Our first serious museum. The big one – the famous Naturhistoriches Museum Wien. A monument to curiosity and the desire to learn, classify and understand everything in the natural world. Magnificent building on the outside.
And spectacular within. Statues of the men who had collected and dissected the specimens contained within adorned the stairs. One who had famously been regarded as the last man to know everything about the world – before that knowledge became too big for any one person to know.
Aboriginal Australians depicted alongside Native Americans on the exterior.
These men of the Enlightenment were interested in everything around them. Hard to conjure up the sense of excitement about exploration and discovery that fuelled this endeavour. The whole museum exudes confidence that the world was knowable once it had been observed, classified and displayed. Amazing. Two levels. The Mezzanine – minerals, fossils, prehistory, (anthropology – being refurbished so we didn’t get to see that). And the First Floor – zoology (microcosm, molluscs, insects, vertebrates). Thirty nine separate halls – plenty to see and marvel at. Beautiful windows. Display cases designed to ensure you could see everything.
We started with minerals – plenty of references to Australia here, including nuggets from Ballarat. What did they think – these cultured men of Vienna – when hearing news from the other side of the earth?
Other stones from Australia as well – opals and other less famous ones. Very beautiful colours – pinks, blues, reds. Some enormous chinks of rock – a lump of Topaz came up to my knee. From everywhere – all over the world. All carefully labelled with dates and locations (continents, countries, cities) in tiny discursive script conjuring up feather pens on small, yellowing cards.
There were also examples of the jewellery made from the precious metals. Some quite exquisite. From minerals we moved on to fossils. Fantastic.
Then onto dinosaurs. There were actual bones as well as re-creations. Some moving models as well.
In the pre-history halls there were lots of early human implements and ornaments. From the earliest times we have been making beads to wear. There was also, Venus, the oldest statue ever found, a tiny figure of a very curvaceous woman. A burial site was a little confronting – a number of skeletons jumbled together, tall ones apparently seeking to protect smaller ones. Up the stairs. To the microcosm section. Some of the earliest microscopes – including the model used by Louis Pasteur. And we got to do some inter-active stuff with more modern versions.
We then moved onto my favourite section – insects – doesn’t describe the variety! Fantastic. A whole cabinet of different sorts of ladybirds – all in pairs, all with different markings. Too dark to photograph. Lots of beetles. Lovely butterflies of all
sizes and colours. Purples, blues, reds, oranges, green. All the colours of the rainbow. Other strange things that were almost translucent. So delicate Such ingenuity in terms of camouflage. From tiny things to gigantic. Enormous moths. Ants and flies. Bees – including a working hive that had bees coming in from outside. All set out in pairs – pinned there for us to see and for scientists to learn from. So much diversity in the insect kingdom.
On to the vertebrates. Started with sharks – not much that was new to us there. Displays included surfboards with big chunks out of them! Scenes from the film Jaws. Then great glass cupboards full of reptiles in lovely cylindrical jars. All different sizes. Started with salamanders – strange looking creatures. Some tiny, some huge. All pale. Then snakes. Beautiful colours, amazing patterns, all different sizes. All shown off to great effect. A whole wall of snakes. Then frogs – some lovely colourful ones but more of the fairy tale variety – huge brown warty things.
And of course we loved the lizards. So many different varieties. Australia’s bearded dragons, blue tongues and goannas all there – a long way from home. Lots of pretty little geckos. All in their formaldehyde jars looking like they are sleeping or about to pounce on their prey. Obviously been there for years. by this stage we were not looking at the labels – would have been in the museum forever if we had been.
The birds were also wonderful as expected. Great glass cases, vitrines holding every imaginable species in all sorts of poses. Australian galas and rosellas – didn’t se the kookaburra but would have been there. New Zealand’s kiwis. Beautiful falcons and hawks. Penguins, gulls, owls, ducks. Some strange and ugly things. There were some displays that had been given awards for the best stuffed bird at some prestigious event. So the craft is still valued here in Vienna. Seems an old fashioned thing to do in this modern age of computer graphics and 3D imaging.
Finally lots of animals. Once again some familiar. There were kangaroos and wallabies as well as a rather sad looking, moth eared koala.
The usual exotic beasts. The lions, tigers, panthers and leopards looked as though they had been in the museum for a very long time. I really liked the big ones – bears and bison. They all look so lifelike. Strange to see them like this – all in the interest of science. Still strange to modern eyes.
We staggered out after about four hours feeling we had barely scratched the surface. You could certainly go regularly for a long time before you ran out of things to see. A great resource for local schools and there were lots of students of all ages going through in groups with harassed looking teachers! A great experience and all those people who told us we had to experience this while here in Vienna were absolutely right!
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