Judy & Brian Tour Oz: Darwin NT Trailer Boat Club, Museum and Art Gallery

Wandered about today. Starting to panic, so many things we aught to do so little time to do them. Went back to the Museum and Art gallery and spent an hour or two looking at the artefacts and criticising things we know nothing about.

Our theme, as has been the last few years, is based around the existence of the aboriginal art. Now in this gallery, most of the stuff they have is old, well old for today, having been collected in the 70s and 80s. The point is, the 'art' as we see today, didn't exist prior to the 1970s, so why is it held in near religious reverence? At least the pieces in the museum purport to document some of the stories as opposed to the current pieces being produced. The long and short of it is that its just art when its produced in the form of a canvas or a convenient sheet of flattened bark. They have no history of art in this format. They only painted their possessions such as spears, shields and ceremonial items. The interesting items are the burial sticks, which according to custom are erected over the burial mound and are highly spiritual and sacred, you can't even take pictures of them. So how come we have a whole bunch in a museum?

Anyhow, I don't know that's for sure.

What i do know about is that at lunch time i felt like a feed and having ascertained that the Cornucopia Cafe is full as usual, we enacted the Club Crawl clause and headed off to the Darwin Trailer Boat Club, all of about 500m away. The setting is superb, the food excellent, plenty of table, no waiting. Why do we bother with that museum?

This club, just like its Water Ski counterpart, is set right on the beach. Absolute water frontage. It has large grassed areas and shaded tables. They also provide a playground and a decent looking pool for anyone to use. Could explain why its jam packed at the weekends, those cunning locals just keep quiet about it.

A few snaps, the first lot from the museum where they have a collection of the oddest vessels that you will see anywhere. They are mostly of asian extraction, with the exception of the last Darwin based pearl lugger which was built in Broome. In the 1980s when Paspaley had finished with it, he donated it to the museum, but elected to change its name from White Star, to that of his wife. Now isn't that odd. an old piece of history with a brand new name, sort of doesn't sit right.