On the way to the Melbourne Museum it was hard to miss the enormous Melbourne Exhibition Buildings.  They were opposite the museum.  I didn't realize the building was considered a World Heritage Site until I read a sign that it was.  It did look impressive not to mention historical.  Then right across the street was the Corpus Christi, Seminary of the Sacred Heart which I mistook for a church.  It was beautifully made of red brick.

The banners in front of the Melbourne Museum.  When we arrived, we saw the Tuthankamon exhibit ongoing for a few more months.  We no longer visited it since we saw the same exact exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park six months prior.  Hence we just visited the exhibit which highlighted Melbourne's culture and history.  We were quite pleased.

The site of the Melbourne Museum

A life size exhibit of the Australian Coat of Arms.  This by far was my favorite of all the exhibits I saw inside the Melbourne Museum.  The stuffed kangaroo and emu were truly beautiful and impressive to look at.

These artifacts formed part of the Bunjikata, the award winning Aboriginal and Torres Islander Strait Centre.  I really developed a love for this type of art from Australia besides the Polynesian art I saw in New Zealand.  There was just so much similarity between them and the Indonesian art of Southeast Asia.

Just as one will find the Rocks in Sydney, the area where the convicts first landed in Australia and which was a depressed are of the city until the 1970s, Melbourne had its counterpart in Little Lon.  The Melbourne Museum had a pretty and quaint model of houses from this gritty and down and out part of town coupled with furnished living, kitchen, dining, and bedrooms to boot.

Me in front of a mock Little Lon dwelling inside the Melbourne Museum

The first room we viewed inside the set of the Little Lon dwelling was the parents' bedroom.  Here it is with two single beds (bear in mind that for many years up until the 1950s and 1960s, husbands and wives did not share the same bed) with the baby crib in the middle.  Notice the stained and torn wallpaper of the room for a more realistic effect.

The dining table next to the fireplace which also doubled as oven for cooking and heating food back in the old days in Melbourne's Little Lon.

The real kitchen with the wood burning stove with a kettle and pan

The world of "Little Lon"

Every city has its dark side, a place that respectable citizens scare themselves with.  In Melbourne fro 1860 one such place was "Little Lon", the crowded streets and lanes bounded by Lonsdale andExhibition, LittleLonsdale, and Spring Streets in the central city.  Prostitutes, families with children, drunks, nuns, tradesmen, and recent immigrants-all could be found living in Little Lon.

Much of life here was lived out in the open, in the streets and laneways, and residents had to find ways to share the public space with their neighbors.

Little Lon was much feared, much imagined-and much visited.

Another view of the same stage coach that transported mail in Melbourne in the very old colonial days

Preserved animals galore inside the Melbourne Museum from floor to ceiling

Marc and I spent one whole afternoon touring the Melbourne Museum.  I thoroughly enjoyed the visit.  Like what usually happens every time we travel, time is never enough.  That is why a second, a third, and even many more visits are often necessary to really get to know any place.  I hope I get to visit Australia again someday and see its other cities and towns as well.  G'day for now, folks!