August 2011 - Travel Stripe

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Travel Stripe - August 2011

The National Gallery, Canberra

August 27th 2011 09:03

There’s no better place to wind up a tour of Canberra than the National Gallery. Massive, plain and as impenetrable as a fortress, it is absolutely perfect for its purpose as a storehouse for some of the nation’s most prized and priceless art.

Sculptures on the front lawn of the National Gallery

Within the National Gallery’s solid white walls are the expected national treasures, like the breathtaking aboriginal installation just inside the entrance and the legendary Sydney Nolan Ned Kelly series. There are also some unexpected international treasures, like Monet’s Les Nympheas, Matisse’s Jazz, Leger’s Les Trapezistes, Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Tins and Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.

Sculpture on shores of Lake Burley Griffin

Surrounding the National Gallery is a magnificent Sculpture Garden. There’s a silver ball and a cluster of pears on the front lawn. A huge wire apple hangs suspended from a wall. Around the back, on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin, great chunks of metal and wood are strewn almost carelessly, across clearings and among the trees. In a secluded corner lines of sculptured heads float on the surface of a pond.

Heads on a pond - The Indonesian Memorial

Hours, days, perhaps weeks, maybe months and even years might easily be lost here.

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Posted By: Patricia - Category: No Category

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The Museum of Australian Democracy, Canberra

August 22nd 2011 05:54

Before the New Parliament House there was the Old Parliament House.

The House of Representatives, Old Parliament House

Designed by John Smith Murdoch, the Old Parliament House is an example of the “stripped” Classical style – symetrical and balanced but without flourishes like pillars and pediments - which was commonly used for government buildings in Canberra during the 1920s and 1930s. It began operation on 9 May 1927, as a temporary base for the Commonwealth Parliament after its relocation from Melbourne to the new capital. It served for sixty one years, until finally, in 1988, the New Parliament House was opened.

These days Old Parliament House is home to the Museum of Australian Democracy – one of the country’s most fascinating museums.

The building itself is a monument to its era, with frosted glass panes in doors, wooden signs with gold lettering ghosted in green and pointing gloved hands, dark, narrow wood-paneled corridors and the faint, but unmistakable, scent of a time when smoking indoors was perfectly fine. Clichés like “if only these walls could talk” spring readily to mind.

Our group was greeted at the front door by a guide and taken to a spacious ground floor room, once probably some kind of common room or cafe but now a bright, light-filled classroom. The thirty students were divided into groups and each was given a coloured box. Inside each box were descriptions of the roles they were to play in an enactment of the landmark question of the Franklin Dam. There were rudimentary costumes, scripts and artefacts like letters, newspaper articles and banners. Once hydro workers, protesters, representatives from the tourist industry, police and politicians were “in character” it was off to the House of Representatives to debate the issue.

The rest as they say is history!

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Posted By: Patricia - Category: No Category

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Learn about elections at Canberra's Australian Electoral Commission

August 14th 2011 05:01

Just a stone’s throw from the New Parliament House, is the Australian Electoral Commission. This is the place that masterminds and organises the process that puts Australian Politicians in their places in Parliament. You wouldn’t visit it for the fine architecture, or for a tour of its labyrinth of offices or for a chat with its large force of functionaries. You probably couldn’t! Most of it has a locked down, closed off, “secret electioneers business” air about it.

The camp at Canberra

However, if you’re a twelve-year-old future voter, a visit to the Australian Electoral Commission’s Education Centre is well worthwhile.

A tour begins in the theatrette, with a DVD on the history of elections in Australia, from the time when only landowners could vote, until the referendum in 1967 which, officially and nationally, extended the vote to all aboriginals and effected universal suffrage.

Then it’s off to the next room to learn all about the Who? Why? How?, Where? and When of the electoral process, at a series of brightly colour-coded activity stations.

The culmination of the programme is a mock election with all the paraphernalia - polling booth ballot box, ballot paper and tally board. The candidates are four students (dubbed apples, pears, peaches and bananas) and the guards, scrutineers, vote-counters and voters are the remaining twenty-six. After much juggling of the fruits, much recounting and redistributing of votes, we all get the principles of preferences and absolute majority – I think!

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Posted By: Patricia - Category: No Category

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The High Court of Australia, Canberra

August 8th 2011 21:47

The High Court of Australia is a building where the form truly reflects the function. It is 40 metres tall with a facade of gleaming white concrete and great inscrutable glass panels. It is a building which speaks of power and authority. And well it might. This is the place where, legally speaking, the buck stops.