Still the best: newly renovated Australian Museum

It's proud to be Australia's oldest museum, and Sydney's Australian Museum claims to be Australia's best museum too. It was closed for a while for modernising renovations, and they seem to have worked out well. I did a repeat exploration recently.

There are hundreds of excellent specialist museums out there. But if you want a good old fashioned all-rounder, you probably won't beat this one.

Among the 100 Treasures collection is this historical Maitland Bar gold nugget.

 

 

There's an exceptional introduction to traditional indigenous culture and the nations, languages, and clan groups of the Sydney region.

 

There are also 100 People Who Shaped Australia

Lots of heroes

 

 

And a few villains too!

 

 

Giant prehistoric wombats and things

A perhaps definitive collection of Australian wildlife

 

 

I wish they'd keep their dinosaurs under better control

 

 

 

 This one had to be brought down violently!

Now milking.......spiders!

The Australian Museum is putting on a good little show.

There's an exhibition called 'Spiders - Alive & Deadly', and it's well worth a visit. If you just find spiders fascinating, or if like us, you find them crawling around the house, and would like to better tell which ones are harmless, and which ones are totally deadly, then it's for you.




There's a daily demonstration of venom milking too. Spider venom is used for pharmaceutical and pesticide research. Spider venom contains hundreds of compounds which could be effective for all kinds of purposes.

My main interest was to improve my spider identification skills, and there was lots of material available to assist in this.

As well as live spider exhibits (where they were sometimes hiding from view of course), there were lots of dead exhibits on offer.




In Sydney, we do of course have the world's deadliest spider, the Sydney Funnel Web. That's probably disputed by the Brazilians, who have the Brazilian wandering spider, but let's be parochial for a while. We're all rather keen to be able to distinguish between our funnel webs and the other local species who sometimes look remarkably similar.

So here are the male and female Sydney Funnel Webs. The male is the deadlier, but the female's bigger.







And here are the Brown  Trapdoor spiders.

We also came across a Black House Spider in the hallway this morning, and they're a bit similar.


Below: a close-up male Sydney Funnel Web.

Surviving the museum

 'Surviving Australia' is the name of one of the galleries at Sydney's Australian Museum. It's packed with scary venomous spiders and snakes, things like sharks and crocodiles that eat you, stingers, biters and buzzy things, all the things the tourists love. And so do we!

It's been 20 years or so since I'd last explored the place, and it's come on quite nicely. There's still the classic galleries with the the fine collections of stuffed birds, insects, marsupials etc. There are skeletons galore, and of course dinosaurs. Menacing, noisy dinosaurs. Australian ones too these days. There are rocks, gemstones and meteorites.

A lot of work has gone into making things very accessible and exciting for kids and for tourists.  

There's also a classy gallery on indigenous Australia, and intelligent displays on environmental degradation and extinctions.

I think an Australian Museum visit is a must for visitors with a few hours to spare and a wish to gain a good quick introduction to the country, and it should probably be on the agenda for all of us locals too now and again.