Today we visited the National Museum of Australia, which is an unusually designed building - there's something which looks like a rollercoaster / skating ramp coming out of the building at the front! We walked from the hostel, along the edge of the lake, and down a bit of a dirt track to get to the museum.

Like all good museums, admission was free, and there were lots of exhibitions, so you could easily spend a day there. The first exhibitions we looked around were 'Old New Land' which explained a bit about the environmental history of the country, and 'Australian Journies' which explored the personal stories of migrants to Australia and the impacts of their journies here. The last part we looked at before lunch was my favourite, it was called 'Eternity' and is based on 10 emotional themes such as 'joy', 'mystery' and 'chance'. For each theme there were stories from 5 people who have lived in Australia - you chose which story to listen to using a touch screen in front of the glass case which contained objects relating to each story. It was a small, simple exhibit, but I really enjoyed the stories that I chose to watch. We would have spent more time in that gallery, but our bellies were telling us it was lunchtime!

We ate lunch in the museum café and sat outside in the sunshine. In the afternoon we looked around the rest of the exhibitions including an interactive one called Kspace, which was aimed at kids, but we enjoyed! We had to pretend that we were in the future, and use touch screens to design a futuristic house and vehicle. We only had about 3 minutes to design it (using multiple choice options, so it didn't take long!), and then we were shown into the 3D theatre and given our 3D glasses (which the old guy running it spent too long explaining how to use!) and watched a short cartoon of the 'future' featuring our designs - high tech! It actually seemed a bit dated, and the 3D glasses were massive compared to the ones you get in the cinema, but it was still fun!

Before leaving, we had a coffee and some mars bar cheesecake (yum!) in the café, then on our way out we spotted one of the temporary exhibitions that we'd missed earlier. It was called 'Inside: Life in Children's Homes and Institutions' and was an extremely moving exhibition, telling personal stories of people brought up in these homes, including the child migrants from the UK. One of the volunteers working there had grown up in one of the boys homes, and spent a while talking to Dave and sharing his experiences. It was heartbreaking to read some of the personal accounts, and scary to remember that it wasn't really that long ago that it was still going on. We continued talking about it on our walk back to the hostel afterwards.

That evening / night, we spent on the computer updating the blog, booking hostels for the east coast and skyping. Tomorrow we head to Sydney where we will spend the next 10 days over Christmas and New Year!