The Melbourne Museum

Today I went to the Melbourne Museum, which contains exhibits on the human body, WWI, evolution, the history of Melbourne, and Aboriginal culture. The Human Body exhibit had actual human organs on display as well as an audio section of a medical school professor carrying out the dissection of a convict who had been sentenced to death.  I do not consider myself squeamish and I am perfectly fine with carrying out dissections on animals in biology classes. However, upon hearing that audio clip, complete with the sounds of sawing and bones breaking, I was suddenly very happy with my decision to be a psychologist and not a psychiatrist because I could not make it through a cadaver lab if I were in medical school.

The other exhibit that left the biggest impact on me was the one Aboriginal culture.  The tragedies they have suffered are similar to those ordeals the Native Americans in the United States underwent.  As with Native Americans, many children were stolen from their homes and placed into white families or communities. These lost generations, as the exhibit referred to them, were taken from their communities and cut off from their culture. Despite being in a different country, I am finding the culture very similar and it is easy to find parallels. Besides that, I cannot seem to escape the American culture completely. There are more American TV shows and movies here than native ones as well as music and brands. These children, however, who were uprooted from lives in their Aboriginal communities, I think did not have an easy time with the differences. Though technically they never left the country, they certainly left their cultures and were placed in a new one. From the first hand accounts in the exhibit, these lost generations had to deal with many more barriers than I have come across and due to Americanization and Westernization more than I may ever encounter.