Museum Visit

We went out to Welshpool to the warehouse where the major portion of The Western Australian Museum's various collections is stored. The building is huge and the airconditioning ducts are immense. A good place to be on a day like today.

We walked past a lot of different storage areas until we came to the anthropology section. Each section has some kind of poster or illustration on its door - some serious, others not. This particular door is decorated with a Farside cartoon. Two pith helmeted gentlemen can be seen approaching through the window of a native hut. The caption is "Anthropologists !! Anthropologists!!" and inside the hut several people are grabbing TVs, VCRs and computers to whisk them out of sight. I loved it.

Once inside the door we were confronted with rows and rows of metal shelving, all with boxed or bubble wrapped artifacts. The object we had come to see rated a plastic wrapped crate of its own. I will leave it to Kevin to talk about this - he would never forgive me otherwise.

We were shown a number of different artifacts including Sepik carvings and some tapa from Oro Province. There are some very nice pieces there, but there are also some that were obviously made for the tourist trade that have been donated by people who thought they were genuine. There is a really awful carved bowl from Manus and some of the Sepik masks are very poorly decorated. But they are being well looked after and we were told that there are plans for an exhibition - if funding can be obtained.