Chronicle: Burning Down Under

I love a sunburnt country

A land of sweeping plains

Of ragged mountain ranges

Of droughts and flooding rains

I love her far horizons

I love her jewel sea

Her beauty and her terror

The wide brown land for me

The second verse of Dorothea Mackellar’s poem “My Country” is one of the most widely known pieces of writing for Australians, many of whom learn the entire work at school. It was published in the Spectator in London for the first time in 1908, and it remains to this day an effective evocation of Australia. The verse I quoted captures the extremes of climate in the driest inhabited continent (only Antarctica has less precipitation) and also the vastness of the landscapes. Most Australians live within a few tens of kilometers of the “jewel sea.” The poem, in the verses that follow, celebrates the breaking of the drought. It is an appropriate beginning to a discussion of burning issues facing science museums and science centers in Australia, since much of the sunburnt country is reeling from the effects of the worst drought on record.

As the sun has blazed down during the summer, forests have caught fire and battles have raged to save rural communities from destruction. In 2007 in Victoria, 1.4 million hectares burnt in fires sparked by lightning that merged to create a giant blaze with a fire-front 250 kilometers in length. This year has proved to be even worse—lives lost, properties destroyed, whole communities traumatized. The combustibility of the forests resulted not just from one hot year but from a drought that began in 2000. Farmers have struggled to grow crops and keep livestock alive. In towns and cities, increasingly severe water restrictions have been introduced to eke out dwindling supplies in the reservoirs. Water levels have continued to drop to a point where irrigators have been told no more allocations will be available and wetlands will be drained so Adelaide continues to get drinking water.

Australia is prone to drought, as Mackellar’s poem so vividly recalls. Since her day, the impact of El Niño on the continent’s weather has been recognized, and the end of an El Niño episode is greeted with relief by everyone—farmers, gardeners, politicians. However, another factor has emerged as significant in the 21st century: the impact of climate change. An already hot and dry continent is particularly vulnerable to the impact of global warming, and it has become a hot political issue.

The question therefore arises: Do museums have a role in this scenario? I believe they do, and Museum Victoria is engaged in initiatives that relate to topical issues.

I took the post of CEO of Museum Victoria in August 2002, and we set about redefining its focus and role. Not surprisingly, water conservation has emerged as a key topic for the museum. With the large number of visitors attracted to the museums, including 350,000 schoolchildren each year, there is a great opportunity to encourage a responsible approach to the use of this precious resource. Raincheck 3000 is a multimedia interactive through which visitors can experience the water cycle by flying from Melbourne Museum to the hills and following the droplets of rain from clouds, through the trees into aquifers and streams and into the reservoir. The Water Smart Home interactive takes off where Raincheck 3000 finishes. The museum researched water-saving practices among

Melbourne’s inhabitants and uses individual stories presented on one of the screens that forms part of the large installation.

The impact of such exhibits as these is reinforced through public programs. Each year, Museum Victoria plays an active part in Water Week, a national initiative held yearly to encourage community involvement in water conservation. Part of one year’s programming included large melting blocks of ice at the Melbourne Museum with shower timers embedded in them; as the ice melted, visitors were invited to take the timers home. We also marked International Polar Year, which ended in March, in which science museums throughout the world presented Arctic and Antarctic research to visitors. The threat of a rise in sea levels due to melting ice is a topic of immediate interest in any country that resides predominantly near the sea.

Pollution of waterways is another area of concern. At Scienceworks, an exhibit to discourage people from polluting streams and creeks has been developed. A character called Max Muck-Bunker tempts people to conspire with his evil plan by discarding cigarette butts, engine oil, dog muck and other undesirables in the drains that lead to the stormwater system. Users recoil from his machinations when they realize that what goes down the stormwater drain ends up on the nearby beaches of Port Philip Bay.

Another new exhibit at Scienceworks focuses on recycling. Every home in Melbourne has a blue bin with a yellow lid in which all recyclable materials are placed for weekly collection. What happens to it after that is something of a mystery to most people, so our exhibit shows how it is separated into different materials suitable for recycling and why it is important to exclude other waste from the bin.

I began by describing the bush fires that have raged this summer. In the heart of Melbourne Museum we have a temperate rainforest in which we present bushfires as one of the inevitable occurrences in Australia. Indeed, recent research has linked the extinction of megafauna to deliberately lit fires by early inhabitants of the continent that caused changes to the environment.

Models of climate change resulting from global warming predict a drier, hotter future for much of Australia, as well as more severe storms. The dangers posed by bushfires are therefore increasing with worrying implications for the human and natural population. It is essential that changes to flora and fauna are monitored, and here the collections of specimens in Australia’s museums are of immense value.

From its very beginnings, Museum Victoria has collected and described the natural history of the state. We have recently launched a website that draws on this work and the wonderful illustrations that were produced to illustrate it. The museum’s research continues, giving insights into the impact of global warming on marine environments and in the fragile alpine areas of Victoria and New South Wales.

Our new strategic plan identifies climate change as one of the key drivers for the organization as we go forward. Part of that is reducing the impact of the museum itself. We have made significant gains, but we have a long way to go.

J. Patrick Greene is CEO of Museum Victoria in Australia.