Photo: Elizabeth Kisler  Source: Elizabeth Kisler

This morning a visitor to the Immigration Discovery Centre came in with photographs of floor tiles, ready to talk about the floors she'd visited in Victoria and around the world, including the above example from a temple in Singapore. She was fascinated by the tiles in the "Long Room" of Immigration Museum's own building, Old Customs House, which have been painstakingly and beautifully restored. So we chatted about tiles for a while, locating useful resources on the subject, and comparing colour schemes. Apparently green was in fashion, once, but only very briefly.

People ask about all sorts of things at the Immigration Discovery Centre, including its columns. "What's this stuff?" asked one visitor from Perth, touching the dark stone. So we learnt about bluestone together, researching the quarries that sprang up to the north of Melbourne in the first years of European settlement, learning that the material was sought after for prisons, cathedrals and cobblestones. "Oh look," I enthused, "they used it for the Carlton Receiving House for the Insane - and Pentridge!" A moment of silence; we looked at the walls. 

One of the great things about working in the Discovery Centre is that we can be asked a question on just about anything relating to (or not, as the case may be) the Museum’s collections and areas of research.

When we get questions that we consider particularly interesting, we like to publish them on our website as the Question of the Week on the assumption that other folk will find them as interesting as we did.

But then we also get the odd question that wildly misses the mark – certainly not fit to be called a Question of the Week, but which certainly deserves some attention. Our favourite so far is the request to use Phar Lap as a prop in a high school history presentation; but we have a new contender in the request for DC staff to confirm that the Museum is built to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark…

Melbourne Museum is one of the most modern and architecturally creative buildings around, so this is probably unlikely, but there’s a floorplan below for you to decide for yourselves. Although, not so sure about the Royal Exhibition Building…

(Besides, how would Noah have gone with the Evolution Gallery, I wonder?)