted with the odd sketch.This treasure was passed down the generations of the Duckmanton family until it was donated to Museum Victoria in 2002.

While the food section in any bookshop today is spilling over with cookbooks about every kind of edible, published cookbooks were relatively uncommon in Victorian times. The English & Australian Cookery Book written by Walter Abbott in 1864 is considered the first Australian cookbook. Recipes were handed around between friends and family members, or torn from newspapers, and compiled in books like Eliza's. Hers is particularly interesting for its remedies, too - her cure for cancer is a concoction containing saltpetre, sulphur and molasses!

I quite liked the idea of reviving one of Eliza's cake recipes, so on the weekend I baked her Queen Cakes. I assume these are named for Queen Victoria but would love to know the full story if there are any food historians reading. Although Eliza didn't specify that Queen Cakes are baked in individual cases, my copy of the CWA cookbook did. The recipe is transcribed below along with a few changes I made to the order of operations.

As I cooked, I thought about the 140-odd years between Eliza and I. My ingredients came in neat supermarket packages and an electric mixer saved me a lot of elbow grease. Eliza might have made her own butter and hauled home sacks of drygoods. She probably collected and chopped the wood that fuelled her oven and it certainly didn't have a thermostat. Despite this, I'm sure her cakes were just as buttery, dense and delicious as the modern remake. 

Queen Cakes made from Eliza Duckmanton's 1870 recipe.
Source: Museum Victoria

Queen Cakes

1 lb flour

½ lb butter

½ lb pounded loaf sugar

3 eggs

1 teacupful of cream

½ lb currants

1 teaspoonfull of soda

Work the butter to a cream. Dredge in the flour and add the sugar and currants. Mix the ingredients well together. Whisk the eggs, when fluffy, mix the cream and flavouring and stir these to the flour, add the soda, beat the paste well for 10 minutes, bake from ¼ to ½ hour.

*Changes made: I creamed butter and sugar together, then added eggs and cream, mixed lightly, and cooked about 15 minutes at 180ºC. This made about 20 small cakes.

Last weekend's balmy evenings brought out a squadron of deadly aerial hunters in my backyard. I saw about ten dragonflies zooming around, plucking flying insects from the sky. It was an amazing sight – I’ve never seen so many in action in such a small area. From the half-eaten bodies I saw on the ground, it seems they were feasting on a swarm of young ant queens and males on their nuptial flights.

Dragonflies and damselflies belong to the 300-million-year-old insect order Odonata. You can tell the difference between the adults easily; damselflies are generally smaller, more delicate, and hold their wings together above their body when resting. Dragonflies are their beefy relatives and most rest with their wings held out to each side. As juveniles, odonates – known as nymphs – mostly lurk in freshwater ponds and streams eating smaller creatures such as mosquito larvae and small crustaceans.

Compound eyes of a dragonfly.
Source: Museum Victoria

Adult dragonflies have incredible eyesight thanks to large compound eyes that wrap almost all the way around their heads. Combined with extraordinary agility, they are skilled hunters and snatch gnats, moths and flies from the air, eating them on the wing with their powerful jaws. They even mate on the wing; the male guards the female while she lays eggs in the water, grasping just behind her head with the claspers at the end of his abdomen.

A pair of dragonflies laying eggs in a pond. The male is holding on to the female just behind her head as she dips her tail into the water to lay eggs.
Image: Susan McBratney
Source: Susan McBratney

I love watching these animals and their amazing behaviour, which is reflected in the common names for some dragonfly families – hawkers, cruisers, skimmers and perchers. Another common name, darner, harks back to a medieval folk tale that they were the devil’s darning needles that would sew shut the mouths of unruly children!

Male scarlet darter (Crocothemis erythraea) male on the island of Crete. The thorax of the dragonfly is packed with powerful muscles that drive their wings. Unlike most other insects, dragonflies and damselflies can move each pair of wings independently of the other.
Image: Stavros Markopoulos
Source: Used under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0 from macropoulos

A lot of people have mentioned seeing more dragonflies than usual this season so I had a chat to MV’s aquatic insect expert, Richard Marchant, to find out more. He says that knowledge of Australian dragonfly biology is patchy, but they’re quite long-lived – nymphs might take one or two years to reach adulthood, and adults probably live a month or more and travel many kilometres. He believes that all the rain Victoria has received this summer means the increased areas of standing water has attracted dragonflies in huge numbers to many parts of the state, including the greater Melbourne area. So look up, and enjoy the stuntwork of these acrobats in the summer sky!

Links:

Infosheet: Dragonflies and damselfies

Australian Museum: Order Odonata

Devil's Darning Needle

600 Million Years: Giant invertebrates in the Carboniferous

Herald Sun: 'Bugs galore as Vic gets steamy'

Today is the 100th celebration of International Women's Day. In 1911, rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March turned the movement into an international phenomenon, with over one million protesters calling for women's right to vote and equality in the workplace. Now held each year on 8 March, International Women's Day celebrates women's achievements and encourages everyone to address inequalities between the sexes where they still persist.

It's also Women's History Month in March and the featured theme on Collections Online is the militant suffrage movement in Great Britain, exemplified by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The 'militant' behaviour of WSPU campaigners seems rather restrained compared with the modern-day definition of the term, but in the 1900s, accosting politicians and public demonstrations were decidedly unladylike and they used military language to describe their 'fight'.

The theme is illustrated with a wonderful object - a silver muffineer, or shaker for dispensing spices for the tops of cakes. The muffineer is in the form of a suffragette complete with a sandwich board.

Suffragette muffineer made by Saunders & Shepherd, Silver, 1908 (HT 17185)
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Another Collections Online WSPU object is a medal awarded for valour to Myra Eleanor Sadd Brown, an activist and mother of four who was arrested in 1912 for breaking a window in a government office. Her hunger strike ended when she was force-fed in Holloway Prison. It is estimated that fewer than 100 of these medals were struck. It still has its ribbon with bands of green, white and purple, the offical colours of the women's suffrage movement. (You may see people wearing these colours today - I'm one of them!)

Suffragette medal awarded to Myra Eleanor Sadd Brown, Great Britain, 1909, for her efforts in the militant Women's Social and Political Union. (NU 36216)
Image: Jennifer McNair
Source: Museum Victoria

Myra was one of around 1000 British women imprisoned for protesting for the right to vote, which finally came in 1918 for England women, 16 years after non-Aboriginal Australian women were allowed to vote in Commonwealth elections. Our neighbours in New Zealand did much better; women could vote from 1893, including Maori women, whereas Australian Aboriginal women were excluded until 1962 when Commonwealth voting rights were extended to Australia's Indigenous population.

How are you marking International Women's Day?

Links:

International Women's Day

Australian Women's History Forum

MV News: From Little Things

The annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival starts tomorrow and MV is hosting events at Melbourne Museum, the Royal Exhibition Building and the Immigration Museum. It seemed the perfect time to ask the History and Technology curators to suggest some foodie collection items for a series of MFWF posts.

It's hard to imagine Melbourne's food scene without an Italian influence. The flush of Italian migrants that arrived here following World War II brought with them the foundations of the café culture so prevalent across Melbourne today. Some early cafés still survive; Don Camillo near Victoria Market, and Pellegrini's in Bourke St being two well-know examples. Many Italian migrants also started food manufacturing businesses to satisfy the appetites of the migrant population, and, increasingly, the wider community that embraced Italian cuisine. One of these businesses, La Tosca, was founded in 1947 and still produces pasta today.

'La Tosca' Ravioli label for labelling tins of food produced by La Tosca Food Processing Company in the 1970s.
Source: Museum Victoria 

Curator Moya McFadzean talks about the La Tosca roller in this video from The Melbourne Story website:

La Tosca tools and package labels are on display in The Melbourne Story exhibition, which is also the venue for Melbourne's Culinary Story. This festival event features special guest Charmaine O’Brien, author of Flavours of Melbourne, a Culinary Biography and Victorian wines and produce. If you mention MV Blog when booking you will get the MV Members discount  - call 13 11 02 for bookings.

Links:

Selling Pasta to Melbourne - the La Tosca story

Marvellous Melbourne: Café Culture

Borghesi Family Collection on Collections Online

MV Melbourne Food and Wine Festival events

Pendle Hall is an enormous, elaborate and intricate dolls’ house that Felicity Clemons built almost entirely by hand. It was donated to Museum Victoria through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program in 2010 and work has begun to ready it for eventual display at Melbourne Museum.

Beginning in the 1940s, Melbourne-born Felicity was inspired to create Pendle Hall after her daughter received a small dolls’ house as a gift. Ultimately, Pendle Hall reached 21 rooms of Georgian-style country splendour, complete with parquetry floors, working chandeliers, a fully-stocked larder, a resident family with servants and even a mouse beside a wheel of cheese.

The shelves in Pendle Hall's larder are well-stocked. You can see the wheel of cheese and mouse in the middle of the the first shelf.
Image: Michelle Berry
Source: Museum Victoria

Janet Pathe has been steadily registering the individual pieces which number over 600 items. As chief unwrapper, she’s been the first to sight some of the amazing miniature items therein. “ I really like the little pack of cards but some of the pieces of furniture, like cabinets, are just absolutely amazing. All the little drawers and doors open.”

A cabinet from Pendle Hall's Withdrawing Room. It's hard to believe this intricate piece is only 18 cm high. (HT 25753)
Source: Museum Victoria

Pendle Hall has been on display in Felicity Clemons’ private museum in Westbury, Tasmania for many years. To transport it from the Apple Isle, the dolls’ house was carefully photographed while assembled, then each item wrapped, labelled and boxed by a conservator. The reference photos will be critical to reassemble and manage all the little pieces, since, as Janet explains, “so much of it is too small, like the tiny candlesticks, for us to put registration numbers on them.”

This board shows the tools and techniques Felicity Clemens used while constructing Pendle Hall.
Source: Museum Victoria

While Janet registers, conservator Sarah Babister is working through the house room by room. “At the moment I’m doing a conservation assessment on all 612 components, literally looking at every piece, and trying to determine what treatment, if any, needs to be carried out,” says Sarah. “To date most pieces I have examined only require basic surface cleaning, however there are some components which will need to be repaired or stabilised." In some cases she may consider replacing materials (such as a tiny foam mattress) with an inert material because she suspects the foam may be speeding up the deterioration of the bedspread on top.

Conservator Sarah is working through the furniture from the Chinese Bedroom of Pendle Hall.
Source: Museum Victoria

We’ll provide more pictures and news on Pendle Hall here on MV Blog in coming months.

Links:

ABC Radio National: interview with curator Michael Reason on ByDesign

“The fountain is fountaining!” announced a colleague last Thursday. He’d passed the French Fountain in the eastern forecourt of the Royal Exhibition Building and noticed that it was flowing for the first time in ages. Years of drought and water restrictions meant the fountain has been out of action. However now that there are over a million litres of water stored in new tanks under the REB’s western forecourt, the fountain can run again.

It was recomissioned for the opening of the newly-completed German Garden, a careful restoration of the original garden that stood on the site for the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880. You’d never know that under the lush lawns and new garden beds – which follow the exact shape of the 1880 design – there’s a massive water tank and network of pipes to collect and distribute rainwater. Not only the gardens around the REB, but also Melbourne Museum’s Forest Gallery and Milarri Garden will benefit from this new sustainable water supply.

The Royal Exhibition Building's completed German Garden in the western forecourt on Rathdowne Street.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

Thursday’s event marked the completion of the 18-month project World Heritage, World Futures. Even as the speeches were underway, people were wandering through the new landscape after so many months of it being hidden behind construction hoardings. Special guests, Minister for Consumer Affairs, the Hon Michael O’Brien, and Margaret Gardner AO, President of the Museums Board of Victoria, snipped the ceremonial purple ribbon and declared the garden open.

Guests at the garden opening. L-R: Dr Patrick Greene, CEO of Museum Victoria; Dr. Anne-Marie Schleich, German Consul General; Professorr Margaret Gardner AO, President of the Museums Board of Victoria; the Hon Michael O’Brien, Minister for Consumer Affairs and the Right Hon the Lord Mayor Robert Doyle.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

Please come and admire the new garden with its restored iron gate, reinstated urns and stately plantings on your next visit to Carlton.

Performers in period costume test out the new garden.
Image: Heath Warwick
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

World Heritage, World Futures blog

What's going on here behind the aquatic invertebrate display?

A Water Scorpion in Bugs Alive hanging out while the TV crew sets up.
Source: Museum Victoria

Saturday morning TV show Kids' WB have been shooting in Melbourne Museum's Science and Life Galleries today, with a special visit to Bugs Alive this afternoon. Some of the museum's young visitors were very excited to see hosts Lauren and Andrew but for the resident insects, it was all in a day's work.

Chloe from Live Exhibits and Kids' WB hosts Lauren and Andrew filming in Bugs Alive.
Source: Museum Victoria

Chloe, one of our Live Exhibits keepers, brought out some special big invertebrates for Lauren and Andrew to hold. Let's just say that Andrew enjoyed this bit more than Lauren...

Chloe shows Lauren and Andrew a Spiny Leaf Insect.
Source: Museum Victoria

You can see Melbourne Museum featured on Kids' WB when this epidsode screens on Channel 9 at 10am on 5 March.

Over the past ten years, MV curator Tim O’Hara has been snooping through museum collections all over the world, collecting data about brittle stars for a major mapping exercise. He compiled nearly 7000 samples from 250 common species of brittle stars from 24 different museums and discovered something quite unexpected about their distribution.

Brittle stars, or ophiuroids, are echinoderms closely related to sea stars. They have five long, flexible arms attached to a central body. Unlike sea stars, brittle stars are quite active and fast-moving. They are ideal for this kind of large-scale mapping study because they are found all over the globe in a variety of habitats.

A brittle star (Conocladus australis) from southern Australia wrapped around a whip-coral.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

Biogeographers – scientists that study the patterns of distribution of life – have long observed that certain species are associated with particular environments. This makes sense; an animal has particular requirements of temperature, salinity, depth, food availability, and won’t survive where these conditions don’t exist. However in the deep-sea, environmental factors are not very variable - deep water is cold and dark everywhere. Correspondingly, it has been assumed that the fauna in the deep-sea won’t vary much, or at most, certain species would be confined to particular oceans.

It turns out this assumption is not necessarily true. Tim's brittle star study found that there are distinct bands of species distribution not only in shallow water environments, where conditions can be very variable and distinct, but in the deep-sea. Deep-sea brittle stars are found in the same latitudinal bands as their shallow-water relatives, and it’s not yet clear why.

Map showing the overlapping distribution of tropical, temperate and polar brittle stars.
Image: Tim O'Hara
Source: Museum Victoria

Tim thinks the pattern he's discovered might be related to the life history of brittle stars. As he explains, the distinct bands might be due to the way currents disperse larvae. “A lot of these animals have very yolky eggs and there’s a theory that in cold water, eggs go into suspended animation and float on the currents for perhaps a year. Some don’t need to feed – they have all the energy they need to go through metamorphosis to juvenile stage.”

A brittle star (Acanthophiothrix purpurea) on a coral, from Lizard Island Queenlsand.
Image: Julian Finn
Source: Museum Victoria

“It’s a funny strategy that an animal would just throw eggs into the current and hope for the best, but obviously it’s successful because they get around. We’re doing a lot of genetic work at the moment over this study area and we’re getting things that are almost identical 7000km apart.”

Tim’s study, co-authored by Ashley Rowden and Nicholas Bax, was published in Current Biology. This project was generated as part of the Marine Biodiversity Hub, a multi-institutional research program funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.

Links:

O'Hara,Timothy D., Ashley A. Rowden, Nicholas J. Bax. A Southern Hemisphere Bathyal Fauna Is Distributed in Latitudinal Bands, Current Biology, 8 February 2011 (Vol. 21, Issue 3, pp. 226-230)

Marine Biodiversity Hub

Discussion of this study elsewhere:

Deep-sea News

The Age: 'Scientists discover deep-sea creatures play in the same band'

Echinoblog

Have you ever passed the weathered, rough-hewn post and rail fences near the corner of Smithfield and Flemington Roads? These are the remains of the former Newmarket Saleyards which opened 150 years ago this month.

Newmarket Saleyards, highlighting the laneway running between the stock pens showing detail of bluestone pitches and post and rail fencing.
Image: Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Cars, trucks and trams thunder along Flemington Road these days and but there was a time when the roads were full of traffic of a different kind. For decades, thousands of head of cattle were driven along here ‘on the hoof’ by working dogs and drovers, many from as far away as Queensland. In the late 1800s Newmarket was on the city fringe, but as Melbourne expanded, the chaos, sounds and smells of rural life collided with the city. Increasingly, trucks and rail were used to transport livestock during the 20th century and a stock overpass, built in the 1960s, reduced the risk of escapes. There are plenty of stories of stray cattle trampling through local houses, turning up at the pub, the milk bar, and even the Zoo. After the auction, drovers ran livestock to nearby abattoirs or to be transported to the paddocks of their new owners.

 A yardman directing cattle at Newmarket Saleyards, 1960.
Image: Laurie Richards Studio
Source: Museum Victoria

The vast Newmarket Saleyards were the most important in Australia, setting the price for livestock nationwide. It became a ‘town within a town’ with its own essential services, including a telegraph office, cricket club, newspaper and radio station. Record numbers of animals were sold here during World War II.

Covered walkways between the stock pens at the Newmarket Saleyards where auctioneers stood and conducted sales.
Image: Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Regional stockyards led to the decline of Newmarket which finally closed in 1987. Museum Victoria acquired significant objects from Newmarket and volunteer Jackie Gatt has been working with curator Liza Dale-Hallett to document the collection, which is featured on Collections Online this month.

You can still see bluestone paving, stock pens, covered walkways and brick buildings on the site, but new housing occupies much of the original 57 acres. Every year since its closure, drovers, agents and auctioneers who worked at Newmarket hold a reunion on the third Saturday of February each year to catch up with old friends. This year there will also be a community celebration day on Sunday 20 February, 11am-2pm, to honour the 150th anniversary.

Detail of the Newmarket Saleyard mosaics, featuring Bill Glenn, a drover at the Newmarket Saleyards, and his cattle dog.
Image: mural artist Elizabeth McKinnon, photographer Robert Cutting
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Newmarket Collection on Collections Online

Brochure about Newmarket Collection (PDF, 2Mb)

ABC Landline: Saleyard of the Century

Poster for Community Day on 20 February (PDF, 6.2Mb)

In 2008, senior curator David Demant gave a talk about CSIRAC at the Computer History Museum in California's Silicon Valley. CSIRAC is the only surviving first-generation computer in the world, and is a key item in MV's Information and Communication Collection.

Following David's visit, two CSIRAC items were borrowed by the Computer History Museum for their new exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. The objects - a replica paper tape that holds a CSIRAC program and an amplifier from CSIRAC's memory - feature in a section called 'The Birth of the Computer' beside the 1953 computer JOHNIAC.

Display case containing CSIRAC amplifier and paper tape at the Computer History Museum.
Source: Computer History Museum

JOHNIAC on display in the exhibition Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing.
Source: Computer History Museum

It's great to see an Australian-built computer - and the fourth computer ever built - represented in this important timeline of computing history.

Links:

CSIRAC: Australia's First Computer

What's On: CSIRAC

Computer History Museum

In Melbourne's sizzling 38ºC heat today, the landscaping crew are planting out the Royal Exhibition Building western forecourt. The larger trees - including jacarandas, oaks and araucarias - are already planted. Pots and pots of lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), lamb's ear (Stachys byzantina) and other plants have arrived and will go into the ground this week.

Plants arriving in trucks.
Source: Museum Victoria

 Plants in pots lined up near the central circular garden.
Source: Museum Victoria

Landscapers planting out patches of lamb's ear.
Source: Museum Victoria

The landscape architect, Barrie Gallagher from CDA Design Group, used plant catalogues from the 1800s, newspaper reports and early pictures of the site to design a garden that would reflect the original planting. The design is an informal arrangement of plants that would have been common in Victorian-era gardens, including sage, penstemon, flaxes and cabbage trees, within the beds around the formal circular driveway. Wonderful fragrant plants, such as mock orange, daphne and roses, will ensure the western forecourt garden will soon delight our noses as well as our eyes.

Links:

World Heritage, World Futures blog

Video: Recreating the garden

Bernard in Public Programs didn't just receive a gory makeover for his stint as a security guard in the Science and Life commercial; he also needed a haircut to tame his unruly locks.

 Going, going, gone... Bernard's wild curls are trimmed off.
Source: Susan Bamford Caleo

But don't worry, the trimmings were put to good use... as nesting material for the finches and wrens in Melbourne Museum's Forest Gallery. In the wild, these birds salvage tufts of animal hair to line their nests and provide a soft bed for their chicks. During the birds' breeding season, Live Exhibits collect all sorts of materials that will make good nesting matter. This includes coconut fibres, fleece from sheep and horse hair to name a few. Staff stockpile material in spring and disperse them out in small amounts throughout spring and summer.

 Trimmings from Bernard's haircut.
Source: Museum Victoria

Rowena from Live Exhibits had the strange task of scattering the hair around the Forest Gallery early one morning. When I told her it was Bernard's, she said, "I don't know if it's better or worse, knowing who it belonged to!"

Rowena scattering the hair in the Forest Gallery for birds to use.
Source: Museum Victoria

The Melbourne Gallery was filled with beautiful harmonies this morning as a group of Maori performers sang and danced to farewell Phar Lap's skeleton, which will return to New Zealand next week.

Maori performance group Te Waka Raukura sing and dance in front of the Phar Lap Reunion display.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Performers from Te Waka Raukura.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

A performer from Te Waka Raukura.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

On loan from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the skeleton has been on display next to Phar Lap's hide since September 2010 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Melbourne Cup.

Today's performers, Te Waka Raukura, provided a wonderful send-off for the skeleton. It has been an honour for us to have the skeleton and send thanks to all who made this reunion possible. The Phar Lap Reunion display can be seen until Sunday 30 January.

Media and museum visitors gathered to enjoy the music and dancing.
Image: Ben Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

What's On: Phar Lap Reunion

MV News: Phar Lap reunion

Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

MV Blog: The crates have arrived!

Test shot for the upcoming photo shoot.
Source: Museum Victoria

Do you know a child between seven and ten years old who'd like to be included in a new exhibition at the Immigration Museum?

The team working on the upcoming exhibition Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours are seeking up to ten children to be photographed to feature in one section of the gallery. This area will focus on how people identify difference from a very young age through to adulthood. A large scale photograph of a group of children playing - from various cultural backgrounds - will form the backdrop to a series of text panels outlining key moments of personal development. This is the section for which volunteers are needed.

Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours is a new long-term exhibition that will open at the Immigration Museum in March 2011. It will address the very personal experience of identity, and what this means in Australia – today, in the past and into the future. The exhibition will explore the complexity and fluidity of personal identity in contemporary multicultural Australia, with a focus on ethnicity, language, spirituality, ancestry and citizenship.

What's required?

No experience necessary – children (and their carers) are required to turn up on the day of the photography shoot for an hour or two.

When?

UPDATE: Thursday 3 February, 1pm

Where?

Meet at the playground near Rathdowne St, Carlton Gardens. Melways ref 43 J4

To express interest of for more information, call Monica Zetlin, Producer on 0411 555 663 or email mzetlin@museum.vic.gov.au

Links:

Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours

Exhibition development blog

From the 1950s to 2009, the western forecourt of the Royal Exhibition Building was an asphalt car park - useful, but hardly befitting the World Heritage classification of the site. Certainly there was no trace of the ornamental garden planted there for the 1880 Melbourne International Exhibition.

Cue World Heritage, World Futures: a major project that began in October 2009. Funding for this project was provided form the Victorian Property Fund on the approval of the Minister for Consumer Affairs.

The project's three phases: excavation of the site to recover artefacts from the original 1880s garden, installation of an enormous rainwater storage tank, and restoration of the heritage garden and circular drive - are almost complete. 

Landscapers have installed the watering system and are now preparing the ground for planting. Within the next month the project will be finished and a beautiful water-wise garden will return to Rathdowne Street.

This extensive watering system will use the water from the new rainwater storage tank to ensure the garden stay lush and green sustainably.
Source: Museum Victoria

So keep an eye on the final flurry of activity behind those purple hoardings this month; the World Heritage, World Futures blog contains posts on the project's progress from the very beginning if you'd like to know more.

Hoardings around the project building site with a glimpse of the restored circular driveway.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Royal Exhibition Building

World Heritage, World Futures

First generation iPod in the MV Collection from 2001. It was donated by a journalist who reviewed the device just before its release in Australia. (HT13346)
Source: Museum Victoria

Two new Museum Victoria podcasts by Dr Andi are now available on the MV website to listen to or download. 

The first podcast, part of the series Someone's Gotta Do It, profiles MV's chief tweeter and number one narwhal fan, Jareen Summerhill. Jareen helps Phar Lap manage his Facebook page, too.

The second, Episode 26 in the Access All Areas series, takes the poetry of Ogden Nash to museum experts for the full story on ants, pythons, ducks, coelocanths and more. Exactly how many ribs do reticulated pythons have, anyway?

Links:

Archive: Access All Areas podcasts

Archive: Someone's Gotta Do It podcasts 

iPod on Collections Online

Have you seen the Science and Life television commercial? 

We hung around on set and learned all sorts of useful things - what fake blood is made from, how much blood is too much, and exactly what attacks Bernard the security guard at night in the gallery...

Dave Pickering checking out the teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

The crew at Scienceworks have just unpacked a shipment of animatronic dinosaurs from Questacon. They will be refurbished in our workshops before going on display in the exhibition Explore-a-saurus, which opens at Scienceworks on 1 June 2011. Palaeontology collection manager, David Pickering, was caught hamming it up in a photo shoot with the mighty models, but I don't think he'll get that close once they're switched on and come to life!

Among the dinosaurs are some of the superstars of the dino world - T. rex, Stegasaurus, Triceratops and others. They will be overhauled with some new animatronic technology and their appearance updated to reflect recent discoveries in palaeontology.

Eye to eye with Triceratops in the Scienceworks collection store.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

Explore-a-saurus will have moving, roaring models on a grand scale. The exhibition will also show how paleontologists reconstruct dinosaurs - what they looked like, how they behaved and where they lived - from fossil evidence.

Links:

What's On listing for Explore-a-saurus 

Dinosaur Walk

MV News: How old was that dinosaur?

What's this conservator doing?

Elizabeth holding a rope...
Source: Museum Victoria 

And this one?

 Sam holding a rope...
Source: Museum Victoria

No, they're not flying giant kites in the Melbourne Museum foyer; they were carefully lowering our replica Duigan Biplane for cleaning last night.

 Lowering the Duigan Biplane for cleaning.
Source: Museum Victoria

This kind of large-scale work takes place once museum visitors have left. It means that conservators can work some strange hours!

The dusty Duigan back on the ground ready for cleaning.
Source: Museum Victoria

The biplane was back up near the ceiling this morning, and the floor was clear for the return of the Deliverette, which has been in storage while the special Titanic exhibition desk occupied its place in the foyer.

Special delivery! The Deliverette van returning from the collection store.
Source: Museum Victoria

It's great to see this unique little van back in the building. It is a prototype small delivery vehicle designed in the late 1940s at the aircraft factory at Fishermen's Bend. The start of the Korean War halted its production. What a shame - the Deliverette would have been perfect for Melbourne's narrow laneways. Perhaps it would have an iconic Melbourne vehicle like our trams.

Links:

Centennary of the Duigan Biplane's first flight

Deliverette on Collections Online

Every now and then, those of us who work at Melbourne Museum receive a polite but slightly troubling email:

"The Preparation Department needs to undertake work today that may generate some odours."

I can’t think of another workplace where stench warnings are a regular occurrence. They’re intriguing, too, because I always wonder what they’re doing down there in the basement.

Our skilled preparators do much as their name would suggest: they prepare things, from animal specimens for research collections to intricate models for display. Their job combines elements of biology, taxidermy, sculpture and painting and their work area is a den of creativity and practicality that is stocked with tools and equipment and art supplies.

In mid-December, a Gray’s Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon grayi) unfortunately was stranded at Portland and died. Given the rarity of this species, and MV’s strength in the study of whales, its skeleton is a valuable addition to our research collection. The preparators perform the somewhat gruesome but necessary task of cleaning the skeleton, and that’s where the odour comes in.

The Preparation Department's collection of rubber gloves - essential tools in this line of work.
Source: Museum Victoria

Preparator Steven Sparrey explained the facilities in which large specimens are prepared. The specimens are placed in a sequence of water baths in the ominously named ‘maceration tank’ which allows the animal’s soft tissues to loosen away naturally from the bones without damaging them. It’s not pretty and it doesn’t smell good. After this, the bones are given a soapy wash and dried thoroughly.

The sealed room that holds the maceration tank (at the back) and cleaning benches.
Source: Museum Victoria

Some astonishingly large vertebrae from the backbone of a whale were on the drying racks. These were prepared for the Melbourne Aquarium from another stranded animal. The bones were quite yellow and Steven explained that the stains are from the whale’s oils, and they would be bleached by the sun once they were properly dry.

Whale vertebrae in the drying racks.
Source: Museum Victoria

Shortly after that, he firmly suggested that we leave the area because the smell tends to cling to clothing. Needless to say, he doesn’t wear his work clothes home on the train. So there you have it – perhaps not one of the most glamourous jobs at the museum, but an essential task to maintain Victoria’s collection of our state's fauna.

Links:

Model-making for Dynamic Earth

Climate change and whale evolution

Fossil unlocks secrets to the origin of whales

Fireworks on New Year's Eve in St Kilda, 1935. (MM 8768)
Image: Cyril Henshaw
Source: Museum Victoria

With Melbourne temperatures predicted to reach 40ºC on New Year's Eve, I'm glad I'll be spending the working hours of Hogmanay in the cool of Melbourne Museum's air conditioning. A perfect time to visit one of our venues before celebrating the arrival of 2011. We're open on New Year's Day, too.

How will you be escaping the heat?

Links:

What's On at Melbourne Museum

What's On at the Immigration Museum

What's On at Scienceworks

An engineer friend of mine told me that an engineer friend of hers had recently wed at the Pumping Station. The ceremony took place in this Heritage-listed building amid its pumps and gleaming copper pipes - surely the perfect venue for an engineer's wedding! Congratulations Hannah and Ian!

Ceremony among the pipes and engines of the Pumping Station at Scienceworks.
Image: Clare Plueckhahn
Source: Hannah Clement

Links:

Pumping Station at Scienceworks

Scienceworks venue hire

'Catching a Star' - a Christmas card created by Thomas Le showing people plucking stars from the sky and hanging them on a Christmas tree. (SH 991104 1)
Image: Thomas Le
Source: Museum Victoria

This lovely card in our Migration Collection was created in 1996 by Thomas Le for humanitarian organisation Austcare, now ActionAid Australia. Mr Le fled Vietnam as a teenager, arriving in Australia in 1980, where he put himself through art training and established his career as an illustrator, artist and graphic designer. He donated this and other artworks to Austcare as a way of giving something back for his new life in Australia and helping others who are suffering.

Also on the topic of Christmas stars, the Planetarium's latest FAQ ponders the astronomy of the Star of Bethlehem and provides some good reading until our venues reopen on 26 December.

From all at Museum Victoria, we wish you a happy and safe Christmas!

Links:

Thomas Le's Christmas card on Collections Online

Origins: History of immigration from Vietnam

The cafe at Melbourne Museum is full of staff each morning seeking a caffeine hit at the start of their workday. This morning, web developer Reuben held out a shiny twenty cent piece, delighted. "Look what I got in my change!" 

 Centenary of Federation commemorative twenty cent piece with the Royal Exhibition Building in the background.
Source: Museum Victoria

According to the Royal Australian Mint, this coin was designed by Ryan Douglas Ladd and Mark Aaron Kennedy of Lara Lake Primary School as part of a student design competition. It portrays our own Royal Exhibition Building which hosted the opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament, since it was the only building in Melbourne with the capacity to hold the 12,000 people in attendance. After this first gathering on 9 May 1901, the newly-formed Federal Government sat in Melbourne until the opening of Parliament House in Canberra on 9 May, 1927.

As we sat in the shadow of the Royal Exhibition Building this morning, we couldn't resist a picture of Reuben's twenty cents alongside its inspiration. 2.9 million of these coins were minted so check your pocket; you too may have a little piece of World Heritage among your small change!

Links:

Old Parliament House (now site of the Museum of Australian Democracy)

Opening of the First Commonwealth Parliament of Australia

Numismatics on Collections Online

Coming soon to a telly near you is the new commercial for the Science and Life Gallery at Melbourne Museum. But for those who can't wait until Boxing Day, we've loaded it up on our YouTube channel.

Congratulations to the in-house production team: Bernard Caleo (actor), Tim Rolfe (writer/director), Jenni Meaney (production manager), Stephen Dixon (editor) and Maree Martin (marketing).

Many thanks also to 

• Trish Keating (cinematographer),
• David Chesworth of Wax Sound Media (music and sound design)  
• Act3Animation for the volcano eruption
• Creature Technology Company for the animatronic dinosaurs
• Emma-Jane Redmond for the make-up and fake blood

Links:

Dinosaur Walk

Wild: Amazing animals in a changing world

600 Million Years: Victoria evolves

Dynamic Earth

The History & Technology Department is steadily listing the vast International Harvester Collection on Collections Online. This collection of over 50,000 items records the operations, products and manufacturing of the Australian subsidiary of the International Harvester Company. This US-based company began selling its agricultural machinery and trucks in Australia in 1902. Local manufacturing in Victoria began in the late 1930s.

The IH Collection includes colour transparencies which are particularly interesting because colour photography was still quite rare in the 1940s. It’s unusual to see scenes of this era captured in vivid reds and blues and greens.

Horse-drawn GL-60 plough manufactured by International Harvester, 1940. This is one of several colour transparencies in the collection. (MM 115209)
Source: Museum Victoria

Nearly 200 images are now online and more will be listed in coming months. Curator David Crotty is keen to hear from anyone who could help identify some of the people in the images, particularly the photos of farmers and town residents who attended presentations by International Harvester sales reps.

A group of International Harvester salesmen presenting the Farmall A Tractor in Albury, 1940. The company embarked upon regional tours demonstrating its agricultural machinery. (MM 115021)
Source: Museum Victoria

Group of farmers from Cohuna outside International Harvester factory, Geelong, 1940. (MM 115033)
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

International Harvester Collection

On our recent trip to Benalla Art Gallery, Nicole and I took the chance to track down some of the town's historic buildings that appear in Collections Online. We wanted to see how they had fared over the years.

The State Electricity Commission (SEC) building was flanked by some impressive automobiles back in 1948:

Glass Negative - State Electricity Commission, Benalla, Victoria, 9 August 1948 (MM 011402)
Source: Museum Victoria

We spotted it on Main Street now housing a second-hand bookstore. A local helpfully shouted, "that's the SEC building!" at us from his ute as he drove by.

Benalla SEC building in 2010.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

This hotel was a little bit harder to find because it looks quite different these days.

Negative - Floodwaters around a Benalla hotel, September 1921 (MM 6159).
Source: Museum Victoria

We spotted it near the railway station. The friendly owner confirmed that it's the same building pictured in the 1921 photograph, but it had a significant facelift following a fire not long after that picture was taken. The basic bones of the building are still there, even though its iron lace verandahs are long gone.

Victoria Hotel in Benalla in 2010.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

We ran out of time before we could locate the Farmers Arms Hotel, but I've since found a recent picture of it on flickr that shows it too has lost its decorative iron lace but is otherwise much the same.

A bullock team and car outside the Farmers Arms Hotel, Benalla, pre-1940 (MM 001773).
Source: Museum Victoria

We'd love to hear any stories about these buildings from Benalla locals. Anyone know the character leading the bullock train?

Links:

Collections Online: search for Benalla

In May, Dr Joanna Sumner, Manager of Genetic Resources, joined a trip to Ilkurlka in remote Western Australia to work with Indigenous people and the WA Department of Conservation to survey the wildlife of this desert region.

A crew from MV spent much of last week in bushranger country in the town of Benalla in Victoria's north, readying the exhibition Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land paintings and objects from the Donald Thomson Collection for its opening on Saturday 4 December.

The exhibition, curated by Lindy Allen, was first shown at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in 2009. This showing at the Benalla Art Gallery is the first stop on a tour that will include other galleries in regional Victoria plus the Northern Territory and New South Wales.

The exhibition crew carefully cover a display of objects with a protective case.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

The exhibition features large bark paintings by Yolngu people that were collected in the 1930s and 40s by Donald Thomson. They capture the sacred patterns, known as minytji, that were painted onto the bodies of ancestors in creation times. The same destictive designs were painted onto ceremonial objects also.

Nicole and I were there to interview Lindy about the exhibition for an upcoming Ancestral Power website, but it was a rare treat for us webteam staff to see an exhibition being installed, too.

Lindy Allen preparing for her video interview about the works in Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

Benalla is well worth a visit to see this amazing show. Admission is free and it will be on display until 30 January 2011. 

Links:

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic MV News story

Benalla Art Gallery

You've probably heard reports that northern Victorian farmers are losing whole crops to armies of marching hoppers and that locusts are on their way into Melbourne. The species in question is the Australian Plague Locust, Chortoicetes terminifera, which belongs to the short-horned grasshoppers (family Acrididae). High rainfall over past months has created a bounty of lush green growth for the locusts to eat, allowing them to breed to plague conditions.

‘Locust’ is used to describe grasshoppers that can swarm in huge numbers. Most grasshoppers are solitary and the Australian Plague Locust generally shuns company too. But something interesting happens when their numbers build up: they enter what is known as a gregarious phase and their behaviour changes profoundly.

Juvenile locusts aggregate in ‘hopper bands’ that march across pasture, devouring everything in their wake. The adults travel vast distances in flying swarms that can be kilometres wide. A swarm that covers just one square kilometre can eat ten tonnes of vegetation in one day.

Band of nymphs moving through pasture, as seen from the air.
Source: Industry & Investment NSW

We spotted locusts on a recent trip to Benalla; they were all over the town, hopping and flying over roads and gardens in low numbers.

This locust was sunning itself on the footpath of the main street in Benalla.
Image: Nicole Alley
Source: Museum Victoria

In some species – such as the Desert Locust found in Africa, the Middle East and Asia – the gregarious phase displays very different colours and body form to the solitary phase. Not so with the Australian Plague Locust; the two phases look pretty similar, especially when they’re dry specimens and their colours have faded, such as those in our entomology collection.

Specimens of the Australian Plague Locust in the Museum Victoria collection. The dark spots at the end of the hindwings in the top specimen are distinctive features of the species.
Source: Museum Victoria

Links:

Australian Plague Locust Commission

DPI Victoria locust information

DPI NSW locust image gallery

Entomologist Ken Walker took 75 students in Year 7 at Eltham High School for a nature walk around their school grounds last week. Ken also gave a talk about biodiversity, but he believes that biodiversity is best understood through fieldwork.

The students discovered this batch of beautifully architectural eggs:

Eggs laid on young eucalyptus leaves.
Image: Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria

Detail of insect eggs.
Image: Ken Walker
Source: Museum Victoria

They were laid by a Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle (Paropsis atomaria) which belongs to the family Chrysomelidae, or leaf beetles. This is a very large and common family of beetles that feed on leaves. Some species of chrysomelids are introduced pests, such as the Elm Leaf Beetle that threatens many of Melbourne's historic elms, but the Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle is native to Australia. These eggs will hatch into voracious leaf-munching larvae.

Paropsis atomaria laying eggs.
Image: Peter Kelly
Source: PaDIL, Museum Victoria

Young larvae of the Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle feeding on eucalyptus leaf.
Image: Peter Kelly
Source: PaDIL, Museum Victoria

Next year Ken will help the students do a full survey of the ants found at Eltham High to teach them more about classification and the biodiversity of their own school.

Links:

Eucalyptus Tortoise Beetle on PaDIL

Elm Leaf Beetle featured in Question of the Week

Melbourne Museum foyer is decked out for the Christmas season! The tree went up this morning and a special case full of beautiful vintage Christmas decorations was installed yesterday. These are borrowed from the amazing collection of Rob and Lee-Ann Hamilton and include fragile glass baubles and a miniature tree made from dyed goose feathers.

Installing the Christmas display.
Source: Museum Victoria

Vintage glass owl decoration on a miniature Christmas tree made from dyed goose feathers.
Source: Museum Victoria

The first of December is the day to start counting down to Christmas Day with an advent calendar. So we thought we’d make an online Museum Victoria advent calendar with random treats and prizes.

At 5pm each day until Christmas Eve, we’ll post a link to a Christmassy collection item through MV’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and ask a question. The first correct answer to the question will be in the running for museum goodies like badges, books, toys and tickets. Come and play!

Links:

Vintage Christmas Decoration display

I missed the Leonid meteor shower in November so I was delighted to learn that there's another shower on its way in mid-December. Astronomer Tanya Hill explains more in our monthly Video Skynotes.

Twenty Geminid meteors an hour? Those are pretty good odds for spotting one!

If you prefer your Skynotes in written form, head to the Skynotes page on the Planetarium website.

What happens after archaeologists dig up thousands of pieces of historical material? Where do they go next? And who will care for them in years to come?

These questions were central to a recent symposium at Melbourne Museum. Jointly sponsored by Museum Victoria, La Trobe University and the Australian Research Council (ARC), the symposium was organised by Dr Charlotte Smith, a senior curator at Museum Victoria. The symposium, called Developing sustainable, strategic collection management approaches for Archaeological Assemblages, invited local and international guests to discuss the problem shared by institutions around the world – what to do with boxes and boxes of artefacts.

Rows and rows of archaeological material in storage at Museum Victoria.
Image: Veegan McMasters
Source: Museum Victoria

Charlotte’s curatorial duties include oversight of the Commonwealth Block assemblage, which is the world’s largest 19th century urban assemblage. It comprises 508,000 individual fragments that were excavated from the site bordered by Lonsdale, Exhibition, Little Lonsdale and Spring Streets in Melbourne. It was painstakingly documented and has phenomenal research and exhibition potential, but this is not always the case. Some assemblages excavated in the 1980s arrived at the museum with such scant records that we don't even know where they were dug up.

Some archaeolgocial material is poorly documented; we don’t even know where this particular box of artefacts came from.
Image: Veegan McMasters
Source: Museum Victoria

The idea of sustainability, explained Charlotte, refers to cultural and social sustainability. “It’s making sure we hand on to future generations collections that are manageable.” When it comes to the idea of significance, the perspective of archaeologists and museums are slightly different. “When a museum develops a collection, you can limit your collecting from the start. But in archaeology you can’t make those kinds of decisions because the whole of the record is important and you can’t predict how big it will be.”

Speakers at the archaeological assemblage symposium. L-R: Tim Murray, Nick Merriman, Charlotte Smith, Maryanne McCubbin and Terry Childs.
Source: Museum Victoria

By training museum workers in archaeology and vice versa, both groups better understand the perspective of the other. Museum Victoria has a great working relationship with local archaeologists, but not every institution has access to such experts. Until recently, archaeologists rarely received training in collection management and Charlotte talked about the importance for people to have skills in both areas.

Charlotte is very pleased with the outcomes of the symposium about what she describes as “a huge and interesting problem.” The symposium participants were pragmatic in their approach and agreed that better planning at the dig stage of a project, including on-site significance assessment, would help keep these large, important historical assemblages manageable for future generations.

Links

Unearthing Little Lon

Casselden Place on Collections Online

Archaeology on the World Heritage, World Futures blog

After months of work to excavate artefacts, dig an enormous hole, pour a rainwater tank that will hold over a million litres of water and cover it up again, the very last stage of the World Heritage, World Futures project is underway. We've been recording time-lapse footage for most of the project. This video shows work on the donut-shaped driveway on two days in November.

The workers and machinery look tinier than usual with of a bit of tweaking to create a tilt-shift effect. It's a simple trick that changes which area looks sharp and which area looks blurry, and suddenly it looks like a miniature world.

I can't wait to see that area planted out! It's been covered by asphalt car park for decades, then hidden behind purple construction hoardings more recently. The World Heritage, World Futures blog has been tracking the project since the first breaking of ground in October 2009.

World Toilet Day, held on 19 November each year, serves to point out that nearly half the world's population don't have access to proper sanitation. It's not the world's most glamorous issue, but it is an important one - globally, more people die from disease caused by poor sanitation than from any other cause.

There are several toilets of note in Museum Victoria collections. We're not shy about poo at MV, since the Spotwood Pumping Station at Scienceworks was once responsible for moving all of Melbourne's sewage out of the city. One particular toilet at the Pumping Station was installed in 1939 for the exclusive use of Lucey Alford, the first female scientist to work there. Her job was to determine if corrosion in the concrete pipes was caused by bacteria and her research was important to the proper functioning of the system.

Toilet - Fowler Ware, MMBW Spotswood Sewerage Pumping Station, circa 1939 (HT 2486)
Source: Museum Victoria

Before Spotswood Pumping Station and sewage treatment at Werribee were established in the 1890s, sewage disposal was a much dirtier job. The stink of cesspits and open sewers earned our city the moniker of 'Smellbourne' in the mid-1800s. Typhoid outbreaks killed hundreds of residents. With no internal plumbing, Melburnians used chamber pots or the 'dunny' at the back of the yard, which was emptied by nightsoil collectors. (You can still see many of these old dunnies from the laneways that run behind older houses in the inner city.) 'Nightsoil' - the coy term for human waste - was dumped in pits or depots in the outskirts of the young city, including the area that would become Carlton Gardens.

A fragment of a simple whiteware chamber pot from the Little Lon archaeological assemblage. (LL 068610)
Source: Museum Victoria

'Dunny' toilet and chicken coop in a suburban backyard, Glenroy, 1960 (MM 110571)
Image: John Cuff
Source: Museum Victoria

So today as you 'spend a penny', as my grandmother would say, spare a thought for those who don't have the convenience and hygiene of clean, safe, indoor toilets.

Links

World Toilet Day

Melbourne Water education resource - Lucey Alford

MV News: Royal Exhibition Building archaeology

Kingston Historical Website - Night Soil

Thanks to modern phones and gadgets, many of us carry a camera of some kind everywhere we go and we can document our lives like never before. Today's children feature in hundreds, if not thousands of photographs in the first years of their lives. I think in the flood of images, the importance of any one image has lessened.

Last year, Christine Anu featured in an episode of the SBS series Who Do You Think You Are. She grew up in mainland Queensland but her ancestors were from Saibai Island in the Torres Straight, and the episode takes her back into a personal history she never knew about. At the start, she talked about the lack of a family album: "My family don't have many photographs. We didn't own cameras or had no way to develop the film." In her case, a single photograph has amazing power.

The show's researchers tracked down a photograph of her grandfather in the Donald Thomson Collection that is managed by Museum Victoria. Taken in November 1943, it shows Nadi Anu among other soldiers in Irian Jaya. He died when Anu was ten and she had never seen a photograph of him. When presented with the image of him with his patrol, she was overcome. "The photo has snapped him right in his prime," she said. "This photograph changes my life."

A still from series 2 of Who Do You Think You Are, with Christine Anu being shown a photograph of her grandfather as a young man.
Source: Courtesy of SBS

The Donald Thompson Collection has been managed by Museum Victoria since 1973, and since then, there have about 600 requests from communities and researchers to access and use the collection. The episode originally screened on 18 October 2009 but you can now watch it online on the SBS website.

Is there a photograph that has changed your life?

Titanic comes down, Tron Legacy goes up.
Source: Museum Victoria

It's been a mad week at Museum Victoria. It's the last week of Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition at Melbourne Museum and the crowds have poured in for their last chance to see. It closes on 7 November after an extended season. I took this picture today of workers in a cherry-picker updating the banner on the side of the building. I love that the Irish shipbuilders seem to be watching them work, too. Titanic has been a huge success for the museum and we're so pleased that visitors have liked it so much.

It's also Melbourne Cup Week - makring the 80th anniversary of Phar Lap's win and the 150th anniversary of the first running of the Melbourne Cup. The reunion display of this hide and skeleton at Melbourne Museum also has a new wonderful item borrowed for display, the Centennial Cup. It's so much bigger than you might expect, just like Phar Lap himself!

Speaking of size, did you know Phar Lap was 17.7hh? If you don't know what 'hh' means, have a look at Measure Island, which opened at Scienceworks this week. All your horse and horse-racing measurement questions will be answered!

And of course, another bit of news was announced this week. Coming in April 2011, the amazing exhibition of Ancient Egyptian artefacts in Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs.

Phew! That's a lot of exhibition news for one week!

Jack the Satin Bowerbird is arguably the superstar resident of Melbourne Museum's Forest Gallery. His gleaming blue plumage is gorgeous. His skills in construction are unparalleled. He's a great collection manager. But could he also be an illusionist? 

Jack the Satin Bowerbird Ptilonorhynchus violaceus.
Image: Alan Henderson
Source: Museum Victoria

Deakin University's John Endler reported a fascinating possibility in his recent paper in the journal Current Biology. His study of the bowers constructed by the Great Bowerbird, Ptilinorynchus nuchalis, suggests that these animals arrange the ornaments in their bowers in such a way to make themselves look bigger, and thus more impressive, when courting females.

The principle is the same as that in the Ames Room in our exhibition The Mind: Enter the Labyrinth. The distorted, forced persepctive tricks our brains into interpreting people at opposite ends of the room as being dramatically different in size.

Of course, we're not sure if bowerbirds see this illusion the same that we do. And no one has noticed any partiular pattern to Jack's set-dressing, but perhaps there's more to his collection of blue things than first thought!

Links:

Birds use optical illusions to get mates, New Scientist, 9 September 2010

I needed a tetanus shot yesterday after a gardening accident involving my arm and a very spiky cactus. Like many people, I hate needles, but I'd rather suffer the jab than take a risk with this quite awful, and often lethal, disease.

We have several vials of tetanus vaccine in the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) Collection. CSL was established in 1918 when it became clear that Australia's isolation, combined with the global disruption of World War I, demanded that we become self-sufficient in medicines and vaccines for the sake of public health. Like most vaccines, the anti-tentanus vaccine includes deactivated pathogen that doesn't cause illness, but still triggers the immune system into battle mode. The resulting antigens can respond quickly to destroy any active tetanus bacteria that enter the body and prevent us from developing full-blown tetanus.

A group of Clostridium tetani bacteria, responsible for causing tetanus in humans
Image: Centre for Disease Control
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library

When I was a kid I thought you caught tetanus from rusty nails, since standing on a rusty nail was the most common reason people went for a tetanus shot. It's not, of course - it's caused by a rod-shaped bacterium called Clostridium tetani. C. tetani is a common, free-living bacterium that flourishes in anaerobic (or oxygen-free) enviroments... such as the deep wound caused when you stand on a rusty nail. Once in there, the bacteria release a toxin called tetanospasmin which causes devastating muscle contractions and spasm. The infection is also known as 'lockjaw' since the first muscles to be affected are often the large chewing muscles. Tetanus is lethal in up to 45% of cases.

So on that cheery note, as summer approaches and you ditch your winter shoes for summer flip-flops, and spend more time outside near rusty nails, perhaps it's time for a tetanus booster? 

Why must it rain on the annual Ride to Work Day? It just doesn't seem fair. It rained last year, and with drizzle this morning and storms forecast for this afternoon, this year's event was a bit washed out, too.

Ride to Work Day breakfast at Melbourne Museum.
Source: Museum Victoria

Despite the weather, dedicated museum staff peddled in and enjoyed the breakfast. There were breakfasts organised all over Melbourne - did you attend one?

An article in the Age today shared the good news that the rare leafy liverwort Pedinophyllum monoicum survived the Black Saturday bushfire disaster in tiny remnants of Yarra Ranges rainforest. It was discovered through the Rainforest Recovery Project which is revisiting sites that were sampled prior to the fires.

This sort of work is critical to our understanding about how ecosystems recover - or don't - from bushfire. MV Curator of Hepetology, Jane Melville, received an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant in June this year to continue her work on the ecology, demography and genetics of frogs in the Kinglake region. A surprising number and diversity of frogs survived the February 2009 fires.

This field site in Toolangi was badly affected by bushfire, yet yielded an adult frog previously caught in 2008. It is thought that frogs survived the fire by hiding in and around bodies of water like this dam.
Image: Bec Bray
Source: Museum Victoria

Frogs and liverworts share one characteristic that make them particularly important indicators: they are very sensitive to drying out. Neither would survive a direct fire front but  persist in unburnt pockets (or refugia) that offer protection. Long-term studies will monitor how the forests recover in coming years; since frogs are mobile, it is hoped that they will spread relatively quickly back into their former range. Rainforest plants generally aren't quite so responsive so we're very fortunate that this small, tender plant made it through the fires.

Links:

Media release from the Department of Sustainability and Environment

Type specimen of Pedinophyllum monoicum held at Te Papa Tongarewa

What is a liverwort? - Australian National Botanic Gardens

We were delighted to win an AVIA award for the Panoramic Navigators in Wild: amazing animals in a changing world. If you'd like to know more you can now head to Museum Times for a podcast interview with Tim Rolfe, Head of MV Studios.

The exhibition design team came up with the Panoramic Navigators as an ingenious alternative to traditional labels for the 770+ specimens on display. With the mounts all the way up the wall, labels would have been impossible to read. Sometimes necessity truly is the mother of invention!

Visitors exploring the displays in Wild using the Panoramic Navigators
Image: Diana Snape
Source: Museum Victoria

You can also check out the Wild virtual exhibition without leaving your chair.

In April the Racing Minister Rob Hulls put out a call to reunite Phar Lap's heart, skeleton and hide to mark the 150th anniversary of anniversary of the Melbourne Cup. His heart, which lives in Canberra at the National Museum, is too fragile to travel. However his skeleton, usually on display at Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, was sturdy enough to make the trip.

Now, after months of planning and packing, it's here! It arrived late last night in two custom-built crates.

Phar Lap's skeleton being escorted up from the loading dock at Melbourne Museum.
Image: Karen Jakubec
Source: Museum Victoria

Of course, we can't be sure it's in there until the crates are opened tomorrow by AQIS, the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service. Until then the crates will sit quietly in the collection store. We can't wait to see his skeleton and hide displayed side by side on Thursday.

The crates containing Phar Lap's skeleton awaiting quarantine inspection.
Image: Karen Jakubec
Source: Museum Victoria

If you want to know more about the skeleton, have a look at Te Papa's wonderful video about its preparation for travel:

Links:

Phar Lap Reunion What's On listing

None of our venues could be called art museums although we collect and display artworks, such as childrens' paintings from the Victorian Bushfires Collection and the Indigenous sculptures of Menagerie. However we're always delighted when visitors interact with us creatively and some wonderful photos, drawings and other pieces of art are the result.

A few months ago the Melbourne Museum Discovery Centre hosted a visiting artist who sketched an African Wild Dog. Recently we received a message from an American artist, Sandy Rodriguez, who has been inspired by our local marine life to create a series of drawings and paintings. Lovely. 

The Striped Pyjama Squid is one of my favourites - a very cute, but very poisonous, little cephalopod.

Striped Pyjama Squid (Sepioloidea lineolata). Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Sandy Rodriguez
Source: Sandy Rodriguez

Have you ever sketched or photographed in the museum? We'd love to see your work!

The eleventh annual Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival finished its national tour at Melbourne Museum last night. It's the fourth year that we've hosted the festival and it finished with a brilliant documentary called Reel Injun about the portrayal of Native American Indians in films.

Trailer courtesy of Rezolution Pictures.

I was moved by the stories of kids growing up on Indian reservations watching cowboys and Indians films in church hall, cheering for the cowboys and not connecting the Indians on the screen with themselves. There moments that had the audience in stiches, too - snippets of non-Indian actors like Burt Reynolds sprayed in 'redface', or the first time anyone bothered to translate the words spoken in dialect by extras in films. Did you know that the headband was largely a Hollywood creation? According to the film, they weren't really worn by Indians; they were used by costume departments to keep the long black wigs on the heads of actors as they tumbled from horses!

Look out for the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival in venues around Australia in 2011.

In late August, Melbourne Museum became the 50th docking site of the Melbourne Bike Share Scheme. There is now a flock of bright blue bikes parked on the plaza's west end near Rathdowne Street.

Aerial view of the Bike Share Scheme docking spot on the Melbourne Museum plaza. The red rectangle indicates the exact site.
Source: Museum Victoria

Demand for the bikes is expected from Carlton residents and tourists visiting the museum and we'll watch with interest to see how they're being used.

Coincidentally the docking station was installed within a week of the launch of our staff bike fleet. It's great to see the rise of bicycles as shared public transport, especially here in Melbourne where the bike paths are good and getting better.   

Have you used a blue Bike Share Scheme bike to visit the museum?