The Perth Mint is the oldest working mint in Australia and we took a tour which, among other things, talked about the first gold discovery in Western Australia, something Dominic studied last term at school. The mint was opened in 1899 as one of only 6 branches of the Royal mint, London in the world. We saw the biggest bullion coin in the world -
1 tonne, watched a gold pouring demonstration, and minted our own coin. We also saw some incredibly expensive diamonds! The combined value of our family's weight in gold worked out at around $12 million dollars. There was a gold bar about the size of a brick weighing over twelve kilograms that we could barely lift, and the second largest gold nugget in the world. We really enjoyed the mint, and the building was one of the many beautiful old buildings in Perth. 
Next we trekked across the city to the museum. The children all enjoyed the music garden outside first, with Cooper visiting each glockenspiel many times. Inside, there was a visiting exhibition from the British Museum with some significant artifacts from the world's history. (well, someone deemed them significant, anyway). I particularly liked the golden Celtic torc (collar) that a farmer
in England dug up with his tractor, and an old chess piece, a Queen, found in Scotland. The Queen is sitting in a chair with her chin resting in her hand, contemplating the game before her. The sign explained that the game originated in India where there was a King piece and his accompanying Vizier, no queen. So 
when the game moved to England, and the vizier became the queen, she was quite a powerless piece, only being permitted to move one diagonal space in any direction. Of course now she is the most powerful piece on the board....hmmmmm. The other thing Grant and I found significant in the special exhibition was their use of the common era to date artifacts. For example, the torc was dated as 75 - 145 BCE, before common era, rather than BC, before Christ. If we are determined to remove all mention of deities etc from our calendar or dating system, we should probably also rename the days of the week.
In the main part of the museum, we saw a huge egg from the extinct Madagascar elephant bird. No idea what the bird looks like, but it's egg is equivalent to 134 chicken eggs! This particular one was found on the coast of Western Australia at Cervantes, near the pinnacles, and they assume it floated across the sea to there. The bird itself has been extinct for 300 - 400 years. Upstairs we saw lots of meteorites and now Grant wants to find a metallic one on the Nullarbor. They had slices out of a lot of metllic meteorites from around the world, and they were all silver and shiny.
We found the discovery centre in the museum on our way out, which is particularly aimed at kids, and there were aquariums with frogs, snakes, insects and lizards. The kids all settled down on the leather couch to watch a video on animals deep in the sea, and rest their feet from all the walking. Back out in the cold wind, we walked down to The ferry and caught it across the Swan river and
back. Near the wharf was a very cool looking bell tower. We also saw a couple of black swans. Bus back to the city, MacDonald's for dinner, and finally home again on the train. Katie was exhausted, as we all were, but it was still a great day. Had some great praise music from the aboriginal conference to go to sleep to!
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Vicki
That Aboriginal conference sounds a blessing.
ReplyDeleteWow, such an interesting day.
ReplyDelete