Today was our last full day in Sydney. I am a little sad, but we have seen a lot of the city. We started the day at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, www.hht.net.au . The Barracks, which now is a central building with a small stone wall around it was originally a jail. It then became an immigrant depot and finally housed courts until 1979. Today it is a museum that talks about the various usages. There is a large focus on Hulks, un-sea-worthy ships that could still float and house prisoners. Eventually they moved to land based prisons, although in the 1980’s the US sold the UK a personnel ship that was converted into a prison until 1997.
I did not end up taking too many pictures, but we could see the Sydney Tower outside. If you look closely you can see that the floor in the overhang is made of glass. Needless to say my fear of heights prevented us from going up.
Up next was the Art Gallery of New South Wales, www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au . It was built onto the side of a hill, much like the Toronto Science center. There are 5 levels that go down the side of the hill. There museum housed some aboriginal art, which is mainly “natural pigments” on bark. There was also a modern art section, my least favorite type of art. There were some pieces that I liked, but there were also a large number of pieces that I could have painted in 2nd grade had I not been told not to cover my entire paper in one color. The reason I dislike modern art is because it is too simple and anybody can do it really. The argument that they though of painting a canvas black and I didn’t is not very creative. But enough about modern art. The museum also had a collection of Asian religious pieces, including 16 nude 6 foot tall stone statues holding clothes to symbolizes deaths in some part of south east Asian. Unfortunately I forget where it was.
Next was time for a quick snack, also know as a Big Mac. All the beef used in McDonalds, as well as ramen noodle cups comes from Australia. They also sell family dinner packs with several burgers and fries and drinks.
With some much needed energy Ina and I set off for the Australian Museum, www.amonline.net.au . It is a natural history museum that was established just 40 years after the first convict boats landed. They had an exhibit on Aborigines and people of the Torres Straight, the area between the top of Australia and the islands of south east Asia, New Guinea I believe. Just as in the US there was racism in Australia. In the 1960’2 through the early 1980’s the government used to take children away from the Aborigines and put them in boarding schools. There also used to be segregation with public swimming pools. A group of Aborigine youth chartered a bus and went from town to town paying to use the pools. The government at this time had banned all segregation laws. Sometimes the bus occupants were allowed to swim and then the town would pass a segregation law anyway. During the late 1980’s and into the mid 1990’s many Aborigines in jails died. There was a government investigation that actually found racism to be a cause of the deaths. I thought this was pretty interesting considering it all happened since I have been alive. The exhibit also talked about many of the problems facing the Aborigines today. Most are similar to the problems faced by Native Americans on reservations, drug abuse, joblessness, suicide, ect.
Also housed in the museum was a large collection of skeletons including a human one. On the next floor up was a large collection of native birds, insects, and spiders. There was also a very large exhibit on minerals of Australia. Australia had a gold rush of its own. There was a cast of a 34kg (I think) piece of gold that was found. Any natural history museum would not be complete without a section on dinosaurs. Ina asked me what type of dinosaur the Inasaur was, but unhappy with my response she decided on the T-Rex.
We were rather close to our hotel so we ate in Chinatown at a Korean place before heading back to the hotel. The plan was to swim, do laundry, pack, and then go out to a bar in Kings Cross, a seedy part of town that is alive with nightlife. Of course by the time we had packed we were both too tired to go, just like every other day; imagine that.
Since this is the last night in the hotel I could probably talk a little more about it. It is the Mercure located right above the central bus terminal, not so much a terminal as a large collection of stops. It is on the edge of Chinatown. Sydney, all the neighborhoods, seem to be a lot cleaner, at least in smell, than New York City. We got a room on the 14th floor, the pool is the only thing above us on the 15th. It was quite a good deal, Hotels.com gave us something like %40 off the entire stay because it was longer than 4 nights. The view from the room was not that great. In the distance we could see Sydney University.
To turn on anything in the room a key has to be put into a slot by the door. Also every power outlet has its own little on off switch next to it. The toilet has two buttons a half flush and a full flush. Apparently Australia is concerned with saving water and electricity. Outside of the hotel all the outlets I saw had the same little switches on them. The TV selection here is either sports or imported shows. There is always a game of AFL, or Rugby on, sometimes soccer, and last night I saw the strange backboard-less basketball. I guess they can’t dribble, and women play in skirts like tennis. New episodes of TV shows are ones I saw a few months ago. Shrek 3 is coming out next week and some video games are released later down here. At the beaches there are tons of Razor Scooters. There seems to be a strange mix of Australia being behind us and ahead of us. All the cell phone plans here appear to be prepaid, and internet is billed by the amount you download, like a 150Gb set up is 75Gb peak, 8am-2am and 75Gb off peak, 2am-8am. We did see a television ad that the government is investing a large amount of money to bring broadband internet across the entire country, and for remote places using satellite internet. It appeared that this would be free and 100x faster than what most Australians currently have. Maybe this means if I come back hotels will have cheap or free internet for guests?
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