2 Museums: Museum of Brisbane & Commissariat Store

This morning I visited two museums, the Museum of Brisbane and the Commissariat Store Museum.

Why two museums, you might ask. Well, let me tell you. When I checked the weather on the weather app I usually use, it said it was currently raining and it would rain all day.

I looked outside my hotel window. I didn’t see any signs of rain. I looked down and the streets appeared dry. But I’m on the 22nd floor and I was willing to accept the probability that my aged eyes deceived me.

So I checked two other weather apps. They both said the same thing: It’s currently raining and it will rain all day. I figured three out of three couldn’t be wrong. So I planned rainy day activities for at least the morning.

You might enjoy singing and dancing in the rain. I don’t*. For me, rainy day activities are indoors. I didn’t want to go to a shopping mall or movie, so I settled on museums. There aren’t a lot of museums in Brisbane so my choices were limited. Of the three I considered, the Museum of Brisbane and the Commissariat store were my top two choices. So, off I went.

* To be clear, I don’t sing or dance under sunny or overcast skies either. Trust me. No one wants to see me dance, hear me sing, or, worse, both simultaneously under any weather conditions. It’s not a pretty sight or sound.

The idea I tried to convey with that singing and dancing reference is that I don’t enjoy being out in the rain. I have no desire to be present while the rain “washes memories from the sidewalks of life.”

(*A line from Woody Allen’s “Play it Again, Sam.”)

Museum of Brisbane

The Museum of Brisbane is on the third floor of Brisbane’s old city hall. The third-floor entrance to the museum is also the entrance to city hall’s clock tower. Entry to both is free.

The Clock Tower

To go up the clock tower you have to book a spot on a clock tower tour, which leaves every fifteen minutes. When I asked at the reception desk, one of the staff told me, “You’re in luck. We just had a surprise cancellation. There’s a spot on the next tour, which goes up in ten minutes.” She booked me on that and I visited the clock tower before going into the Museum of Brisbane.

The clock tower tours use the old, original lift (aka elevator), not stairs, for most of the journey. Hence, the elevator capacity limits the tour size.

When I said “old lift,” I meant it. According to the guide, it’s 93 years old. (If you stumble on this post years after I wrote it, the elevator is older now. That’s my understanding of how time works.)

The elevator walls are made of fancy metal grating sufficiently sparse to see through.

There are no buttons in the elevator. Instead, there’s a handle. When the guide turns the handle down a quarter-turn to the right, the elevator motor engages and the elevator moves up. Turning the elevator handle back to the upright position engages the brake. Like I said, an old elevator.

The journey up passes by the backs of the clock faces, which are visible through the grills of the elevator walls.

From the upper elevator stop, there are two flights of stairs up to the highest publicly accessible level. Windows there afford views of the surrounding buildings. While we were at that level, the guide told us about what we saw.

When it was built, City Hall’s clock tower was the tallest building in Brisbane. That’s no longer true. Not even close. The views from the clock tower now are mostly of other buildings.

The ceiling of this level is glass. Looking through it showed me the five bells of the clock tower, one large one that chimes the hour, and four smaller ones that chime the quarter hours.

The closeness to the bells is why they run tours only every 15 minutes. They time them to be out when the bells chime. According to the guide, it’s exceptionally loud there when that happens.

On the way down, the guide stopped the elevator where we could see the backs of the clock faces. There, she explained how the mechanism works. She also pointed out the master clock. It sits up against a wall and looks like an old grandfather clock. If the master clock is wrong, so are the publicly visible large clock faces.

Museum of Brisbane

The Museum of Brisbane occupies the entire third floor of Brisbane’s old city hall except for the entrance desk, small, simple elevator lobbies for the clock tower and museum elevators, a small gift shop, and washrooms. Which is to say the museum is a fair size (the city hall covers a large footprint), but not huge.

Its first room gives a bit of the history of Brisbane via pictures, text, and one video map. The primary focus is on colonial Brisbane. But there is also a reference to Aboriginals having lived in the area for at least 65,000 years and about the conflicts between the settlers and the Aboriginals. The museum also provides a few Aboriginal land recognitions.

In this room, I learned that Brisbane was named after Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane, who lived from 1773 to 1860. He was born in Scotland, but served as the sixth Governor of New South Wales from 1821 to 1825. (Australia was a British colony back then. Hence the Scottish governor. Furthermore, what is now Queensland was part of New South Wales at the time, hence a Queensland city being named after a New South Wales governor. According to Wikipedia, Queensland separated from the colony of New South Wales and became a self-governing colony in 1859.)

The rest of the rooms in the Museum of Brisbane contain art of a variety of media by local artists. Although, many of the artists were/are immigrants.

The Commissariat Store Museum

The Commissariat Store and the old windmill that I mentioned when talking about the walking tour I went on are the only buildings remaining from the convict settlement of Brisbane. The Commissariat Store is now three floors, but the top floor was added later, when the land on one side of the building was raised. That’s the level that contains the main entrance.

The original lower two floors now house a small museum. (It’s not a large building.) Entrance to the museum is not free, but it’s only $8 (AUD) for seniors, and $10 (AUD) for non-decrepit adults.

When I bought my ticket, the woman at the desk asked me where I was from. “Toronto, Canada,” I replied.

A smile came to her face that I didn’t understand until she said, “Oh, I’m going there on December 11 to visit my son for Christmas. He lives there.” (It’s now November 28 here in Brisbane. She seems nice, but I won’t be back in time to welcome her to Toronto. I’ll leave that to her son. I hope he’s nice too.)

She then proceeded to give me considerable information about the history of the building.

The lowest level of the Commissariat Store contains some models of no-longer-standing buildings from the convict settlement era and some panels providing information about those times.

If you read my post about the walking tour of Brisbane I took, you might remember my mention of the grain-grinding treadmill that replaced the grain-grinding windmill that didn’t work.

One of the panels on this level gives more information about it and provides an illustration of it. I included a picture of that illustration here. As you can see, it’s a wheel, not a horizontal belt like modern treadmills.

According to the information provided on the panel, the treadmill required 25 convicts to run it. A typical punishment for prisoners was 160 revolutions of the treadmill, which required that they take 3840 steps while shackled with leg irons.

Sixteen convicts got a special punishment of 14 hours on the treadmill. According to the sign, this was a very effective punishment because there were no recorded floggings of the convicts it was inflicted on for four months after the 14-hour treadmill punishment. It doesn’t sound like a very progressive penal colony, does it? Then again, how many penal colonies were progressive? I think cruel was kind of their trademark.

(This conflicts somewhat with the information that Guy, the walking tour guide, gave me the other day. Unless I misunderstood him, he suggested that those long shifts were a typical day for the convicts. My trust goes to the museum on this.)

The next level up in the building contains artifacts from the time of the convict settlement, including tools and various bric-à-brac such as coins, nails, buttons and a flogging whip.

Lunch

I went back to the cafe in the old city hall for lunch. There, I had a glass of wine and a smoked salmon sandwich with cream cheese, capers, and onions on white bread. A side salad came with the sandwich. I asked for the sandwich on multigrain, which was one of the options specified on the menu, but the service was exceptionally slow and I didn’t want to send it back. I’m scheduled to leave Brisbane tomorrow. I wasn’t sure I could make it if I sent the sandwich back and asked for it on multigrain as I ordered.

The cafe is lovely and looks like it’s been there for a long time. All of the tables are in booths made of dark wood. The legs of the tables and benches are stylish spindles made of the same colour wood as the booth walls.

While I was there, another patron appeared to not understand the concept of cellphones. He didn’t seem to know that the phone conveys his voice, making it unnecessary to shout loud enough for whomever he was talking to hear him without the phone wherever that other person was. Other patrons had to raise their voices so their lunch-mates could hear what they were saying over the cellphone-talker.

And there I was, alone and trying to enjoy my lunch in peace while I typed some of these words into my silenced phone.

Oh, by the way, the sign pictured here sat on my table in the cafe. If I’d known before I went in that I’d have to prepare a bill and give it to the cafe I’d have gone somewhere else for lunch. And why they thought I’d even want to give them more than one bill is a mystery to me.

Fortunately, I was able to leave after just paying for my meal without giving them a bill.

The Weather

Oh, about that weather forecast. It was wrong.

The morning was overcast, but my walks to the Museum of Brisbane, the Commissariat Store, and lunch were all almost entirely dry-shod. And I didn’t see any water on the roads or sidewalks after coming out of the Museum of Brisbane or the Commissariat Store. The first two drops of rain fell on my head just as I walked into the old city hall to go to its cafe.

Then came the afternoon. But that’s fodder for another post coming soon.