N  75  Canberra  (Part  2 )

 

After the Botanical Garden we continued on to the National Museum. This museum came to this permanent home only in 2001 and its architecture can be called extraordinary. It is based on a theme of knotted ropes , symbolically bringing together the stories of Australians including the Aborigines , the original settlers. The building is meant to be the centre of the knot with trailing ropes or strips extending from the building. It profiles a long history of indigenous heritage, settlements since 1788 and key events in Australia’s history.. We could see a large collection of Aboriginal bark paintings.

We strolled leisurely along the several galleries displaying paintings, photos or other works of art and the social history of Canberra, looking for the featured stone tools, the heart of the champion race horse Phar Lap and the Holden prototype No. 1 car and found them.

 

The last place we visited was the Royal Australian Mint. Beside producing the circulating coins it also produces medals for military and civilian honors, most notably the Order of Australia, and also mint coins for other foreign countries. It has the capacity to produce 2 million coins a day. The public can observe the coin processing ,which is mostly done by robots from designated places.

On the groundfloor there is a place where people can buy coins to keep as souvenirs. There is a machine that produce a single coin at a time, with the concerning year to keep as souvenir. Because we went in 2012 it was minting coins with the year 2012 on them. If we queue in front of the machine and press some buttons the coins will come out from the machine. And so we can say we minted the coin by ourselves. But only  after paying 3 dollars for a 1 dollar coin.But it is worth  paying for the experience and everybody seemed happy about it.

After that we came back for some rests at the hotel. The  place we were staying was a little far from Canberra CBD because the city was built like that. SL who was living in Canberra told us that the  suburbs are somewhat distant from the town centre at the present with natural vegetation and bushlands in between , but they are expected to close in on the city later and filled it up.

 

That evening we made some plans to go and look for kangaroos because we have heard that there are plenty of them in Canberra. We hadn ‘t seen a single kangaroo since we had been in Australia. SL said they were often found near the golf course , and so we went there. Parking the car we walked into the golf course and began to cross the lawns to the other side where there was a plot shaded by trees, but a little worried that we will be hit by golf balls.

Then somebody exclaimed… there they are…. the kangaroos ; And we saw a  whole lot of them , some standing , some lying on the ground. We were so excited and want to go near them but we were warned beforehand that they are fierce animals and can attack people. So we stopped a little distant from them and just took pictures without enough light , and so didn’t get good photos. We saw more of the creatures in the distant on the other side too. So only with the thought that we had seen them we came back contentedly.