Australian Museum
Heard of a 'wisdom of giant wombats'? Did you know their poo was cube shaped? That's because you haven't been to the latest exhibition at the Australian Museum.
By Alex Chidzey
Life and death in the Antarctic
Welcome to the land of the Giant Wombat, the last habitat of the Demon Duck of Doom, a place where courting cuttlefish bob side by side and the deadliest critter in the house is smaller than the nail on your pinkie finger.
And you thought museums were boring!
This week Time Out ducked under the scaffolding to check out Surviving Australia, the brand spanking new exhibition opening this Saturday at the Australian Museum.
Curator Elizabeth Cowell is proud as punch. Through a six room maze of stuffed, pinned and live displays, lurk new acquisitions, new technologies and old menageries reborn.
"It's about Australia - its fauna and environment and how they adapted to over time," says Cowell. "We've worked hard to ensure people of all ages discover new and interesting things, because there are so many surprising things about animals' behaviour in this harsh country - that's what revealing."
Museums are doing it tough trying to shake the image of being geriatric haunts or meeting places for 50 year old virgin stamp-collectors. Curators like Cowell feel the pressure to come up with sexy shows that dazzle on every level - a tall ask when you're dealing with old bones and stuffed animals.
But Surviving Australia is unique. The bowerbird display is designed by blockbuster Australian artist Fiona Hall, replete with flickering blue screen and the entire exhibition is designed as a fast flow through small spaces packed with visual Viagra and so much aural stimulation you forget to yawn.
Each pond of fauna is a slick and thought-provoking habitat in itself, all exploring impirtant themes - from the aquatic life of Australia's vast blue edges to the backyard beasties in Sydney's inner and outer suburbs. Themed lighting, soundscapes and digital projections flicker like eyes in the night.
One surefire highlight is a touchscreen that shows how rising water levels might affect your suburb - at 40 metres the island of Bankstown would be prime real estate, (because nothing else would be left!) and you could sit on the road of the Harbour Bridge and wet your toes. Spooky stuff.
Other cool things sure to draw ‘Wows!' include the skull of the horned turtle and a complete Diprotodon skeleton aka Giant Wombat - they travelled in ‘wisdoms' and excreted cubed pooh - and other vanished Aussie giants like the Demon Duck of Doom, Donald's 300-kilo flesh-eating ancestor.
During Time Out's infiltration, the finishing touches were still being applied to several exhibits - a stuffed dingo sat forlornly in the projection room waiting for a dais - and the museum's two full time taxidermists (who worked for a staggering10 months on this exhibition) were sweating for their pay packets, stuffing new specimens on site or retouching golden oldies by the forestful.
There are hundreds of them, thousands, if you include the 50 different species of flies specially bred from pupae on the premises and then individually speared to make up the words "Sci-fly" by scientist Louise Kampen. "I couldn't even tell you how many there are... except to say the letter "I" has 129 - you can extrapolate the rest," she laughs.
Kids in particular will lap up sections like Dangerous Australians which contains the ten deadliest snakes in the world, all natives of the sunburnt country. There's also a wailing wall - you'll wail when you see "extreme magnification" of funnelweb spider fangs, fire ant mandibles and tick probosci.
Woven throughout is a sense of our planet's fragility, a fact driven home by the ‘In Memoriam' plaques - gorgeous illustrations lament the loss of the broad-faced potoroo, the pig-footed bandicoot and long tailed hopping mouse - while warning of beasties under threat from drained wetlands and felled forests. "The message is very subtle at times, because we're not trying to brow-beat people," says Cowell, "but we do want people to enjoy the beauty of the environment and wonder aloud at the animals - maybe by doing so they'll
protect those that are left."
Surviving Australia starts on 28 June.