2004: Extremes. Survival in the Great Deserts of the Southern Hemisphere

  Extremes.  Survival in the Great Deserts of the Southern Hemisphere.  National Museum of Australia, December 26 2004 to mid-2005.  Adults $8, Concession $6, Child $5, Family $16.

    Here is an exhibition which is worth crossing a desert to see - 4 deserts, actually.  There is plenty to slake your thirst for knowledge about the Atacama which contains the driest place on earth, the famous Kalahari, the less well-known Namib and our own Red Centre.  What links them is, in Afrikaans, the Steenbokskeerkring - the ring of antelopes - aka the Tropic of Capricorn.  As the earth spins, our swirling atmosphere creates this band of dry air still linking us to our old partners in Gondwanaland since we split up over 50 million years ago. 

    A good exhibition should be dramatic in its impact, and this story of people living in the deserts over the last 30,000 years begins with larger than life indigenous people talking quietly and personally to us on film, immersed in marvellous images of their country.  Stop as you go in, look and listen, before you explore the ancient and modern artefacts of change which is the history these people have survived.  It is not so much lack of water that makes life difficult in these deserts.  More often it has been insensitive, greedy and deliberately destructive invasion by people who have failed to learn to live within nature's bounds.

    It strikes home, as senior Ikuntji man Douglas Multa speaks, to realise that people started mining red ochre in his country 30,000 years ago, and still do today as part of the life of a man related to cattle bosses, cameleers and famous women artists, and whose own interests include football, heavy metal and country music.  How dramatic are these changes indeed? The stories of Namib elder of the ǂAonin people, Rudolf Dausab (ǂis a 'click' sound) and Atacamena Rosa Ramos are no less fascinating.

     Between the inflatable sea lion skin raft and the Conquistador helmet, ostrich egg water flasks and Dr Livingstone's actual cap he wore when Stanley greeted him "Dr Livingstone, I presume?", a hair string belt and the Bush Mechanics EJ Holden there is much more than an hour's worth of remarkable human experience for visitors young and old.  An extremely good exhibition in the best National Museum tradition.

© Frank McKone, Canberra