A faster start means we take the 40 min bus to arrive at the Museum of Contemporary Art by 10.00.

The building is next to Circular Quay, and The Rocks. It's a fabulous location really. In fact we wanted to come here ever since sheltering in the rain, back in November / December. We had just acquired our umbrella. We were smug beyond belief. That was a good day.

In the Art Gallery, we first wandered around an exhibition by a group of Torres Strait Islanders (from Bathurst and Melville Islands to be exact). The exhibition was called Tiwi, which actually stands for 'one people' in their language.

...but just as we were getting into it all by ourselves, Alice hears over the tannoy that a free MCA gallery tour is about to begin. How could we refuse??

It was led by a lovely volunteer woman, who smelt faintly of PVC paint - incidentally, most of my Art teachers smelt of this. Anyone else also think the same? Anyway, it was about 45 minutes and very interesting. Here are some factoids:-

- The artworks by both Aboriginal and Australian artists were mixed up throughout the collection. Not many galleries do this in Australia
- The ordinal building of the MCA was the old Maritime Services Building. This has been rented to the MCA for next to nothing from the government, whist the new, shiny extension is only a couple years old now
- The MCA has an extensive collection of Indigenous bark art. This is thanks to a marketing man from the US who worked for Arnott's. He simply loved these paintings before they were 'in vogue', and would often travel to NT in order to buy them. When he died, he bequeathed them all to the company, which in then permanently loaned them to the MCA
- Amongst this collection is a bark painting by David Mulangi, otherwise known as "dollar Dave". This is because his bark painting was used for the new $1 bill when it was introduced 50 years ago, this week. (Cue "In come the dollars and in come the the cents"...)
- An Australian woman corrected the tour guide that dollars and cents were actually notionally from Spain NOT USA (for as historically, the McQuarrie Holley dollar was punched from Spanish Dollars) ... The American woman present, face like thunder mutters "I don't think so..." in response. Haha. Americans...
- Emily Kngwarreye, a famous indigenous painter. Who, at the age of 70 only started to paint! Traditionally in her culture, only men painted. In 4 years, she had painted over 1,000 paintings!!
- "Why is this 'Art' and not a video?" asked the enlightened American. Thanks for your contribution.

Concluding the tour, we spotted there was a Grayson Perry exhibition on. However, we're too poor to go. Plus, we could see this stuff in London Town baby.

We wander outside to warm up... It's very cold in the museum, indeed we even heard the security staff complain to the same effect as we left! But oh boy is it warm today in Sydney. Very humid actually.

There is a short wander around The Rocks. This is simply the ultimate souvenir area in Sydney. We make a few, modest purchases.

And before we leave an area that we have well trodden, we spot the Rocks museum. This was largely uneventful, save for a European colonisation video. We caught the following factoids:-

- Portugal got almost everywhere first
- Spain and Portugal had a historic agreement about what they could / couldn't colonise. This agreement had implications for what Cook claimed for Britain
- Broadly speaking... British, Dutch, Portuguese worked together vs. Spanish and French.

A bus back to South Coogee, so that we could get some much needed sun time to top up our tans

Beach for about 2 hours, before back to the bnb, shower and change for dinner with Chris and Christy.

We had dinner at the Coogee Bay Hotel, fully on Chris which was very kind. It was still SO humid tho.

To conclude, we endure a long walk back up the hill, then bed.

AF