Museum’s Trailblazers exhibition excites a deep sense of wonder

This is the best sort of museum exhibition, one that leaves you wanting to do some exploring of your own.

Supplied Editorial Sydney Kirkby MBE (born 1933) is an Australian surveyor and Antarctic explorer. One of the 50 explorers ch...

“That’s the sort of explorer I want to be,’’ declared my young companion as we studied the instal­lation dedicated to Andrew Harper, the first person to walk west to east across Australia with camels. Harper’s setup didn’t look comfortable exactly, but it was a hell of a lot roomier than the Jules Verne-inspired bathysphere we had emerged from a few minutes earlier.

Crammed inside that hollow steel ball we took ourselves on its then world-record descent of 923m in 1934. What if a shark chomped through the cable or the air hose? No point asking Ron and Valerie Taylor for help: as we knew from their exhibit, the future shark whisperers were born in 1934 and 1935 respectively. And anyway, no way would their chain-mail suits stop the ravenous, super-intelligent Great White of our imaginations.

Educational, interactive, fun and with a whiff of danger: it’s a combination that makes the Australian Museum’s Trailblazers: Australia’s 50 Greatest Explorers an ideal school holidays outing. Of course unaccompanied adults will also find much at which to marvel, though they may struggle to ­secure a spot on the excellent rock climbing wall that marks the halfway point of the exhibition. (Note to helicopter parents: the ground under the wall is massively padded.)

The show is guest-curated by Australian Geographic founding editor Howard Whelan, a trailblazer himself. On entering, an ­introductory panel promises a cele­bration of the “visionaries, seekers, misfits and adventurers who pushed boundaries in pursuit of understanding the blank ­regions on our universal map’’. That should be push, present tense, as 21 of the 50 explorers are with us still, despite their best ­attempts to be otherwise.

The inclusion of modern adven­turers, from Dick Smith to Jessica Watson to astronaut Andy Thomas, adds pulse to this history of exploration: it’s not all heavily bearded blokes getting permanently lost at sea, in the bush or on the ice. Indeed, it’s not all blokes at all; another pleasing aspect is the presence of so many women: Jane Franklin, Nancy Bird Walton, Linda Beilharz, Robyn Davidson and Gaby Kennard, to name a handful.

Not that we were uninterested in the tragic blokes, far from it. We found it grimly satisfying that the only remnant of the Burke and Wills expedition on display is a single saddle bag. That’s what happens when you walk into the desert and don’t come back, we agreed. That saddle bag is one of 360 objects that help tell the story of explorers past and present. We liked William Bligh’s sword and the gondola from Smith’s hot air balloon, and remarked on the survival of a feathered cape James Cook brought home from his voyages. You’d put that out for the council clean-up, Syd accurately observed.

The exhibition is arranged into five sections: Riding the Waves, Trekking the Wilds, Going Over, On Thin Ice and Taking to the Skies. The Antarctic display is well laid out, informative and not all about Douglas Mawson. There’s a cool interactive station where you attempt to put shapes in holes wearing a bulky polar glove.

We read up on Syd Kirkby, for obvious reasons, but what most caught our attention was a stuffed husky named Shep. How did he avoid being eaten, we wondered, until closer inspection revealed he was one of 10 huskies who died in a blizzard near Mawson Station in 1983.

This information sent us on a quest of our own, to learn more about Shep. We found his employment file via the Australian Antarctic Centre website: “ … a good worker like his brothers Siber and Streaky, is highly strung though and tends to panic in certain situations …” Not without reason as it turned out.

That’s the best sort of museum exhibition, one that leaves you wanting to do some exploring of your own, online, in books and, aptly in this case, on foot: our first port of call on leaving was the nearby State Library of NSW, to look at the statue of Matthew ­Flinders’s remarkable seafaring cat Trim.

If you too are curious to learn more, the museum’s infor­mative website is a good place to start: www.australianmuseum.net.au.

Trailblazers: Australia’s 50 Greatest Explorers. Australian Museum, Sydney, until July 18.