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A lovely night's sleep in my very own room which might as well have been ensuite! Five beds, all to myself and a ladies only bathroom next door which nobody used. Lovely!
By 9am I was all packed, checked out and on my way to Queen Street to check the money situation. Suffice it to say, it was not good. $62 in my account to cover two more night's accommodation in Sydney and transport to and from the airport. So for the first time in my life I whipped out the credit card. I suppose I had to start up a credit history at some point.
Crisis over I walked across the Brisbane River to the South Bank and spent the morning perusing Brisbane's best museums and art galleries. First stop, 'Queensland Museum'. An odd yet interesting collection of artefacts from dinosaur bones, aboriginal art, a zoo of stuffed animals, old planes and fire engines, the history of life guards and the story of three ANZAC soldiers who were awarded the Victoria Medal. It is only a tiny museum and worth the $0 I paid to get in. Hardly the 'British Museum' but I suppose Aussies do have to scratch around a little harder to find enough stuff to show off their history ... all 200years of it.
In all honesty it was more interesting than I expected it to be and I did learn a lot but the 'Museum of Art and the 'Gallery of Modern Art' were a million times better. I was shocked to see a whole exhibition dedicated to European Art which only contained Flemish and English artists. I didn't know whether or not to inform someone that the Italians were pretty good too, but I was enjoying the limelight the British were afforded so I thought best to leave things be. Some beautiful paintings by 'F. Cadogen Cowper', 'M.E Dockree', 'John Faed' and 'Blandford Fletcher'. Not artists I have ever heard of but I was really taken with their paintings and would have loved to have seen more.
I then walked through a new exhibition of Scott Redford's new collection 'Introducing Reinhardt Dammn' . It was mesmerising and I knew a few people at home who would have loved it too. It was about surf and surf culture and included a life-size dummy of a surfer holding a surf board but with his face done up as a clown. There was a video of a girl sawing a surf board in half in her apartment and there were hundreds of painting of waves with surf stickers on them and surf boards used as canvases. Really good stuff!
The 'Gallery of Modern Art' however was by far the best. I could have stayed there all day. They had a mounting of lego blocks to play with, a wall full of holes with small ribbons hanging out of them with wishes on them. You could take a wish and then put a piece of paper in the hole with your own wish written on it. Cool stuff. Then there was a bridge made out of cardboard boxes, a swimming pool you could get into and not get wet (and no it was not empty). I even walked around with a head piece on and filmed myself looking at art and chatting about it which has now been e-mailed to me. By far the best bit was the 'you tube' wall; a wall full of little screens playing the best of 'you tube'. You could also sit at a bigger screen with a pair of headphones and watch as many as you liked.
The best way to spend my last few hours in Brisbane I had left before a train ride, a plane ride and a bus ride back to Sydney.
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