Museum Day in Sydney

I love that most museums in New Zealand and Australia are free. Though it was another beautiful day, I spent the rest of it popping in and out of museums.

First up was The Rocks Discovery Museum. Located in The Rocks district, this museum is housed in a former stone home. It is small and quaint. It also covers a lot of history from pre-European days to the present day. Much of it is told through videos of locals and experts in local history sharing stories. The main focus is from their inmate to immigration days, which is still a lot of history.

The ceilings are low. The stairs are wonky. It is subdivided into five rooms, plus an entrance room. There are artifacts retrieved from The Big Dig in glass cases without much context given. 

Fun hands-on activity

Also near Circular Quay is the Museum of Contemporary Art. A complete contrast to the last museum, the MCA has 30 foot ceilings and vast spaces. The first room is an exhibit on sound, though oddly everyone was silent. We were encouraged to touch everything except the electrical equipment. I left needing an explanation. 

I didn't feel a connection in that museum, so I left even more grateful I didn't have to pay for the experience.

Quick lunch at Betty's Burgers because even though I try to stay away from chains, I knew it would be my quickest cheapest option in the tourist district, and the bright 1950's décor was eye catching.

Walked to the UNESCO site Hyde Park Barracks Museum, which was just as amazing as I had read about in a blog post. It, too, was free, but would have been worth paying for. As you are about to enter you are encouraged to cross the courtyard and pick up an audio tour. I'm not usually a fan of audio tours, but decided to give this one a go. It uses voices to tell about different experiences. I learned on that morning's walking tour, this was built by convicts for them to live in because Sydney was becoming too crowded and they realized the inmates needed some controls. Prior to this, they were allowed to roam around because there was no where for them to go, and very few places to get into trouble. I learned on the tour fifty years later it became an immigration depot. It seems Australian history is similar to American history, just on a faster scale.

Stories of convicts

Where they slept

Things they brought with them

The biggest visual was the sleeping room filled with hammocks close to each other. Some men slept beneath the hammocks with the rats.

Men would bribe the guards to be allowed to scale the walls and get out at night to help fuel the local "economy." When they arrived they were issued two shirts with their initials on them to cut down on stealing. On laundry day they put the wet shirt on while washing the other to discourage stealing.

The audio had some glitches. You had to stand still to hear the story. Moving a couple of feet away to look at the item from a different angle often stopped the story, or even changed to a different story. 

As I handed in my headset, I had a great chat with someone on the way out and mentioned this. She said they thought about having footprints of where to stand, but was afraid that would detract too much from the aura. They renovated the museum in 2019. Then they were open, closed, open, etc. through the pandemic. They used to charge $24 a person ($15.50 USD), then they lowered it by half to either $12 or $12.50. They just received word that the museums will be free another four years. The government recognizes the benefit. More families, especially grandparents and little ones, are going to the museums, which means a generation is growing up being exposed to museums.

I returned to Hyde Park to walk through St. Mary's. It rivals European cathedrals for its scale. 

The inside

Live rose in Mary's hand

Earlier in the day I stopped inside the Australia Museum -- the oldest museum in Australia to see if it was worth a visit. Deeming it needing more time, I stopped inside to study their 200 Treasures in the stunningly restored Westpac Long Gallery.

The rest of the museum was like most natural history museums in the world -- skeletons and creepy taxidermic examples of animals. I did notice a map showing the hundreds of different indigenous tribes in Australia. This brought home the point someone made earlier in our trip about the difference between New Zealand and Australia when it comes to incorporating both languages and cultures into daily life -- New Zealand only has the Maori culture, whereas Australia and the United States have many. How do you do that without insulting other native nations?

After the museums closed at 5 pm I walked to the LEGO Store I thought was closest to the Central Business District. Google Maps said it was 25 minutes away via mass transit, or 34 minutes walking. I opted for walking rather than figuring out all the transfers. The path took me through a market that felt sad, like all of its good days were behind it and it would never ever be cheerful again. Most of the stalls were closed for the day, and the ones still open seemed to sell items that fell off the back of a truck. (I returned a couple of days later to see if the mood was better earlier in the day. The answer was a little bit, but only a little bit.) The path took me through Chinatown and way off the tourist path leading me to an alleyway between a parking garage and a warehouse-like building. I was most grateful it was still daylight.

In Melbourne we had issues with the GPS in Google Maps getting confused as the signals bounced between buildings. Thinking it was something like that, I walked around until I found a small entrance to what I thought was a small mall. Inside was a four story building filled with every type of store imaginable including an Aldi and a K-Mart, plus a basic food court. Yes, there was a LEGO store. I took a couple of pictures and left.

Next to the LEGO store was one with Disneyland
merchandise

  

Once again my options to go back to the room were 35 minutes walking vs. 25 minutes via mass transit. When I couldn't even figure out where to catch the first bus, I decided to walk. Along the way I did take out, which I ended up eating cold 40 minutes later. It was tasty, but still felt like a dining fail. Had a quiet night in the room texting Don and watching Netflix.