The National Museum of Australia, Canberra
July 24th 2011 03:21
The big, bold, bright National Museum of Australia sits on the edge of the lake, breaking the balance of Walter Burley Griffin’s art deco city, the decorous white of the New Parliament building and muted green of the landscape, with its unruly lines. From a distance it’s an attention-grabbing architectural interloper. Up close, from outside, it’s overwhelming. Inside it’s magical.
At the National Museum of Australia you can dip into the past and find fascinating (and minute) details like the origin of the “furphy”. You dance through the present (literally) following the moves of young,urban aboriginals. You can design your dream space-craft, don three-d glasses and watch it negotiate the 22nd century freeways in K Space’s theatrette.
But the best and most beautiful space at the National Museum of Australia is the Garden Of Australian Dreams. The gallery brochure describes it as a “rich landscape of symbols and meanings drawn from Australian life”. A giant map spreads across the surface of the garden and under the Museum building, bringing together a conventional land map as well maps of aboriginal boundaries, vegetation, geology, roads and electorates. The broad yellow line which intersects the area represents the line devised by the Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1494, to divide the globe into Portuguese and Spanish territories. Red and white poles represent the way that the early surveyors read the Australian landscape. A walk-in camera obsura helps visitors to interpret the garden. The bush is represented by a stand of gums. The rudimentary white “Dream House” represents the built environment of Australia while the gnome perched on an outside ledge is the “Antipodean” that Europeans of the Middle Ages imagined lived in the mythical land down under.
Always available to help you and answer any questions on the National Museum of Australia, is a large, well informed, endlessly gracious, multi-cultural and multi-lingual retinue of guides.
The Garden of Australian Dreams
At the National Museum of Australia you can dip into the past and find fascinating (and minute) details like the origin of the “furphy”. You dance through the present (literally) following the moves of young,urban aboriginals. You can design your dream space-craft, don three-d glasses and watch it negotiate the 22nd century freeways in K Space’s theatrette.
The Garden of Australian Dreams
But the best and most beautiful space at the National Museum of Australia is the Garden Of Australian Dreams. The gallery brochure describes it as a “rich landscape of symbols and meanings drawn from Australian life”. A giant map spreads across the surface of the garden and under the Museum building, bringing together a conventional land map as well maps of aboriginal boundaries, vegetation, geology, roads and electorates. The broad yellow line which intersects the area represents the line devised by the Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1494, to divide the globe into Portuguese and Spanish territories. Red and white poles represent the way that the early surveyors read the Australian landscape. A walk-in camera obsura helps visitors to interpret the garden. The bush is represented by a stand of gums. The rudimentary white “Dream House” represents the built environment of Australia while the gnome perched on an outside ledge is the “Antipodean” that Europeans of the Middle Ages imagined lived in the mythical land down under.
Always available to help you and answer any questions on the National Museum of Australia, is a large, well informed, endlessly gracious, multi-cultural and multi-lingual retinue of guides.
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