Hello, my name's Australis, and I'm a science geek. Well, kinda.
At high school, I was an A or B student in almost everything. English, maths, geography, history, German, French, IT. Everything except science. I liked it - I just wasn't all that good at it... Ok, I was terrible at it. Despite my father being a chemical engineer and both of his parents scientists or science teachers, I just couldn't get my head around the theory of it. I liked learning about the origins of the chemical symbols (I guess that's the linguist in me - I still remember that the chemical symbol for lead is Pb because the Latin term is "plumbum"). I found genetics and the human body fascinating in biology. I enjoyed learning about the practical effects and application of the laws of physics. I just never got the grades for it, and eventually dropped science at the end of year 9 after getting horrible grades two years running, despite my best efforts.
As a child though, many weekends and school holidays were spent in the company of my paternal grandmother at various museums in Melbourne. The Museum of Victoria was my favourite. I still remember walking around in the darkened minerals exhibit as a seven- and eight-year-old, awestruck by the black-lit glow of various precious and semi-precious stones, and looking at all kinds of skeletons and geological exhibits. That is, until the mid 90s when Scienceworks opened.
Scienceworks was my absolute favourite place to go in Melbourne as a kid. I think even my grandmother got sick of taking me there at one point. Every school holidays for as long as I could remember, we'd drive across the Westgate Bridge in their blue Honda to Spotswood, and spend the afternoon playing with the pulley exhibits, figuring out spinning pictures, learning about aerodynamics, space exploration, our galaxy and a whole host of other activities. Occasionally we'd go into the Planetarium in the city; sitting there underneath the dome, watching the constellations zoom across the screen above us, then being taken on a guided tour of the solar system and beyond into the rest of our galaxy entranced me. To this day, I remain in love with astronomy. I therefore amend my previous statement: I'm a science geek, with a major in astronomy.
Going to those museums as a child though, I remember seeing that some of the exhibits had plaques next to them, acknowledging their temporary status due to them being on loan from somewhere called Smithsonian. Over the years, this name, "Smithsonian", kept coming up - not just at museums in Melbourne or even Australia, but in the natural history museums I visited overseas, and in all kinds of books: this or that was on loan from the Smithsonian, or on display in the Smithsonian. This "Smithsonian" place attained a status with me as the holy grail of museums, and it was never a question of whether or not I would go there, but when.
So when I ventured to the States for the first time to meet up with my sister and her boyfriend in New York for a few days in July 2010, it was a given that I would go to Washington D.C., with the goal of finally visiting the hallowed halls of the Smithsonian Museum - where apparently everything of any value in natural history was stored. The Apollo shuttle. The Hope Diamond. And much more.
I was like a kid on her first day of school. The alarm went off at 5.30am; by 7am, I was on a train pulling slowly out of Penn station. Four hours later, I arrived in DC. First stop was a tourist information stand, where I found out to my surprise that the Smithsonian wasn't a museum. It was a complex of museums, known as the Smithsonian Institute, comprising natural history, art, scuplture, Native American and African American museums, to name just a few. And the holy grail of holy grails for me - the National Air and Space Museum (NASM). First was a brief bus tour of the city, then I hightailed it for the NASM.
I remember exactly how I felt when I first walked through those hallowed (to me, anyway) doors. Absolute amazement. No, that's not expressive enough. I was dumbstruck. Literally speechless. And completely overwhelmed. I could not stop smiling in awe and disbelief at what I saw before me. The silver-haired man behind the information desk was watching me with a small smile - I had stopped in my tracks about ten metres into the lobby, and was simply staring up at the rockets, shuttles and planes hanging from the ceiling high above me and at the photographs of planets and constellations adorning the walls, oblivious to the hordes of people swarming around me.
Eventually I broke out of my trance and approached the man at the information desk to find out exactly what was on display here. He told me about some of the best exhibits, some of the most popular displays, and his personal favourite, the Ole Miss. Then he pointed out the Apollo 11 lunar module and the landing capsule about 100m away. I grinned, giddy with disbelief and excitement, and he smiled back at me, enjoying my first-timer's reaction to the museum. Like I said, I'm an astronomy geek. And I was in astronomy geek heaven.
Suffice to say the two hour time bracket I'd allocated was never going to be sufficient. I think I had known that even before I got to DC. Sure, I could see everything I wanted to see, but in a whirlwind, not stopping at one display for more than a few minutes before moving onto the next, the time ticking away in the back of my mind. It was very different to how I had imagined my Smithsonian experience - spending an entire day there, or a few hours one day, then a few more the next, absorbing the history, the trivia, the scientific discoveries of the past, present and future. But I would much rather have had two hours there than nothing at all. And those two hours - wow.
The temptation to stay longer was enormous, but while I was enraptured with the NASM and everything in it, I was also in DC, which had a lot more to offer than just the NASM. So after two hours, I reluctantly made my way back to the lobby, bought a souvenir patch, thanked my good friend at the information stand for his tips, and ventured back out into the 37°C heat of the DC summer. The same day, I managed to cram in the Natural History Museum and a few others - not half as much as I wanted to, but an incredible lot, considering I was only in DC for a total of nine hours.
Three months later, on a Saturday afternoon in Berlin, I heard that the German Natural History Museum was commemorating its 200th anniversary with free entrance for a weekend. I'd wanted to go for ages, but a combination of time availability and wanting to explore Berlin's free museums first had put it far down on my priorities. But since it was free, how could I refuse?
After about twenty minutes though, my initial curiosity and wonder customary to a first-time visit to a museum was replaced with a strange feeling. While interesting, all of the displays and artefacts seemed somewhat lacklustre, as if somehow the entire museum had been painted in a matte finish. Everything was interesting, but that's where it ended. Not mesmerising, not fascinating, not enthralling. Just...interesting. And mildly disappointing. The astronomy display was where I noticed it the most. It seemed so small, as if half the exhibits had been removed for cleaning or restoration. And the exhibits that were there appeared to have lost their glow - as if a thin veil had been lowered over everything.
Then I noticed a small sign on one of the displays of moon rocks. "On loan from the NASM, Smithsonian Institute. Washington DC."
The penny dropped. That's why everything was different. This was the first museum I'd visited since I'd experienced the Smithsonian Institute. And the effect was phenomenal. The visit to my holy grail of museums had apparently forever changed the way I would experience museums as a visitor. The aura was gone. The almost childlike curiosity I used to get when I walked into the foyer of a museum, the excitement at being on the brink of learning unknown facts about long extinct animals, geographical phenomena and stars and planets that no living human will ever reach had been extinguished. The standard of exhibits, especially in the space exhibits, had been set so high that it was completely out of reach for any other museum.
This revelation made me sad. Fulfilling my childhood mission of visiting the hallowed Smithsonian, land of all that is sacred and most important in the area of Natural History and Astronomy (in my eyes, at least) had simultaneously apparently forever destroyed my future museum experiences.
I'm not sure if this is something that can be worked around; if now that I know that I'll never get that Smithsonian feeling anywhere except DC will enable me to lower my standards and enjoy other cities' natural history museums for what they are. I'm not sure. I guess only time will tell. In the meantime, I can be forever happy knowing that I have made the pilgrimage to the Smithsonian; that I have seen the landing module that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins landed on the moon in, and the landing capsule that brought them safely back to Earth again, both first hand, and that the two hours spent there were worth every single second of the eight hour return train trip from DC to NYC.
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