After postponing last year, Melbourne Museum’s Treasures of the Natural World exhibition is finally going ahead this June. We might have had to wait a year to see these treasures, but in the big scheme of things, they’re older than most of us can even comprehend. One year is nothing in the natural world—there’s an 11 million-year-old fragment of a Martian meteorite in this exhibition, people.
The prestigious Natural History Museum in London has been lying pretty dormant for the last year, but the Melbourne Museum is breathing life back into its artefacts and borrowing the objects for display right here in Melbourne. If you’ve been waiting your whole life to visit London and see the museum for yourself, this is the next best thing.
From Friday 25 June, Melbourne Museum will be displaying over 200 objects from the world-renowned collection in London. The Natural History Museum in London has one of the largest and most significant collections in the world, so it’s kind of a big deal for them to be lending to us exclusively. It’ll be the first time the London museum has lent a collection to an Australian museum, and we’re the lucky ones who get to host it. Like most things, the exhibition has been curated and organised by the two museums online so we can’t wait to see the end result.
Each of the objects plays a pivotal role in our collective understanding of the natural world—there will be curiosities that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, a 400,000 year old hand axe, the bones of a wooly mammoth and loads more from the realms of science, history and culture. The Melbourne Museum will also be presenting their own interpretation, with First Nations narratives represented to show the connection and deep knowledge Australia’s First Peoples shared with the natural world.
Tickets are already on sale for the exhibition which will run from Friday 25 June to Sunday 16 January 2022. Get your tickets here.
If you want to see more international gems coming to Melbourne, check out the Winter Masterpieces showing at the NGV this June.
Image credit: Tarpit Grover