La France

For better or for worse, here are some minor thoughts I digitally jotted down during a recent trip to Paris.

Sculpture. In the gardens of the Louvre is a bronze sculpture of a reclining female nude. A succession of (mostly but not exclusively) male tourists are posing for photos embraced by her arms and legs. How many times has she endured this as she stares passively into the space just beyond her outstretched hand? What is she reaching for? Tourists?

The new tourists. All around Paris I see groups of well-groomed American girls. Are they out of school on a communal gap year? They are polite but their accents grate through no fault of their own. "Yeah... Like... Yeah... Mercy. Or rev-woir". They are practicing their French just like me. I bet my accent is ghastly to the locals :-)

Baguettes. The French certainly love their baguettes! At breakfast and at lunchtime, I have seen them walking the streets, brandishing their sticks of bread by a sheaf of wrapped paper. Much of the world has succumbed to practicality and carries a compact loaf. Still, there is something comical about a handlebar-mounted pannier with a baguette thrusting it's nose into the air ahead of the rider. This makes their perseverance endearing.

Velolib. I watched a guy pedal his bicycle from the hire racks down a cobbled lane. His girlfriend was perched cheerfully on the handlebars, facing him. This didn't improve the steering any, but the view was always to his taste.

Tour de France reporters. The sport presenters discussing the TDF this morning were two gorgeous, eye fluttering, posing blonde dolls. Why do we get Mike Tomalaris? SBS should import some European talent.

Foreigners in hotels. It can be funny leaving a foreign hotel frequented by tourists. This morning I was greeted by an American on the stairs in French. Later, a Chinese man and I awkwardly smiled as we passed in the corridor, unsure how to greet one another. There was a good chance he was Australian.

diorama gallery

The American Museum of Natural History has some lovely dioramas... and they are illustrated in the diorama gallery on their website! I adore these miniature worlds. An African plain, Californian valley, an Asian mountain range or an Australian desert all can be compressed into a virtual, tardis-like space along with the appropriate flora and fauna. A long walk for little legs can take a kid from one window to the next and an opportunity to gaze into the world's habitats. Is there anything more comforting than strolling down the halls of a museum at a travel destination and encountering a scene taken from the forest back home?

Of course at home in Melbourne's Museum Victoria we have had some fascinating dioramas also. I suspect that they may no longer exist. Please somebody tell me I am wrong! That would be a serious loss. Of course they reflected 1950s attitudes to Australian Aborigines in particular and present our landscape in simplistic, romantic ways. They are icons of their time, like Women's Weekly advertisements for white-goods aimed at Anglo-Saxon housewives and nuclear families. Australia's landscape is an integral part of the identity of the European settlers who colonised it and those who migrated here much later (but have taken the time to get out of the metropolises along its eastern seaboard).

Viewing the continent's flora and fauna from behind the glass wall of a museum exhibition is quite appropriate. We see the landscape as outsiders, peering in on a strange diorama, limited in the range of perspectives we adopt by the cultural baggage we have carried with us from Europe. Who are we staring at? It used to be that we stared at the Aboriginal people, standing holding spears and boomerangs in a dusty, grass-dotted plane, roasting a lace monitor on the fire. They belonged in the landscape with the kangaroos and koalas. We gawked stupidly from behind the safety of the glass.

But here we are, shaping the diorama as we see fit. Placing its inhabitants in idyllic hunter-gatherer settings that romanticise the history we cruelly interrupted, whilst hiding its difficulties and completely ignoring the damage we continue to inflict. Living here is a wonderful privilege, the cost of which has been born by others. Who'd have thought a museum diorama could hold so much?