Events and Programs

So, it’s not as big or as flashy as CSIRAC (1949), but the real star of last week’s Smart Bar event here in the Discovery Centre was our Amstrad Portable Personal Computing device (1987).

Whilst CSIRAC has the weight of history, ground-breaking science, and several good-sized African elephants behind it, the Amstrad spoke to some more personal nostalgia for many of our visitors – sort of the difference between visiting St Paul’s Cathedral and going back to your primary school.

Spec  for spec, though, the Amstrad does outperform its big brother, inspiring this mini-comic for the #SmartBar hashtag!

Amstrad vs CSIRAC
Image: Siobhan Motherway
Source: Museum Victoria  

Just for fun, compare CSIRAC’s specs with this website’s run down on the Amstrad and then think about the cheapest wee netbook available at the local discount shop.

Obviously, CSIRAC occupies 40sqm, whereas the Amstrad comes under the category of “luggable” – it doesn’t compare to the power or portability of the phone in your jeans pocket, but at least you could haul it around one-handed whilst looking supercool – only those looking very closely would see the veins standing out and the sweat beading on your forehead.

We couldn’t match CSIRAC’s music, though, coaxing only a recalcitrant BEEP! out of the Amstrad when we asked it to do something outside of its parameters. Like, tell us the contents of the disk in the B: drive, apparently. Nevertheless, the sight of the grey plastic shell, green screen and blinking old-school DOS cursor had dozens of visitors crowding around the desk, reminiscing about their own first computers and exploits on local BBSs.

And now I’ll leave you with the most ambitious or optimistic attempt to put the Amstrad to use on the Smart Bar evening. Sorry, sir; apparently it does have an internal modem, but 2400bps and ASCII will only get you so far.

A valiant effort by a visitor to get the Amstrad to connect to the internet
Image: Siobhan Motherway
Source: Museum Victoria  

All I want for Christmas is an update on the Android field guide!

Well – drumroll – it's here!

Last Friday, we were very proud that Senator The Hon Don Farrell, Minister for Science and Research and Minister Assisting for Tourism, was able to join us at Melbourne Museum to celebrate this significant milestone. 

  Field Guide apps team pose with Minister Farrell: Simon Sherrin, Jo Taylor, Ely Wallis, Ajay Ranipeta, Minister Farrell, Blair Patullo (absent: Nicole Kearney, Michael Mason).
Image: Jon Augier
Source: Museum Victoria  

Development of the Android version is part of a wider project, funded by the Australian Government under the Inspiring Australia, Unlocking Australia's Potential scheme, where we are working with museums around the country to deliver field guide apps for all States and Territories.

The MV Field Guide app is now available through Google Play for Android devices – including tablets, phablets and phones. And it's free.

The MV Field Guide home screen (shown here on a Nexus 7)
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria  

The app contains over 730 Victorian animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, fishes and marine and freshwater invertebrates. Each detailed description includes stunning images, distribution maps, endangered status and animal sounds (for birds, frogs and other noisy critters).

The Helmeted Honeyeater is Victoria's bird emblem (shown here on a Nexus 7)
Image: Museum Victoria
Source: Museum Victoria

Apple device users will be able to download an updated iOS version in the coming weeks. The new version represents a significant upgrade to the existing iOS app.

Additions to the new Android app (and coming soon for Apple devices) include:

• Over 30 new species (many added as a result of user requests), including the Great White Shark, the Giant Gippsland Earthworm and Victoria's bird emblem, the Helmeted Honeyeater
• New marine mammals: seals, dolphins, whales
• 75 new bird calls, including the Powerful Owl, the Little Penguin, the Tawny Frogmouth, the Sacred Kingfisher and the Red-tailed Black Cockatoo
• The complete set of frog calls
• The updated Victorian Endangered Status for all vertebrate species (bringing the app in line with the DSE's 2013 Advisory List for Threatened Vertebrate Fauna)

Elizabeth is a Programs Officer at the Immigration Museum

These school holidays the Immigration Museum’s Easter Extravaganza program explores Easter traditions from around the world – from Australia to Germany, Russia, Bermuda and beyond.

Adrienne Leith surrounded by her collection of Easter egg wrappers
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria

Museum Victoria's Adrienne Leith has been creating her own Easter traditions since the mid-1960s, when she began saving the colourful foil from her Easter eggs. "As a child," Adrienne says, "the most treasured things I owned were Easter wrappers. My birthday is just after Easter, so I would be given special ones every year." Her collection spans almost 50 years with over 350 pieces, which are carefully catalogued in two leather scrapbooks. Adrienne only collects wrappers from eggs that have been given to her and she flattens all her wrappers by hand.

Easter Egg Tree at Immigration Museum
Image: Elizabeth Downey
Source: Museum Victoria

Children can bring along their own Easter egg wrappers to the Immigration Museum's school holiday program, using them to decorate paper or pompom Easter eggs to hang on our Ostereierbaum or Easter egg tree. In Germany, the tradition to decorate the branches of trees and bushes with eggs for Easter is centuries old, with eggs of many styles and from different countries represented.

Get wrapped up in a Babushka basket.
Image: Benjamin Healley
Source: Museum Victoria

The sharing of eggs is a common practice during spring celebrations such as Easter, though they haven’t always been colourful or made of chocolate.  Traditionally the first thing to be eaten at a Russian Easter feast is an egg. Shared by the whole family, it is cut into equal pieces and given to everyone at the table. It is said that the egg contains happiness for the entire year, so everyone takes a share.

In Bermuda, people of all ages make and fly beautiful, colourful kites with wonderful geometric designs at Easter.  There is said to be a special religious significance in Bermuda to kite flying that started on Good Friday during Easter, when a teacher had difficulty explaining the Christian religious concept of Jesus' ascension to heaven to his Sunday school class

Inspired by these customs, hop into the Immigration Museum these school holidays to make your own Bermuda kite, Babushka baskets or paper and pompom eggs for our German Easter Egg tree.

See our Autumn School Holiday Program webpage for more details.

Dr Robin Hirst joined the Museum in 1981 to manage the H V McKay Melbourne Planetarium. He was given the task of leading the development of the Exhibitions and Programs for Scienceworks. He is now Director of Collections, Research and Exhibitions at Museum Victoria.

The morning of 28 March 1992 was one the weary crew had worked towards for five years. We hoped that people would venture deep into the heart of industrial Spotswood to appreciate the new kid on the block, Scienceworks, our science and technology centre.

Aerial view of construction site of Scienceworks, Spotswood, in 1991. (MM 122474)
Source: Museum Victoria

Scienceworks building under construction, circa 1991. (MM 122505)
Source: Museum Victoria  

The sight of long queues of excited families waiting for the doors to open made me feel both elated and apprehensive. This was the day we were to hand our creation to the public for their use and delight. This was the day for the locals to be admitted free of charge as a test run. When the doors opened that morning the crowd ran in. Like bargain hunters at a Myer sale, each vied to be the first at every exhibit.

With Boyce Pizzey, the Director of Science and Technology, we had conceived Scienceworks, designed the building, installed the exhibitions and planned how the place would operate. We spent many an hour in smoke-filled rooms challenging and being challenged. We crafted a new visitor-centric experience for families and school children. We thought it would work, but we didn’t know. It was so new and seemed so far from the city.

Left to right: Geoff Harrison, Project Manager, Boyce Pizzey and Robin Hirst at Scienceworks, 1991. The Pumping Station is visible in the background.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The night before, we had the official opening with still much left to do at the crack of dawn the next day to be ready for the public.

Richard Glover installing a display of bicycles at Scienceworks in 1992. (MM 133542)
Source: Museum Victoria  

Two views of crowds in the Amphitheatre at Scienceworks on the opening day, 28 March 1992 (MM 135043, MM 133479)
Source: Museum Victoria

Playground, Scienceworks opening weekend, 28 March 1992.
Source: Museum Victoria  

The exhibits did suffer that day and many nocturnal emergency repairs were carried out. The crowds the day after were even bigger. In many ways Scienceworks has continued the way it began very much loved.

As Scienceworks turns 21 we can feel proud of what we gave birth to. Happy birthday.

Links:

Scienceworks Heritage Collection on Collections Online

Alex Price is a Programs Officer at the Immigration Museum. She has a passion for Cultural Diversity education and Early Learning.

In celebration of Cultural Diversity Week, the Immigration Museum Education and Community Programs team took the In-Flight installation to the Royal Children’s Hospital on Tuesday 19 March 2013.

Originally part of the Another Country artist in residence series held at Immigration Museum, In-Flight is an installation conceived by Filipino-born and Brisbane-based artists Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan.  The installation references a transitional place of leave-taking and homecoming and due to popular demand, it has continued to grow in the second floor foyer of the Immigration Museum.

In-Flight at the Immigration Museum
Image: Rodney Start
Source: Museum Victoria

Visitors are invited to rummage through recycled plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, felt, string, icy-pole sticks and much more to gather materials to make a mini aeroplane. Once completed, the planes are taken home or added to the large overhead structure. Constructions range from conventional bi-planes to more creative interpretations of the most common form of transport used to immigrate today.

The Education Institute of the Royal Children’s Hospital invited the Immigration Museum to partner with them during Cultural Diversity Week by setting up a smaller scale version of the installation in their ‘Main Street.’ 

I assisted and spent a day at the hospital meeting families and encouraging them to participate. We brought two big containers of assorted materials, scissors, elastic and string but no stickytape or glue were allowed, in keeping with the original concept to encourage creative thinking.

In-Flight at the Royal Children’s Hospital
Image: Alex Price

Children who created aeroplanes included those visiting outpatient clinics as well as long term patients who came down from the wards. Some spent over an hour making planes, assisted by their relatives who had come to visit, and the hospital teachers.  Five children from the Early Learning Centre also joined in and departed excitedly with their creations.

In-Flight at the Royal Children’s Hospital
Image: Alex Price

Visitors to the hospital were encouraged to also come along to the Immigration Museum and participate in the larger In- Flight installation, an ongoing and ever-changing activity.

Links:

In-flight at the Immigration Museum

Dr J. Patrick Greene is the CEO of Museum Victoria.

At the 2002 European Museum of the Year awards I described the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a "demonstration of the indomitable human spirit".

Thanks to sheer dedication and spirit of its staff members, the Museum had survived a chaotic decade of conflict and destruction. Located in Sarajevo, the Museum was involved in many military operations over the course of the conflict and suffered significant structural losses from intensive bombing. Despite having no roof or heating the staff continued to stand by their institution, opening the Museum for a Museum Day while the war raged on around it. Scientists, security guards, curators all took turns standing guard outside the Museum during the conflict and thanks to their gallant effort only 10 per cent of the objects in the Museum's collection were damaged.

A cello player in the partially destroyed National Library, Sarajevo during the war in 1992. The cellist is local musician Vedran Smailović, who often came to play for free at different funerals during the siege despite the fact that funerals were often targetted by Serb forces.
Image: Mikhail Evstafiev
Source: CC BY-SA 3.0 via wikipedia.org  

In 2013, the Museum is again under threat. Today marks the six month anniversary of the closure of the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina after 124 years of existence. Despite the Museum housing objects of national and international significance, in 2012 wooden planks were nailed over its doors after political debate regarding the funding of national institutions could not be resolved.

The doors of the closed National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Image: Oslobodjenje
Source: http://www.cultureshutdown.net/  

In response, cultural institutions across the world have joined together in order to draw awareness of this crisis by symbolically closing off an object on display for three days culminating in the global Day of Museum Solidarity today. I am very proud that Museum Victoria could take part in this action by symbolically 'taping off' an object on the ground floor of the Immigration Museum. The object being 'taped off' is a model double spiral staircase crafted from Brazilwood by Heinrich Munzel in Brazil between 1835 and 1850. This action is now part of a virtual exhibition showing different institutions' solidarity acts from across the globe including the Museum of Contemporary Arts (NSW), Museum of Modern Art Chicago (USA) and the Oslo Museum (Norway).

To visit the virtual exhibition or find out more about the global Day of Museum Solidarity head over to the Culture Shutdown website.

Taped off Model Staircase by Heinrich Munzel at the Immigration Museum.
Image: Emily Kocaj
Source: Museum Victoria