Capital history in the news
New tours and exhibitions
NFSA Building History: If These Walls Could Talk | National Film and Sound Archive building history tours will be held on the first Friday of every month. Tickets are free but bookings are essential at If these walls could talk or at the front desk.
Pub Rock at the National Portrait Gallery | This exhibition celebrates the people, places, and sounds of Australian pub rock and its enduring impact on our nation’s identity. Free but bookings essential – as Timed ticketing is in place for all visits to the Gallery. On show daily until Sunday 14 February 2021.
Australian Dreams Picturing our Built World | The National Library of Australia has a new exhibition that explores how buildings express our social values, progress and identify. Drawing exclusively from the collections of the National Library, the exhibition features photographs, prints, drawings, and paintings. It is free with no bookings required on until the 31 January 2021.
Canberra history stories and finds
Harry Mouat was the first surveyor of the rugged ACT-NSW border more than 100 years ago | Historian Matthew Higgins writes about how the ACT border was marked out over a century ago with a particular focus on the surveying work of Harry Mouat in the wild mountainous country of the upper Cotter.
ACTarchives find of the month | Floriade is billed as “Australia’s Festival of Spring”, but before its spectacular beginning in 1988, Canberra celebrated its spring blossoms in a more modest way. This is shown in Canberra tourist brochures of the 1980’s, the ACTarchives find of the month.
Vote for your favourite fossil to be ACT's newest emblem | Canberrans can chose from five fossils found locally that are competing to be the newest emblem of the ACT. Geoscience Australia chief scientist Steve Hill explains that fossils instill a sense of wonder about the incredible scale of geological time and place that they reflect. Voting closes during National Science Week on October 13.
Citizen scientists wanted for climate history project
Help complete Australia’s longest daily weather record | Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) are launching a new citizen science project to create Australia's longest daily weather record beginning in 1838. Volunteers will digitise observations from the 1840s and 1850s which have been previously unused in climate change research. The project is accessed on the citizen science platform, Zooniverse: www.zooniverse.org/projects/caitlinhowlett/climate-history-australia.
Acknowledgement: The National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) have started tours of their historic building on the first Friday of every month. The image above is of the NFSA building sometime between 1930 and 1950 when it housed the Australian Institute of Anatomy. It was created by Mullins, John., and Rose Stereograph Co. and comes from the State Library of Victoria. Full details here.
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