Hidden Treasures

Captain Cook

Do you have a favourite hidden treasure in the museum? The Woolly Mammoth, I suspect, tops many lists. The train station, with its chirping crickets and rumbling locomotive, is another popular choice.

My personal favourite is a little more grisly: a celebrity murder weapon. Let me back up about 240 years to explain.

On this day in 1770, Captain Cook sailed into Botany Bay and became the first European to reach the east coast of Australia. This was part of the young captain's first major scientific expedition, but not his last. During his journeys, Cook was to lead his ships all over the Pacific Ocean: south to the Antarctic Circle, north to the Bering Strait. He has become known to us as one of the greatest of explorers.

His expeditions came to an untimely end in 1779. During a visit to the island of Hawai'i, Cook and his men quarrelled with the local inhabitants. During the fight, Cook was stabbed to death on the beach.

Fast forward to today. Tucked away on the 3rd floor of the Royal BC Museum is a life-size replica of the "HMS Discovery" – a ship that sailed with Cook on his final voyage, and later with Captain George Vancouver. In a display cabinet nearby are a variety of objects related to explorers from the age of sail. Nestled near the front is a small wooden knife. It's unassuming. Tiny. But like many objects within the museum, a small thing can link you back in time and space to world-changing events.

This is believed to be the knife that ended the life of Captain Cook in Hawai'i. There's a bit of mystery around the authenticity of the artifact, and many questions about the actual events that lead to Cook's demise. If you're interested in learning more, check out the links below or contact us directly. Better yet, come in for a visit and see the knife for yourself. While you're here, find a hidden treasure for yourself in the Royal BC Museum.

Links:

• A quick introduction to the life and times of Captain Cook


• An interesting exploration of the death of Captain Cook

Who Goes There? How to Get Visitors Behind the Scenes

Recent visitors, Fans and members may already know about our plans for the upcoming exhibition Royal BC Museum: Behind the Scenes opening on June 25, 2010. While the curators have been busy selecting artifacts and writing labels we, in the Learning and the Visitor Experience department, have been planning the public programs and thinking about how to actually get you behind the scenes.

Despite being an avid museum visitor myself, I have not encountered many behind the scenes opportunities. The times I have, it gave me a real feeling for what the museums were all about and a sense of amazement and privilege, even for someone like me who has worked in museums for over a decade. So why aren’t there more behind the scenes opportunities? Below are a few of the challenges that we are facing in our own preparations.

A lack of physical space. When our facility was built in 1968, visitors were not a factor, let alone a priority, when it came to the areas where artifacts were being prepared and stored. These collection areas are now close to overflowing with artifacts and in many cases there is no room for a small group to gather.

Don’t feed the animals. Although people working in the museum understand the value of a good exhibition, we’d rather not be on display while working. It’s hard enough to work with a deadline looming over you, let alone with 10 pairs of eyes watching you. To the left: artist Adrienne Aikins working literally "inside the scenes" at the the Royal BC Museum.

Please do not touch. In the public galleries we work hard to ensure that there are hands-on opportunities whenever possible but specimens, artifacts and records behind the scenes are protected from all sorts of things including light and handling. How can we give visitors a glimpse of the vastness of the collections without putting the objects at risk?

Who leads the tours? In addition to their own research, curators, collection managers and other staff spend a lot of time with the public doing presentations and answering questions. Is leading a guided tour the best use of their time?

Could we become a victim of our own success? We took these issues into consideration and spoke with people in the know. Over Spring Break we ran a total of twelve test tours into three different collection areas. The first day we had to turn away as many people as we could take on the tour.

What’s next? More planning, testing and training have to take place before we launch the tours in July of this year so we can end up with an experience that is enjoyable for you and also sustainable for us.

You can comment here to help us with this planning. Have you ever taken a behind the scenes tour? Where was it and what was it that made it special? What would you like to see behind the scenes at the Royal BC Museum?

Slowing Down Real Life

This is my first blog entry. I’m going to write about the stresses… and joys of creating exhibitions.

Maybe there are only a few of us ‘exhibition geeks’ who think that what we do might interest others. But I hope that the strange world in which questions like ‘how do you simulate French fries?’ and ‘can you mould a slug?’ are commonplace, might be of some interest to others.

Our business is unusual. There are few professions that stretch so far between art and science, academia and showbiz, business and pleasure. In fact, are there any? Indeed, the very way we develop exhibitions seems to be fraught with paradox – is it science or art… education or entertainment?

I’ll try to focus on projects that we are working on right now, and give a glimpse of the magic and the confusion of this work.

I’m going to start with an exhibition called Royal BC Museum: Behind the Scenes. It opens on June 25. In it, we turn ourselves inside out to expose the work we do… behind the scenes [quelle surprise!]. Part One will run for more than a year and focus on the work of our Natural History staff. Part Two opens in 2011 with a focus on Human History.

How odd that for this inaugural post on the topic of contemporary exhibition challenges, I turn to one of the most traditional of museum art forms – the diorama. Not the great sweeping spectacles of the American Natural History Museum or the forest and coastal dioramas of our own museum, but tiny dioramas starring slugs, goldfish and mosquitoes! (Image below: Colin Longpre’s simulated French fries are a hit with starlings!)

A few years ago, I learned a big lesson from a small museum. Dioramas don’t need to be epic in scale. In fact, being tiny can sometimes focus the attention. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles is a lesson in the power of great storytelling in miniature.

I think dioramas are exquisitely interesting. They are low tech in a world of digital showiness. And yet, there is something compelling about them, even in the digital age. They are masterful representations of life in the original 3-D. Visitors love them for their clarity, their apparent reality and for the skill of the diorama artist. And maybe in a world where life is fleeting, transitory, and intangible, the diorama provides a welcome respite. Dioramas let us slow down and wonder. (Image below: Kate Kerr does a little miniature farming.)

To the challenge at hand – Behind the Scenes will feature a special presentation on the topic of invasive species. Our curators presented a menu of 30 invasive species as the focus. Now… we have a very talented and resourceful exhibitions team, but I have to say that the first reaction as they got their assignment was less than enthusiastic. Let’s face it… sometimes the subject of the show is not exactly movie star material... slugs, mosquitoes, starlings, goldfish… I mean, come on! But this is where the magic comes in. The creative process sometimes needs a few days of gestation… and before long our wonderful team of Exhibit Arts Technicians had started to mock up a whole series of scenes... miniature snapshots from life. I think the mundane nature of the topic became the very challenge. What I love about what they have done is how they resisted the temptation to use media and accepted the challenge of creating a world in three dimensions. And I love that the scenes are not the pristine visions of nature that the old dioramas represent… but rather they are about nature and us… starlings and French fries.

Tim Willis

Recommended reading and other links:

Great article: Diorama-o-rama by Jesse Smith

Great book: Windows on Nature: the great habitat dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, Stephen Quinn

Great visit: the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles