Australia Museum

Walking into this museum reminded me of the Field Museum in Chicago, because the first item I saw hanging above my head was a skeleton of a whale. Dinosaurs and other skeleton types were all over the museum which was interesting to compare to what I had learned as a young student back home. Getting the small guided tour of the indigenous aboriginal people was wonderful and provided me with even more information that I would not have gotten otherwise. It was even better that the guide was of aboriginal decent and had a passion for what she was telling us; she was able to provide information that was not printed on any of the tabs describing the artifacts. I was not totally aware of that the aboriginal people were not considered citizens until 1967, this appalled me because they were here [in Australia] way before the European citizens who came. This museum seemed to provide a lot more information about the spirituality of the aboriginal people as a whole, where many of the other museums we have visited focused more on the aboriginal people as a group and what was taken and given back to them. The dream paintings, which reminded me of dream catchers, seemed to tell a story and were told from many different perspectives, but came from the same person. The rainbow serpent connected the dreaming tracks of people and was a large part of the culture, which helped to keep record of different events. There was so much artwork that was created by the aboriginal people. My favourite was created by artist Gordon Syrons in 1978, entitled Judgement by his Peers, it depicts the trial of a white man with a completely black courtroom. This was exactly how the aboriginal people were treated when they were on trial for something, except they would have had a completely white courtroom. It was interesting to see the way the artist took to get his point across about how unfair the judgment trial was towards the aboriginal people. But much of the artwork created today is made with a more contemporary setting. This has been debated by many aboriginals about being a good element or bad element to what the aboriginal children are learning about their culture. I found it interesting that some of the elders of the aboriginal community found the more modern paintings offensive, but also saw where they were coming from because they want to keep the tradition of the culture alive. It really stuck me that there were two different laws/lores that the aboriginal people had to abide by; the first law being that of the white people and the second lore being that of the aboriginal people. It was interesting to see how far a lesson could be taken, death could be the outcome.