The Melbourne Museum: Aboriginals and a Rubik’s Cube
The Melbourne Museum is no exception to our trend of asymmetrical and interesting architecture. The main entrance of the building features a large, open glass front that is tilted slightly forward, and on the back-end, a wing of the museum looks exactly like a giant, colorful cube stuck straight in the ground. I felt a sudden urge to go over and start shifting those squares around.
The museum is home to a number of exhibits that teach about the settlement and development of Southern Australia, and of the city of Melbourne in particular. The exhibition titled “First Peoples” explores the culture of aboriginals and how they were impacted by the arrival of settlers from England. Surprisingly, what I learned sounded like a very familiar story. Australia and the surrounding islands were dominated by hundreds of thousands of small tribes with nature-based cultures and spirit-oriented religion. The white man came in and took over, and many of the aboriginals died, while others adapted to the cultures of the new arrivals. I haven’t studied United States history since eleventh grade, but I did watch Pocahontas recently.
A difference in the dates of this invasion, however, creates a significant difference in the preservation of aboriginal lifestyle and heritage. Civilizations that modeled the European style did not really begin to flourish until the late 1800s. Therefore, the white, European influence, though forceful at first, did not quite have the same amount of time to truly deplete the aboriginal population the way European domination did in America a couple of centuries earlier.
Preservation of land and culture became a priority of the state while there was still what to be saved. Looking at some of these artifacts, like canoes and beaded jewelry, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Native American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Many of the designs and textures shared the same rich, organic feel. It seems that England had a thing for earthy civilizations.
To consider the distance between America and Australia while noticing these similarities is quite phenomenal. Here I am Whatsapping back home all the time and marveling at how small communication techonology has made the world, when in reality it seems like distant cultures had commonalities in nature-appreciation the whole time.
Just something to think about…