In Melbourne

 Ron Mueck  

As is usually the case our stay in Melbourne began with a trip to the Queen Vic Markets.  Again following tradition there was a queue at the Doughnut van.  Cutting forward a while, at lunchtime there was a queue of about 50 people for the gozleme stall inside the market.  We  passed on both waits, but marvelled at the propensity of Melbournians to wait in line.

Later in the day we noticed these bird paintings in Swanston St.  When I have a few hours to spare I will try to work out what species they are supposed to be (and possibly what substance the artist was abusing when he worked).

We tried to spot the Peregrines around Collins St. I suspected the nest would be out of view but hoped to spot them coming and going.  Unfortunately other buildings block the view from both Collins St ..
.. and Flinders Lane.
To add insult to the dip, out daughter reported seeing one of the adults perched on these antennae earlier in the day.  (Image of antennae from Fed Square, later in the day.)
At Federation Square these whirling pumpkin cups seemed to keep small children happy.
I only realised by accidentally reading this notice that the cups turned on tracks of the music we could here at this part of the site.
The main music was a brass band festival.  I think 15 bands were slated to perform over the afternoon.  This one was pretty good, although I did think it was a bit like Gene Krupa's band where the drummer was the best player!  (According to the leader, this drummer was usually a flugelhorn player.)
The main reason we were in the area was Frances having read of a Ron Mueck exhibition in the Potter Galleries.  We had seen some of his work in Brooklyn so thought it would be interesting for the small people and took them along.  In fact it was a tad strange, consisting of huge skulls.

There was an explanatory video including footage of the pile being created ..
.. and Ron at work.  
I didn't give the video the attention it deserved but think that Ron designed the work but actually participated in the installation by videoconference from the UK.  I did pick up that after each of the 100 skulls had been cast they were worked on various ways (eg a random number of teeth inserted) so that no two of them were identical.  The NGV website gives a little more detail.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Background

Image
 We are about to head off on a trip to Adelaide.  I realised this was our first long trip since we left Carwoola  and it was obviously not suitable for either the Houses of FranMart or Mallacoota Weather and Wildlife.  My usual store of travel stories was Travels with a Tick Magnet, but we no longer have the small dog.  So here we are with a new blog. This is the planned route. The first stop in Halls Gap has two purposes: It breaks the trip to Adelaide; and Gives us a chance to spend a day in the Grampians. It will still be a long first day (750 km 8:45 hours) but better than 1250kms and 14 hours!  Its the only day much over 500kms.  We are hoping to make an early start since it will probably be getting dark by 1730 hrs and we'd like to have arrived before them. In retrospect it is interesting that I didn't notice, when publishing this post that the route from Leeton to Canberra doesn't go through Wagga.  This became apparent when consulting our ...
Read more

Changes not always for the better!

Image
 This refers back to yesterdays comment about the Mexican weather: "Wait 5 minutes and it will change!"  So today we were out at the Western Treatment Plant (a massive sewage works at Werribee) doing birding.  It was colder than yesterday and a strong wind was blowing.  Little actual rain but Avalon recorded 9.4mm of rain yesterday so everywhere was muddy. A little earlier in the day we went to the Queen Vic markets as they will be closed tomorrow.  At 7am it is not crowded. My snag supplier. The main activity today was going to the Western Treatment Plant at Werribee for birding.  This was our fourth trip in that direction.  The first time we did without satnav and got horribly lost about three ways.  The next two times we used Google Maps and all was fine.  This time we used the satnav in the Mazda.  The main problem was that the system seemed to have a lot of trouble working out where we were starting from and then had trouble linking...
Read more

Dunkeld Trip Summary and Index

 This covers a trip of 6 days away from Mallacoota staying one day in Melbourne, 2 days in Dunkeld and (most of) 3 days travelling.  We covered 1700 km in total with the big day being the drive home accounting for 800 km. Dunkeld is a modest sized locality.  The 2021 Census gives a resident population of 688 people of which 36% were aged 60 or over.  The 60-69 years age group had 17% of the population and 70-79 made up 14%: these were the two biggest 'decades'.  (As a comparison Mallacoota had 1183 people with 49% of people aged 60+ and equivalent decade values 22% and 19%.) Here are links to the individual posts: Drive to Melbourne In Melbourne Drive to Dunkeld Around Dunkeld and Hamilton Salt Creek and The Piccaninny  (note: this is a large post with lots of plant photos) Dunkel Heritage Walk Drive back to Mallacoota There was not a great deal of birding excitement,  suspect mainly because everywhere was so wet and water had covered all the marg...
Read more