Nearing the end of a recent visit to Australia, I had a sunday afternoon to fill in Melbourne before boarding an early morning flight to return to Montevideo UY. My hotel was right beside Melbourne’s Chinatown district, so after a yummy lunch of duck something, I set off to check out the Chinese Museum nearby. I confess I really don’t know Melbourne well, and had no idea or had forgotten, that there was a Chinatown or a Chinese museum in the state capital. It is a nice small museum, set up and sponsored by prominent members of the Chinese community in Melbourne and other centres around Victoria.
I particularly liked the videos of Chinese immigrants and their descendants from several generations sharing memories and views on how they and Chinese people generally have fared in Australia since arriving in big numbers during the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850’s which were repeated around the country over the following 80 years. Immigration is currently a hot topic in Aus, and always has been since the arrival of The First Fleet in 1788.
There was much to see, but early on this beautiful object caught my eye, initially for the gorgeous shapes of the dragons – were they handles? But then the rich colours and touches of gold grabbed me; and finally I became intrigued by the little open mouthed frogs arranged around the base, and puzzled over what it could all mean! When I found and read the didactic panel about it I was blown away to learn this is a replica of an ancient seismograph invented in the C1st AD, a creative and inventive device to record tremors and earthquakes, and indicate the direction from which the vibrations came. This was the product of a highly educated mind, and the Chinese are well known for their advanced material culture compared with European and Mediterranean civilisations of that era.
It always interests me how at any one time in the known history of mankind kind there is such disparate development of civilisations between one region/continent and another. My highschool history courses were very Euro- and Anglo- centered and presented by one of the most boring teachers of the day (early 1960’s, in a conservative church-run girls’ school in Tasmania, the most conservative state in our country) Miss Rooney, rest her kind soul, never made any mention of the wonders of China, the Indian subcontintent, or the highly advanced pre-Columbian civilisations of the Americas, let alone the fabulous kingdoms of Africa. And she certainly never suggested how we budding world citizens might find ourselves fitting into the ever-shifting scheme of things.
