This was borne out for me at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin, where I intersected with a traveling exhibit of "National Treasures from Australia's Great Libraries," and found I sort of knew why each article there was displayed, and recognized many.It was wonderful to see early maps where New Holland and New South Wales have not yet grown together, the only surviving prisoner's uniform, Governor Arthur's 1830 Declaration (the picture at right - can you figure out what it's trying to say? the Tasmanian Aborigines read between the lines) and a near contemporary print depicting the importation of wives to the male-dominated colonies (below), Ned Kelly's mask (usually in the SLV here in Melbourne), original drawings from
The Magic Pudding, diaries from Cook's expedition to the Mabo land rights case, the origins of the Hills Hoist and the Sydney Opera House and "Waltzing Matilda" (with a different melody), and much else besides - right down to the original Gould's book of fish! Even 
the portrait of Bungaree (left), the Aboriginal guide who accompanied Matthew Flinders on the first circumnavigation of the continent seemed familiar. (Everything's on the website, nicely explained.)"I've got this place sussed," I thought to myself, just before I headed off to Kakadu to once again have the ground pulled out from under my feet - or is it: ground put under the ground under my feet? Australia's strange and shifting mix of amazingly recent and unfathomably ancient gets you coming and going.
