[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.

Back in April this year the Museum ran a children's activity celebrating the launch of the new Dinosaur Walk exhibition where kids could make their very own dinosaur masks. Discovery Centre staff member Jo was particularly impressed with this activity and had a go herself - her results are well-documented in my earlier post, Bad-Jo-Jo-A-Saurus.

As the mask-making activity went down so well with both Jo and the kids, a similar activity (among many others) was developed for the recent winter school holidays to celebrate the opening of the blockbuster Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition A Day in Pompeii, where kids were able to construct their own Roman gladiator helmets.

Once again, the activity proved popular with both the kids and the staff - witness below Discovery Centre volunteer staff member Susan, eagerly awaiting the thumbs-up or thumbs-down from the Emperor...

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

With a mounting collection of rocks and minerals on the Discovery Centre enquiry shelves awaiting identification, Museum Victoria geologists Bill (below left) and Dermot (below right) paid us a visit to impart some of their rock-solid (hilarious pun by me) wisdom...

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

Now, change of scene for a moment - earlier in the week, one of the Discovery Centre volunteers was kind enough to bring in some tasty snacks for us, including cheese and biscuits, dried apricots, almonds, and also some special chocolates... these chocolates were covered in a sugar coating and shaped and coloured to resemble pebbles. Novel and tasty.

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

Being the wacky funsters that we are, we thought we'd offer up a couple of these rock-chocolates to Bill and Dermot for "identification".

After weighing, and inspecting, and consulting with each other, and mumbling something about garden variety river pebbles, Jo took the identification process into her own hands and bit the "rock" in half.

After a lot of "ha ha's" and "very funny's", the parting message from our expert geologists was "don't tell my colleagues about this!"

So I decided to post it on the web...

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

The usual sigh of relief at the Immigration Discovery Centre, this morning, when Maria walked in for her weekly shift of volunteering. We love her. Pencils get sharpened, books get reshelved, visitors are given expert help with their enquiries. I still remember the time when Maria and I welcomed a whole class of adult researchers to the IDC, each with a project on a different group of migrants to Victoria - never before had there been so much high-speed photocopying, and never before had I witnessed a volunteer displaying such poise. Today she's creating research tools about Victoria's Turkish community, with one eye on the computer screen and another on the door - "can I help you?"