Manly Museum - Night 43

The weather was as poor as predicted and it rained intermittently throughout the day, so inside activities it was. After lunch at Wrapido, we met the girls at the Marriot and walked a few blocks to the Museum on College Street. Basically a natural history museum, it also had a current exhibit on African impressions which was primarily a collection of aerial photographs from National Geographic; an excellent example of the diversity, both physical and economic, on the continent of Africa. The skeletons room had very interesting exhibits showing just how similar some very common animals are to each other. Once stripped of their skin, Koalas look surprisingly like large possums, likewise, the difference between a wild boar and a dog on a skeletal level is quite minute. Albert Chapman, one of the world’s greatest mineral collectors is a local, so an entire room on the second floor was dedicated to some of his amazing finds, many of which are so colorful and strange that you couldn’t dream a design like that up. It is simply astounding that they came from the same earth that most of us imagine as just brown dirt and grey rock.

Sydney from the Ferry

Post-museum we took a ferry out to

Charlie and I at Manly Beach

Manly Island to watch the surfers and the volleyballers. Manly, though the beach is supposedly polluted, is much larger and more active than Bondi. After nearly blowing the bank at a nice steak house, we settled on fish and chips for dinner. I was not overly impressed with either. Didn’t even compare to a good ole fashioned Wisconsin Friday Night Fish Fry.

The ferry ride back took us past the Opera House and the city skyline at dusk, which was quite beautiful. Upon the return to the mainland we hopped a bus to Charlie’s for an early night of relaxation.

What I Learned Today: “Terra Nullius” is the doctrine that the English used to steal land from the Aborigines. It referred to the fact that the land was not being used in a manner consistent with their religious and political beliefs (farming and private property ownership) thus the British owed it to the Aborigines to fix their ‘poor’ land use practices. While we now realize this was a foolish practice, “Terra Nullius” (or a refined concept thereof) might still have some use as a way to reappropriate land from absentee land owners and destructive corporations back to the public for the public good.

written by

exumenius on November 22, 2007 from Sydney, Australia

from the travel blog: Kiwis and Kangaroos

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written by juan galán on November 24, 2007

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