MELBOURNE (dpa) – Visitors to Melbourne notice how cosmopolitan the city is at the airport when they take a taxi driven by Emile from Lebanon or Musa from Turkey. The first thing a driver wants to know is where you come from – then they ask where you want to go.
In the evening, tourists strolling down Lygon Street in the centre are treated to 30-minute culinary tour of the world.
Chinese, Nepalese, Greek and numerous Italian restaurateurs have opened eateries here, but although Melbourne is such a multicultural city, the traces of one ethnic group disappeared from this metropolis long ago.
The missing folk are the Aborigines, Australia’s native inhabitants. Yet things have changed here too.
The Aborigines’ culture and traditions are celebrated in the Royal Botanic Gardens.
The park regularly offers a guided “Aboriginal Heritage Walk” on which participants are serenaded with didgeridoo music and inducted to the mysteries of a small fire whose smoke is supposed to purify the spirit.
Finally, guide Dean Stewart, himself an Aborigine, presses a eucalyptus leaf into each visitor’s hand – as a “passport”, so to speak, for a journey into the past. “We have 120 minutes’ time for 90,000 years of history,” says Dean.
Stewart’s explanations bring alive the botanic gardens’ lush greenery where black swans walk proudly by and flying foxes rest in the treetops. Many of the 52,000 different plants grown here were once a part of daily life for the Aborigines.
“They were medicine, they were their dwelling and they were a part of themselves,” says Dean as he passes a piece of bark taken from a macadamia nut-tree around the group.
He then spreads a map of Australia on the grass, an Australia that looks like a patchwork quilt of nations.
“Each colour symbolises one of the more than 300 languages once spoken by the Aborigines,” says Dean. “Today only 20 of these tongues are still used as first languages.”
The map also hangs on the wall in Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Department of Melbourne Museum. The building, opened in October 2000, is Australia’s largest museum complex and is worth a longer stay.
One of the aims of the exhibitions and the encounters in Bunjilaka is to correct the common image of the Aborigines as the inhabitants of Australia’s red centre.
“There is not one Aboriginal culture but many,” says Michael Pickering, the department’s first curator.
The exhibitions at Bunjilaka, which means “Land of the Creator”, feature colourful handiwork and everyday items. There are also many portraits of Aborigines and video clips in which their ancestors speak of their lives.
Bunjilaka is just one of many departments in Melbourne Museum, which also devotes plenty of space to Australia’s more recent history. Phar Lap, the country’s top racehorse and several-times winner of the Melbourne Cup, is also on display at the museum.
At least his coat is – his heart is in the capital Canberra and his skeleton in New Zealand. “This means that everyone has a bit of him – but we have the best bit,” says museum spokeswoman Katrina Hall.
Right now, a gaggle of schoolchildren sit cross-legged around the display to draw the famous horse, making use of the space still available in the rooms at Bunjilaka.
And although the legacy of the Aborigines is no longer hidden away in Melbourne, a lot of work still needs to be done.
Information: The “Aboriginal Heritage Walk” in the Royal Botanic Garden is held on Thursdays and Fridays at 11.00 a.m. and every second Sunday at 10.30 a.m. The price for adults is 15.40 Australian dollars (8.50 euros), and children under 16 6.60 dollars (3.65 euros). A reservation is necessary (Phone +61 (0)3 92522300).
Melbourne Museum is open daily from 10.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m. Entrance is 15 dollars (8.30 euros) for adults and 8 dollars (4.40 euros) for children. On the Internet: www.melbourne.museum.vic.gov.au; www.rgbmelb.org.au; and www.visitvictoria.com.
