It's from an exhibit on the Victoria gold rush of the 1850s in the now empty vaults of the old treasury in Melbourne,
an effort to make the past seem relevant and interesting to the present. I take it this is a real newscaster, and imagine he was asked to talk about loss of life from shipwrecks, cholera deaths, and the labor shortage caused by worker abandoning the city for the gold fields north of here as if they were breaking news stories today.It works in its way, at least in divesting the past of its hoary patina. For me it also resonates with the strange contemporaneousness of past and present you feel when you first arrive in a place and try to understand its place in time and space - although that's more like expecting a hoary patina to the present, too. Melbourne 1859 is as new to me as Melbourne 2006; both feel relevant, interesting and historically significant. (Walking past Flinders Street Station yesterday, for instance, I thrilled at its being the busiest station in the world--though that was in the 1930s!) Or is it that, compared to the 40,000 years that Aborigines have lived in these parts, the 172 years since Melbourne's founding are as one moment?
By the way, there's another new post below this one, yesterday's. I didn't have a chance to post it then. (And don't believe the dates of these posts. Blogspot is on US time, so most things I post are recorded as if posted the day before. Right now, for instance, it's the afternoon of Sunday the 17th.)
