Photo: Philip Thiel Source: Museum Victoria
The collections of Museum Victoria partly depend on donations received from members of the public, and generous Victorians are often seen visiting the Discovery Centre with offers of all sorts of things - owls, rocks, shoes, skulls... It's one of the nicest parts of our work, here, getting to see these curious objects, and helping possible donors make contact with our curators whose job it is to decide if they will become public property.
This morning at the Immigration Discovery Centre a couple showed me a beautiful tablecloth they'd received as a wedding gift in 1964. The groom's sisters had sent the hand-embroidered cloth from Slovenia to Australia along the same route that he himself had travelled fourteen years previously; they'd done the needlework themselves.
Photo: Philip Thiel Source: Museum Victoria
The tablecloth got me and the visitors talking about life in Melbourne back in the '50s. The woman said: "it was a different place, then." Her husband added: "they needed a hell of a lot of interpreters."
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