[A guest post from Kathy, one of our brilliant IDC volunteers!] 

Photo: Rodney Start  Source: Museum Victoria

On November 22, 2009, the Immigration Museum will celebrate Melbourne's Lebanese community. The Lebanese Cedar Festival showcases Lebanese culture through traditional music, dance, talks and films. Come along to enjoy roving entertainers, games such as touleh (backgammon) and lebanese coffee and sweets!

The Immigration Discovery Centre has a diverse range of resources focussing on migration and cultural diversity. We at the IDC have been having fun preparing for the Lebanese Festival. Resources include the Lebanese Resource Folder, a range of reference books and an Infosheet (prepared by one of our volunteers) on Lebanese migration to Australia. This contains a list of useful websites.

Infosheets have also been prepared on Dutch, German and Indonesian migration to Australia, with more to come soon...

Volunteers play an important role in the Immigration Discovery Centre, helping with things such as answering queries, preparing InfoSheets, and participating in community celebrations. If you'd like to find out more about volunteering with Museum Victoria, you can get more information here.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Two beautiful Sacred Kingfishers have come into the Discovery Centre in the last few days - sudden and unexplained demises, and both found in local backyards. Their passing won't go unremarked or wasted - they'll go into the ornithology collection, and may be turned into study skins or mounted specimens, for the use of researchers. Artists too, for that matter - we often have illustrators, sculptors and even jewellers coming in to access specimens from our collection for their studies and inspiration.

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

The beautiful plumage of these birds would seem to render them too glamorous for a suburban lifestyle, but in fact, these birds are widely distributed throughout Australia, in all but the most arid zones.

Keep an eye out for a flash of brilliant blue and turquoise in your backyard - you may be lucky enough to see one of these beautiful creatures.

Resident Discovery Centre chameleon Leon did something really weird this morning - he just about doubled his size.

Photo: Nicole Davis  Source: Museum Victoria

We know he can flatten himself out to increase his height to look all tough and menacing to rival males or predators, but this morning, he was both twice his size in height, and width. He looked like he was about to explode. Or that mysteriously overnight he had been replaced by an entirely different, larger animal. His colours were also really, really dark.

We panicked, thinking he was ill, and phoned one of his keepers in the Live Exhibits department and told her that he was big and fat - she immediately asked if he was really dark too. We said yes. She told us not to worry about him exploding - apparently he has been known to do this of a morning; he will stretch himself out and puff himself up to maximise the surface area of his skin so he can absorb as much light as possible to warm himself up - presumably the darker he is the more light he will absorb as well.

So, today we learned yet another interesting thing about chameleons... although, fat and puffy isn't exactly how I'd like to look while sunning myself on the beach...

Photo: Nicole Davis  Source: Museum Victoria

We get a lot of mail coming through this centre - photographs, requests for information, offers to donate items, insects to identify. In recent days, our mailbag has been leavened with some delightful letters from junior fans of the Museum. Here is a selection of our favourites:

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

Kirby gave us some great feedback! Kirby's favourite things in the Museum are the dinosaur bones, followed closely by "the Phar Lap". I can tell you that the various relevant curators and managers were well chuffed, and that copies of this letter occupy pride of place on office walls. Kirby expresses an interest in working at the Museum "when I grow up" - Kirby, judging from the folk we work with, I don't think you need to wait to grow up...it doesn't seem to be a prerequisite of employment around here!

Photo: Siobhan Motherway  Source: Museum Victoria

This batch of letters came from a grade one class in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. Not only does their handwriting put mine to shame, but all letters were carefully dated, politely opened with "Dear Sir or Madam", and signed off with "Yours sincerely". They embellished their letters with beautiful garden drawings, and each included a question. "Why are plants green?" (Chlorophyll - it's a pigment found in most plants that enables them to absorb energy from sunlight) and "What is Victoria's tallest tree, and how tall is it?" (Eucalyptus regnans, or the Mountain Ash, which can grow up to 100m tall!).

Thank you to all of our correspondents, and we look forward to more mailbag excitement.

4 - 11 October was Senior's Week in Victoria, and to celebrate, Discovery Centre at Melbourne Museum offered a series of 'Internet for Seniors' sessions, where seniors had the opportunity to come into the centre for a two-hour session to learn about and practice on those new-fangled computer-machines and that 'information-superhighway' (as one of our distinguished students called it) that is the internet.

Although many came into the sessions with deep concerns, for example that they might break the internet, our seniors came away fom the sessions having proved that its never too late to learn a new skill and with an expanded vocabulary including such new words as 'website', 'email', 'blog', 'laptop' and 'mouse'.

Well, mouse isn't quite a new word, but hopefully if they understood its alternative meaning correctly they won't go home and try and sick the cat onto it...

Photo: Nicole Davis  Source: Museum Victoria