The MoB
Trip Start
Sep 08, 2011
1
69
85
Trip End
Jan 08, 2012
Where I stayed
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
I went to my failsafe; new town/city? Go to the visitors’ centre, young man! It’s always a reliable source of information. Except in this case. Granted, I would only be in Brisbane for two more days (including today), but the best they could come up with was a tourist bus – the hop on/off variety. I looked at the woman as if she’d lost her marbles, "Have you seen the weather outside???" I wanted to scream at her, but being a polite Brit, what actually came out of my mouth was more like, “Hmm, sounds interesting, but today might not be the best day for it.” She nodded in agreement and then went on to suggest the Museum of Brisbane. Now that was more like it! Museums were made for rainy days, and, tellingly, this would be my first visit to an Australian one. That’s not to say that it hadn’t rained in all my time here, it’s just that there was either something else on or I was stuck in the middle of nowhere.
So, I was all geared up to visit the MoB. I walked up and down the street it was supposed to be in (in the rain, I might add), but I couldn’t find it. I asked a couple of people and they didn’t know where it was either. What to do? Quite by chance I looked in the entrance of an office block and there it was. So, to clarify, the MoB didn’t have its own building, instead it was housed in an office block. I’d walked past it at least two or three times; that’s how non-descript it was.
Things went from bad to worse; there was an exhibition on called, Cabinet of Curiosities, with knick-knacks about life in Brisbane over the years. Actually, it wasn’t an exhibition, it was the exhibition. What took me aback was that the museum was one room – and not even a big room at that. In it were housed 40 exhibits, ranging from the odd (Peter the stuffed dog had to the most unusual. A murderer, his truck and his dog, Peter, were identified at the scene of the murder by eyewitnesses. Unfortunately, Peter died before the trial and so the prosecution exhumed his body, had him stuffed and presented at trial, surprising the defendant so much that he admitted to owning the dog and thereby implicating himself in the murder) to the downright banal (a reproduction of the Queensland’s wedding gift to Queen Elizabeth on her marriage to Prince Phillip – 500 cases of tinned pineapples). I tried to take my time looking around, looking at all the exhibits, reading all the information about them, but I still finished in under an hour.
Naturally, it was still raining when I left the MoB, so I stopped for a coffee somewhere and grabbed a paper. Now, the NT News (the local paper from the Northern Territory) had been a consistent source of amusement, it was like a legitimate version of Viz. How I laughed at stories of gay pride for dogs; croc insurance for Barak Obama and even the stir that was caused all over the territory when it was suggested that they might have to give up their second (or even third) fridges (packed solid with alcohol) to save the environment – never had I seen a comments column run and run with such vehemence and invective aimed at the ‘treehuggers’. However, what was becoming clear was that this was not a phenomenon limited to the territory. It is true that the stories may not be as colourful as in the NT News, but there is a style of reporting that is distinctive. After all, where else would you see in print a story about a crocodile attack in Northern Queensland and the prime suspect is described as “that big black bastard of a croc...on Bushy Island”? Those were three words I’d never have expected to see in a newspaper describing a crocodile or anything else.
Having spent more time reading the paper than in the museum, there really wasn’t much else to do on a rainy afternoon/evening in Brisbane, so I went back to the hostel to hole up in my room for the rest of the day/night.
