Football, Biodiversity and Secrecy

First, we had the opening of Yiloga! Tiwi Footy last weekend. The design and curatorial teams have done a great job with this show - taking the 40 photographs which tell the Tiwi Footy story, and adding art and craft objects and game and documenrary footage to an amazing environment. The exhibition now features a beautiful display of fabrics by a group of visiting artists from the Northern Territory, and the unveiling of two new 'Footy Man' sculptures which have been acquired by the Museum especially for the project. We have more events this Saturday to kick this one off (sorry) - I'll try and get some photos to post on the blog, but do try and see the exhibition if you can!

This Saturday is also International Biodiversity Day - so we are opening the new Alive arena - which is our celebration of International Year of Biodiversity 2010. The Museum is already well involved in International Year projects - most notably a national project to establish museum-linked events at locations all around Australia.

But Alive is our own biodiversity hub for the year - you may have seen this story in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, which gives a good flavour of what we are planning (plus a nice pic of Tanguy, our designer on this project). For us, this year is more about a big range of events than a single exhibition - but we are still creating a dramatic specimen display as a centrepiece to the event arena.

And with all that going on, how poignant to see news stories this week about both the frightening rate of species extinction we face and then, a few days later, the discovery of a whole array of new species in Indonesia. Truly, we live in a remarkable world.