Hobart to MONA (via MONA Roma)

Hobart's Museum of Old & New Art is quite the place.

Maybe some of the artworks aren't of a Louvre or National Gallery standard, but the spectacular building itself, and the quirky weirdness of some of the experiences, make up for that.



It's in Berriedale, a few kilometres up the Derwent from Hobart's CBD, and the classy way to get there is on board the good ship Mona Roma, which is a somewhat quirky experience too. The kids riding on the sheep's backs here were looking out at the Aurora Australis.  Australia's Antarctic expeditioners' transport was about to leave on its first supply trip of the season.



I'd been to MONA a few years earlier, but I was assured the experience changes often, with new exhibits, and whole new spaces appearing from time to time. Sure enough, most of the spaces I stumbled on this time were completely new to me.

Here, people were venturing out, one by one, for a disorienting experience in a strange black-and-white cube room.





Or looking down on a weird mechanical crawling monster thing.

This chap looks pretty disoriented too, lost in a  mysterious fantasy bubble room.








The blue room is quite something. It becomes a red room or a green room now and again, by the way.

Fully Cooked in Cooktown

'Captain Cook, chased a chook, all around Australia. Lost his pants in the middle of France, and found them in Tasmania.' So we are told in the Cooktown Museum. Must be true, because Cooktown is all about Cook, and the time he spent here in 1770.

He'd pranged his boat near Cape Tribulation and managed to get it to the Endeavour River here, where he was able to park it at a suitable angle against the bank, and carry out repairs.










Cooktown today is a very pleasant and relaxed little town, ideal for spending an easy day at the end of a Far North Queensland bus tour. The day tripper people got only an hour here - the bus driver called them the 'half Cooked'. The two- and three-day people like us got a whole day (the 'fully Cooked').


There are nice cafes and a good Bowlo. There's an excellent Botanic Garden, plus Cook's Lookout on Grassy Hill. And that excellent museum.



The museum also tells you all about the original inhabitants of the area, and the usual quota of misunderstandings and reconciliations that took place during his stay.

Cooktown has a a souvenir shop or two as well. There's a rather nice one where you can buy an unfriendly life sized crocodile.

Launceston's new (to me) museum

Launceston's Inveresk museum complex was new to me. I'd had contradictory recommendations, but decided to go and check it out for myself.

There's the old tram sheds and railway workshops, a functioning tram, a college of the arts, a university campus, a cafe or two, and last but not least, there's the Queen Victoria Museum.




It's not a bad little museum at all. It's got a good sprinkling of the usual dinosaurs and wonders of science stuff. But I particularly liked the fine collection of Tasmanian animals.

There was a good display of old railway trains and other memorabilia too, with maps and a history of the Tasmanian railway system. Launceston had been the hub of said system, and in its heyday it had quite a respectable network.

Dioramas of Independence

I'm a bit partial to the odd history lesson, at least if it's given in a simple enough, pictorial way, and with maybe a touch of partisanship and passion. So when I turned up at the old Dutch fort in Yogyakarta, and discovered it had been turned into a museum of Indonesian independence (independence from the Dutch, that is), I thought I'd take a look.

Most of it consists of big rooms which house about 40 dioramas which tell the story.



The first diorama features the early independence hero, Prince Diponegoro. He was a member of Jogja's royal family and was a major figure in the Java War of the 1820s. He was invited to peace talks, but when he showed up he was just arrested and exiled, we're told. The Jogja royal family played a pivotal role later on in supporting the independence movement, and the city generally was a hotbed of it.

We're then led through the setting up of local cultural and educational organisations, and then independence organisations and political parties. Things changed rapidly during World War 2 though, with the Japanese occupation. There was intensive activity aimed at getting ready to take over from them as soon as they left, and two days after the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945, independence was declared, by leaders Sukarno, Hatta, and Soebardjo.

It might have been declared then, but the victorious British had other ideas. The British had been fighting not only the Japanese, but also the Indonesian nationalists (and managed to bomb and set fire to the buildings either side of one of the nationalist radio stations).

So in early 1946 those Dutchmen came marching back in to rain on the independence parade. It was nearly four more years before they saw the light and got out again, due to the pressures of armed resistance, international support for independence, and a lack of will and funds among the Dutch people themselves.

Indonesia's recent history has continued to be complicated, colourful, and painful. I was reminded of one chapter of it while walking back to my hotel that afternoon. All the flags were at half mast. I asked somebody why, and it turned out it was the annual commemoration of the events of 30 September, 1965. That was the start of a coup attempt, which was blamed on the Communist Party. This became the excuse for the right wing coup of General Suharto, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and ended democracy for quite some time.