The Museum of Hope and Loneliness

It brings bad luck for a year to work on your birthday, so I had a day off and went to the National Museum of Australia with four generations of genetic family: my mother, my niece and her baby daughter, who is both technically and in my estimation my great-niece. "We got one in nappies and the other in Depends", as one of my favourite script lines from NYPD Blue would have it.


This was my first trip to the NMA, partly because I spent some significant years of another lifetime living just up the road, before Canberra Hospital got blown to smithereens (see picture) and have been a bit concerned about running into my own ghost if I revisited the Acton Peninsula before it was time. Seems safe enough now, and I'll be back to have a closer look at stuff I could only quickly survey today.

A particular delight was the discovery that the Eternity exhibition had thematically organised historical acounts around a set of ten intense human experiences: Thrill, Separation, Joy, Passion, Loneliness, Hope, Fear, Chance, Mystery and Devotion. Perhaps another example of an idea being far more powerful than its execution: what now fascinates me is what I would include and exclude if I were to curate the Museum of Hope and the Library of Loneliness.