dah-win

After my morning stroll around Darwin, I can say with much confidence that this city is really boring. I see a cyclone-proof church, the wharf, WWII pictures of Darwin being bombed, and the Supreme Court and Milky Way mosaic inside. Also some painted big sticks and photos of be-wigged old white men justices. The Darwin library looks promising, but the exibit on parasites that I really want to see has not opened yet.

I have a fancy salad (made by me!) for lunch and another soft serve from the little Mc Donalds boy.

I take a bus to the Northern Territory museum, and boy was this museum worth the free admission! First of all, it is blessedly air-conditioned. Second of all, they checked my backpack into a locker (free of charge), so I got to wander around with nothing but a floorplan. And lastly, this museum HAS IT ALL.

The first gallery was about Aboriginals and Aboriginal art. Even though I read all about it in Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country, I was still flaberghasted to read that humans migrated to Australia via Indonesia over 100,000 years ago – at the time of homo erectus. This means that the people in Africa and Asia and Australia evolved into Homo Sapiens and modern humans AT THE SAME TIME, INDEPENDENTLY. Like two strains that developed the same brain, by themselves.

I also looked at some line art and dot art. The Aboriginal dot art doesn't excite me at all, but I do like the Northern Territory style of cross hatching line drawings. Lots of browns and reds and yellow and white. Wallabies and snakes and geometric patterns. The Larakie people don't bury their dead, they put the bones into a “bone coffin,” a cylindrical decorated totem that sticks up from the ground. These bone coffins are up to 7 feet tall, and when grouped together, look like a painted pygmy forest.

The Larakie have another belief about when children die. The child's bones are kept in a mini bone coffin in a woven pouch about the size of a hardback book. And the grieving mother wears this bone coffin around her neck until she gives birth to a new child. The new baby is believed to be the other child reincarnated, and given the same name. The mother can discard the old bones and the new child is given a painted replica of the bone coffin to play with until it gets owrn out. If the mother can't conceive again, the bone coffin is passed on to a sister or other female relative who will carry out the tradition.

I heart Aboriginals.

Other exhibits at the Northern Territory museum include:

• Cyclone Tracy and the history of the NT
• dugout canoes and other Indo-Pacific wooden boats
• crocodiles then and now: a journey through evolution
• Birds, bugs, sea creatures, and reptiles of Australia. I especially liked seeing the box jellyfish floating in a jar of preservative
• Glass cases filled artfully with colorful specimen. Each display case was really done well. It was geometric, neatly labeled, well lit, as if done to be photographed into a poster.
• Australia's land mass and animals through time (Gondwana to the present)
  

In the evening I freaked out about money again, but then counted all my receipts and realized I'm exactly where I planned.

Australian thing of the day: Sweetheart the taxidermied crocodile.