Okay, this roadsign says wallabies but I think they got the silhouette all wrong. :)  This was in Darwin, on the way to East Point to visit the Defence of Darwin Experience and the Darwin Military Museum. First is the Defence of Darwin Experience which is an interactive exhibition/museum.  LadyBug(5) had the camera for a bit and she always takes pictures of the poppies.  This display was in the foyer and provided faces for some of the names inside the museum.  When you enter you are invited to take a little card with a picture and name and find their story inside.  I asked LadyBug to take a picture of her card and this is what ended up on the camera.  🙂 There was a lot to look at here, heaps of information that anyone would be hard-pressed to take in all at once.  It was a pretty contained area so we all wandered around to what interested us and took turns keeping track of the toddler. There were many multimedia experiences.  Maps, videos, audio stories.  This is an interactive table that gives you an aerial view of the harbour.  You can see where the ships were, where the bombs were dropped, and read individual stories from the day. Plenty of memorabilia from the bombings in Darwin.  This is a bomb fragment, there were several around the museum; some large, some small. This gavel and Bible came from the courthouse.  Court was in session when the air-raid sirens sounded.  Everyone headed for the trench out back to take cover.  The trench had been completed the day before.  After the attack there was no need for civil law chambers as most civilians had been evacuated. These came from the MV Neptuna which was sunk during the attack.  Forty-five men died on board.  As the crew prepared to abandon ship the cargo of explosives went off sending smoke and flames 100 metres into the air.  Part of the wreckage still remains in Darwin Harbour.  [This image is from Wikipedia.] This is a Japanese drop tank.  It was an extra fuel tank that helped them fly further, the tank was then dropped after use and was designed to be expendable. I loved this feather painting.  It’s gorgeous and so fragile, it’s amazing it is still around.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.  The ship it portrays is the MV Manunda, known as the hospital ship.  Before the war it had been a passenger liner and thus there were many souvenirs of the ship. This was in the ‘Build Up to War’ section, where you learn about how Darwin prepared for war and the ‘growth of Japan’s aspirations’ in the years before. I remember pointing this out to the kids, if I recall correctly it’s a piece of the underwater telegraph cable that connected Australia to the rest of the world.  It went through Port Darwin and was connected in 1871. In the Bombing of Darwin Experience Gallery they show a 12-minute movie complete with sound and light effects.  It invites you to imagine a peaceful morning suddenly shattered by an attack by 188 Japanese aircraft.  We watched it twice, it was really well done. I found this sign with information about the government of the NT, interesting to me since I’m not familiar with the history.  (Honestly, many Aussies are probably not familiar with the history, either!) Originally the Northern Territory was under the control of South Australia.  That had to do with John Stuart being the first European to explore the area and claiming it for SA.  They were happy to claim it with the success of the Overland Telegraph but not so happy as the NT proved to be unsuccessful in other ways.  The Federation was created in 1901 and SA was finally able to hand over the NT to the Commonwealth Government in 1911.  As of 1978 the NT is self-governed but remains a territory.  Just a few months ago we read news headlines that the NT will become a state in 2018. Of  course there was much more in here than just what appears in my pictures above.  After a good wander around we headed outside to the military museum.  (Next post!)

What a fabulous free museum in Darwin!  We only had a couple of hours to spend at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory but it was such a treat to be able to visit. A talk on Cyclone Tracy had started just minutes before we got there so the first thing we did was pop in there for a listen.  The cyclone hit on Christmas Eve 1974.  The talk was being given by a man who had lived through it and it was so, so interesting to hear him talk of the events of the storm.  He was full of facts and figures as well as anecdotes.  One that stuck with me was that after the cyclone 35,000 people were evacuated in the week following the storm, leaving Darwin with a population of just 10,000.  We lasted nearly through the whole talk but TurboBug (2) was having too much fun playing with the fold up chairs in the auditorium so we had to duck out.  There was much to explore.  The auditorium was near the kids’ room (which didn’t allow photography) so we played there for a bit before moving on.  The main corridor was a treasure trove!  If I hadn’t had kids to chase I could have spent an hour here looking at all the specimens from birds to lizards to shells to crystals.  What an amazing collection! (I know, my pictures are terrible in this museum, it all looks so much better in person.) We watched the video about Sweetheart, a giant croc who they tried to relocate in the late 70s but he died in the process.  He was 5.1m long and weighed 780 kg (1720 lbs).  The museum has an extensive collection of documentation of rock art in the NT.  This one was in the main corridor and was painted by a man who documented many of those sites. I just read on their website that the museum has 1.2 million animal, fossil, rock, and mineral specimens.  That is staggering.  This large room off the main corridor held many of the animal specimens.  There was so much to see in this room! There was an exhibit on Cyclone Tracy, complete with a sound boothwhere you could listen to the sounds of the storm.  Throughout the exhibit you could listen to stories recorded by people who had lived through the storm.  Darwin is considered one of the more modern cities in Australia because it had to be rebuilt after the storm.  Even the trees had to be planted since the cyclone stripped the trees right off the land.  The aerial shots were fascinating.  The pictures compared the area before the cyclone, after the cyclone, and decades later. So it’s called the Museum and Art Gallery, but we didn’t have much time to explore the art before rushing out to make it to a dental appointment.  We found this ‘Mater’ and had a quick walk through the gallery on our way out. LadyBug consistently tells us she wants to be an artist when she grows up, so I asked her to pick her favourite painting for a picture.  As we left we told the kids we would return another day but we never made it back.  The short amount of time we spent there was not enough.