More Perth

I took another day to explore Perth. I had two goals; one to visit the Perth Art Gallery and the other to visit Scitech, Perth's hands-on science museum. Science first, naturally!

Scitech is a very nice facility, probably a bit larger than Impression 5 in Lansing, but then it serves a metro region of about 1.25 million folks. Here are a couple of shots of some of the activties

The air cannon target shows the air vortex from the cannon pretty clearly and the hive is fun to watch. The tube to the outside is full of bees coming and going; I watched for a while and I don't think I ever saw a bee change her plans and reverse direction. They also bump heads with oncoming bees almost every time; I'm guessing it's a recognition thing.

I thought this was quite a cool activity. It uses a projector and some clever software to create a live contour map of the material in the table below.

They have a new exhibit coming called Innovation Central

so naturally I chatted with some of the staff about this exhibit, which it turns out will be an exhibition of innovative items. I learned a new word as well; Chindōguz, which is Japanese for completely useless inventions designed to solve real-world problems. They will be a major facet of the new exhibit. We also had a chance to talk about our Innovation 5 project and agreed that keeping kids engaged as they age out of traditional science museum activities is a worldwide challenge.

There was one exhibit that puzzled me - not the exhibit, just the credit

So I had to find out what a 'Men's shed' was. It turns out to be a community of Australian maker spaces which (with government funding !) are for blokes only!

On to the Art Gallery of Western Australia. (since it's no longer Tuesday). A pretty interesting collection very much focused on the art of Western Australia. There are some pretty iconic Australian images such as this

and frankly, some real drek, like this

There is a fairly limited selection of early work by indigenous artists, but they are better represented in later eras and some of them are pretty pointed criticisms

This is a reference to the tragic history of Rottsnest Island that we visited just the day before. Prior to becoming a tourist destination, Rottsnest was used to incarcerate indigenous peoples, often on the flimsiest excuses, and keep them indefinitely. It was a terrible chapter in Perth's history and clearly not forgotten by some today. Indeed, the issue appears to be live today; here is a protest sign I found stuck by the side of the sidewalk when I was strolling around Perth

I wandered back to my place with a lot to think about.