richmond

After we left the Bonorong wildlife park we headed over to a small tourist town called Richmond, famous for it's old bridge.

There it is. The oldest bridge in Tasmania. And that's about all you can do in Richmond. You can go over it, and if you're feeling REALLY adventurous you can go over it the other way!

Ok, so Richmond isn't all that boring, near the bridge is a stuffed animal house and sitting there are these guys. I don't really know what to think of them, but there they are.

Hey, another prison in Australia! Well how about that. For some reason in the olden days they spelled Jail as Gaol, and so this particular prison is the Richmond Gaol.

As humiliation, all prisoners were dressed to look like bad court jesters from medievil times. It's true look it up.

Here are some tools of the trade. The infamous cat-o-nine tails, which you all probably know about, and then this human-trap which is modeled after the bear-trap. Yeah, pretty sick isn't it. I guess these were loaded all around the prison to catch escapees, but for people who lived nearby I guess they just had to be careful where they went walking.

This model shows the layout of the prison. It's pretty dinky as far as prisons go, but it does have a colourful past.

Ok, this is sick and hilarious. Mary Milligan was sentenced to 2 days in solitary confinement (pictured) for BEING IN A DISORDERLY HOUSE! These guys meant business. Clean the dishes Mary or I will have you thrown in gaol! Oh the eighteen hundreds, good times.

A quick story: at this particular prison there was a particular man who did the whipping for all the prisoners. If you were caught doing anything bad (or keeping an untidy abode) this guy would whip you with that cat-o-nine tails, up to 100 times per offence in some cases.
Side note: whipping was done with a doctor on hand for safety reasons. If the person being whipped would pass out from lack of blood or if too much of their back skin was removed they would stop the whipper. Now this seems nice, but after you were healed from your wounds you were made to FINISH the lashes you were given. There's no winning with these guys.
Back to the story: so anyways, this particular lasher man. This guy was hated by the whole town because a) he was an ex-inmate who would give lashes to current inmates. and b) he would purposely get prisoners into trouble just so he could whip them. So, one night he was getting drunk in town and someone who didn't like his methods actually pushed him off the Richmond bridge and killed him. Justice served I think.

If you're stuck in Richmond and don't particularly like Gaols or Bridjes, then you may enjoy this maze. Holy crap is it hard! It took 4 of us about an hour to get through the thing. And when you get out of it, tired hungry and cold you get a piece of candy :)

Richmond church

Richmond graveyard

A lake/dam I can't remember whats its called.


and that's all folks. Not the most exciting blog post, but still an awesome day for me. Hope all you Canadians are doing fine, miss you all.

What you all want to see!

Kangaroos, wallabys, wombats, koalas. devils, and emus oh my!

Last weekend I went to a wildlife park and met some of Australia's finest. The Bonorong ( or Bono's Wrong as Kyle has mentioned) wildlife park is about a half hour drive out of town and totally worth it. Let's begin:

When you get to the park they give you some kangaroo feed to feed the animals around the place. I tried to feed them all but as you walk around you find out there are like a hundred kangaroos there and it's impossible to feed them all. Smart wallabys like this guy are near the entrance, which is why he looks a little chubby probably.

A wombat! He is the real reason I came down to Australia. Sure they have a nice art school here and the accent is lovely to hear and the beaches and weather, but wombats c'mon. They win. This little guy, and I say little because they get twice as big as that, is an orphan; his mother hit by a car. Someone found the small guy and brought him to the park where they keep good care of him until they release him back into the wild. He is shy as you can see because they have a strong affection towards their mothers until they reach adolesence, then they bugger off and do their own thing.

Here he is again having a good scratch.

and again with me patting him. I don't think you're supposed to reach into their pens, but he came right up to me and was begging for a pat, so who am I to say otherwise. We are best buds now.

This is a yellow tailed black cockatoo. He doesn't seem very impressive especially after hanging out with a wombat, but I read his little card and this guy actually got shot and someone rescued him. He's the gangsta of the wildlife park, because he got shot, and because he's now in jail until he dies. I blame the school system.

Peacock, natures attention whores.

This is Barnaby, the sixteen year old Koala. Koala's only live for about 12 years, so he is way past his prime. Some Koala facts:
1)They are really stupid (the zoologists words not mine). Because they only eat eucalyptis leaves which are nutritionally awful their brains haven't developed too well.
2) They sleep 20 hours a day
3) They have a hard plate on their bums like wombats. Wombats use their plate to defend themselves in their burrows, squishing enemies heads against the roof of the burrow; Koalas use theirs as a seat.
4) Because they are stupid if you scratch them they think an earthquake is happening. Really. I was petting this guy and accidentally scratched him and he kinda freaked out in slow motion (probably really quickly in Koala time)
5) I was going to try and eat some eucalyptis but apparently it's poison to humans. Actually, even after I found that out I was still going to eat some, but I couldn't reach it in their pen.
6) They have this weird bald patch on their chest, which for lack of a better description looks a lot like female genetalia. This is a scent gland which they rub on trees to mark their territory.
7) They make a weird grunting noise which sounds like an elephant with the hiccups.

They may be stupid but they are pretty cute.

A wallaby and a kangaroo. I think it's a wallaby anyways, that's what I have been calling them and nobody has corrected me yet. Small kangaroo if I am wrong.

Pretty sure all native Australian animals are cute and or funny looking. These are Tawny Frogmouths, I want one on my shoulder.

One of the perks of the job must be naming animals and giving them wierd personal ads.

I felt so bad for this guy. These birds are flying around freely all over the park, but this one was in a cage.

An echidna. I really hope he was just having a nap in the sun because I was watching him for like ten minutes and he didn't move.

Roos are all over this place! As you can see they are super tame, and actually pretty lazy. You pretty much have to walk up to them and stick food right in front of their noses to feed them. the kangaroo doing the aerobics had an itch, and the one Naemi is feeding you can see has a joey in its pouch which always seems cuter in kids books then it does in real life. Kinda looks like a huge spider is trying to get out of its stomach. Ick.

A goose type thing and a very sleepy tasmanian devil.

The enormous emu. What to say about this thing... well, I don't really like it. You could feed it the same stuff as the kangaroos but they aren't nearly as gently, whatsoever. I tried feeding it but he tried to beak me to death and scared the crap out of me. Also, their feathers aren't like normal feathers. They're oily and feel like sticks. Lucky he was behind a fence, because I hear they can kill people with their talons. They jump on top of you and just stomp you to death. I don't like emus.

So these guys are supposed to sleep twenty hours a day, but not one of them was sleeping the whole time I was there.

And lastly a Cookaburra! Look at him sit in that old gum tree. Laughing.

After the wildlife park we went to Richmond, a tiny touristy town. I will post those pictures in a few days. Hope everyone liked the animals, I know I did!

MONA art gallery

I went to MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, my first week in Tassie, but I had to go back and bring my camera this time to take some pics of the sweet art they got going there. I went with Venita and I hope the weird art didn't scare her too much.

For fifteen bucks you can take a ferry return from downtown to the gallery way up the river. Pricing down here makes no sense; fifteen bucks for a sweet ferry ride to a world class gallery which is FREE to enter, but it costs me thirty two bucks for 2 packs of smokes. 8 bucks for a couple bananas, 9 dollars a pint. Anyways...

This here is the Tasman Bridge. It's a big bridge as you can see, but apparently some guy in the seventies didn't see it and drove his tanker ship into one of the pillars. He broke the bridge and cars drove off it and died and nobody likes that guy anymore I am sure.

After about a twenty minute ferry ride full of useless information on cantelever designed bridges and zinc oxide power plants you arrive at MONA.

The entrance to the gallery has a tennis court for some reason. The site it's on is actually a winery; you can see the distillery in that rotunda shaped building on the left. Rotunda, good word. Let's have a look at some freaky art now!

The fat car! It's actually a porshe, and unfortunatly looks undrivable. Would be cool to pull that thing up to a Mcdonalds drive thru.

As an art nerd I was amazed to actually see this piece in this gallery. Not my favorite piece of art, but the history behind it is fascinating. It's a black virgin mary with an elephant poo nipple and cut outs of womens bums from porn magazines. Quite a shocker of an art work when it was first unveiled back in the day, but as art history will tell you the more denounced and shocking an artwork is seemed to be the more desirable the artwork becomes.

You are allowed to bring cameras into the gallery, but you can't use flash unfortunatly. Tho I did 'accidentaly' forget a few times. It's really weird to be in a gallery where thousand year old treasures from Egypt and Messopotamia are situated next to sculptures from the eighties with peoples dicks cut off and being hung upside down. THOSE CRAZY ARTISTS I TELL YA!

People HATE Jean Michel Basquiat. He's dead now so his feelings won't be hurt if you say bad stuff about him. I however love his stuff. His art is immediatly recognizable and he is by far the best of the worst artists from the eighties, in my opinion anyways. I had to write an essay about him once and I will stop now before I write another on this blog.

Is that a tattood pig skin? Yes it is. This artists as I recall, sells the live pigs with tattoos already on them as the artworks. Now this seems cruel to tattoo a pig which is still living and breathing and rolling in mud and pooping, but in actuality these pigs live far better lives then those who show up as bacon on our breakfast plates. If you buy one of the pigs you have to pay for it to stay at a piggy retirement home until it dies of natural causes and then you get the lovely pig hide afterwards. Oink Oink!

Arrrr, some pirate booty from a sunken ship!

Here's a weird one. A line of water jets drops random words of water every couple of seconds. Words like black ops and niki and Step Up 2.

It's hard to take a good photo of the gallery space because it's like a huge maze of little galleries and installations, but this shot sort of gives you a bit of scale feeling of how big it is. Apparently it cost more to make the building then the value of all the artworks combined.



Now speaking of value of artworks, this is a Damien Hirst spin painting and it's probably worth a million bucks because it's a Damien Hirst piece. People hate Damien Hirst, but artists are generally just bitchy people.

There are no titles on any of the artworks, instead when you go into the gallery they give you an iphone which has a GPS in it and shows you information on nearby artworks. This forest thing was situated directly under the spin painting by Hirst because the wife of the gallery owner hates both of them and so she stuck them together to which the gallery owner finds hilarious. (He is kind of a weirdo, but i'll explain more on him later).

A movie about a talking fat house! Same guy who did the fat car obviously. The iphone describes it simple as "This house has a really annoying voice", which it does because all it does is complain about how it doesn't know if it's a house or an artwork because it's in a gallery. It is cute tho.

This head is pretty awesome. It has viewing holes in it with this spinning film sculpture which was impossible to take a photo of but I tried.

The photo looks like chaos but it was crystal clear when you actually looked at it. Guess you will just have to come down and see it for yourself.

Another thing I have always wanted to see, the Colonic machine! It mimics the digestive process of our own bodies using a series of enzymes and 'stomachs'. It actually stinks something fierce.

Feeding time for the machine! Stupid machine eats better then I do, even gets a beer for lunch. Under the silver bowl is a blender which mimics human teeth. Then the food passes from one 'stomach' to the next until at 2pm every day it takes a scheduled....

...shit. We missed pooping time, but you san see a little bit poking out of the tube there. This machine apparently took 8 years of research to make, when I do it every ten hours or so. I win.

Cool spinning light drawing machines.

Hi mummy!

The last thing I will show you is this rock deal. It fills up a whole room and has creepy ship and wave noises. Then you come around and see this strange doorway.

Upon which you enter this cheesy movie set looking place with short doors that don't open and music which sounds like God save the Queen. I don't get it, and maybe I am not supposed to. It's actually by some Canadian Artist from Montreal whose name I can't remember or be bothered to look up.

So that was a very small look at the MONA gallery here in Tasmania. There are thousands of artworks to look at and even after my second time going there are STILL things I have yet to see I'm sure. If you were to just watch the movies in the gallery it would take you a full day of non stop looking. Tho some are pretty out there with people taking shits and being humped by dogs, and so you would probably get sick afterwards. This one movie theater room was set up watching a film about cutting meat, but they put ashtrays all over the place and filled the room with the smell of cigarette smoke. That was just torture for any smoker who walks in there knowing you can't light up.

So the guy who own the gallery who's name evades me is an interesting sort. He is a slightly autistic multimillionaire off of some gambling website or something. The kind of excentric rich guy you expect all rich guys to be. I purchased the catalogue for the gallery and on the last page is just him sitting ass naked on a chair. I bet hes a fun drunk. Anyways, the only reason why this very prestigious gallery is in such a place as Hobart with only 200 thousand people in it, is because he has a kid here and wanted to stay close by. He actually lives in the gallery somewhere, being a naked creep no doubt. And that's all my random facts about that guy. Hope you liked the walkthrough of the gallery, if you ever have the time and money head on down, it's pretty awesome.