12. to 18. March

We are on the way to Canberra and have a look at the festival. We got up early and hoped that the hot air balloons will raise and they did (just the second time during the last 7 days). There were some balloons from the Royal Air Force, the EU. We wanted to have a look at the special exhibition in the National Gallery but the queue was much too long even 30 minutes before the doors would open. Later we discovered that the exhibition was sold out for the Saturday and we’ve to return another day.

Instead of the gallery we walked through the Sculpture Garden which is adjacent to the Gallery Building. The Garden features several sculptures created by different artists. Some sculptures have even a story to them – like the heads flowing in the pond or the wooden boat just offshore. Several times you had to watch closely to see the sculpture – they were well hidden.

So we had enough time to explore the Glassworks. At weekends they offer workshops to the public – you can build your own glasswork. We watched how paperweights were created as well as different kind of vases. It amazing how quickly the tiny bits of glass are formed into a vase. I guess I wouldn’t have the creativity to do any of it. In the afternoon we enjoyed the sunshine over Lake Burley and Griffin as well at Mt. Ainslie. The National Sound and Film Archive was on our list as well as the CSIRO Discovery Centre. In the discovery centre you could see how well you memory is still working, what bio-diversity means, how to get energy using water… The National Sound and Film Archive stores films, radio scripts, ads… from the early days onwards. We watched the presentation of their work and they showed us an ad from 1950 starring a blonde girl with lots of boops (nothing has changed really), then we saw a little bit of Skippy – the bush-kangaroo. They even demonstrated how films were created in the early days. After the presentation we walked through the exhibition and could see some things of the presentation much closer.

The special exhibition in the National Gallery was our destination for Monday but we still had to wait two hours before we could enter. It showed several pictures from impressionist like van Gogh, Sauret, Bernard and some unknown artist. These pictures were on loan from the Musee d’Orsay in France.

 

 CU later, Tom and Anja