The power is out and no one is home
My trip to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.
“Every dollar from the sale of the site will come towards this new museum. It’s a very strategic site right next to the city, with a good opportunity for renewal,” — NSW Premier M. Baird.
I attended The Powerhouse Museum last week. After doing this, I cemented my feet to the floor in an effort to stop myself from ever taking another nostalgic punt on an Aussie tourist attraction.
If you want the quick version, here, read my tweets from the eye-pokingly awful occasion.
Ostensibly, the visit was a way to have a day out with two of my cutest kids. There was a lego exhibition that included Batman. This killed at least two birds, in theory. What it became was an overrated, overpriced, mystery tour of an abandoned relic that reminded me how much I didn’t enjoy this as a kid.
Growing up, The Powerhouse Museum was a school excursion everyone looked forward to. But from what I can tell, looking forward is not something the museum has ever done.
The future for this ageing icon is grim. Developers are moving in and the government is eyeing Western Sydney to house the steam engines and… assorted other steam engines. Some people were up in arms about this announcement. These people have been to the museum any time this decade.
The parking surrounding the Powerhouse Museum proves the point. You cannot find a spot for more than one hour. Drive further and you can find a parking station — great. Add $30 to your budget. Some stations actually offer a discount for museum attendees, but if you are me, you miss the fineprint on the website and you are only told this once you arrive.
So we find a spot and head inside. One child immediately — IMMEDIATELY — needs to go to the loo. No toilets are visible but I follow signs that actually lead me to the cafe. Access to the cafe involves leaving the museum. You see where this is going.
Ten minutes later and we are arriving again. The staff smile, compassionately. I don’t want their pity. What I do want, moments later, is an apology, as they charge my three year old to enter the Lego exhibition. (If you don’t have one, a three year old has the attention span of a goldfish and the decorum of a cavoodle.)
The exhibition is ok, I guess — what was I expecting? It is all about to finish, so you are not going to make it anyway. There are numerous statues made of lego. That’s it. And at the end there is a shop & DIY area where you can make a superhero, or purchase something from the acres of branded merchandise.
The most notable thing about this exhibit is not how shameless it is in marketing DC Comics — you are paying to enter a pop-up shop — but that the curation was by the artist. The lego artist. And he goes completely OTT in narcissism so comical it could have been curated Kanye West.
Have you ever thought at all about the life of lego artist?
- How do they handle the endless hours of adding brick upon brick?
- How do they decide what to make?
- Don’t they get bored?
- What do they eat while making a model?
Well, wonder no more. This artist was given free reign to explain all, as if these were insights the audience was paying to discover.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
I would like to think he was taking the piss, but his metre-high signature as you entered the movie theatre to watch a video about his ‘journey’ put waste to the idea.
Amusingly, the cards get more bizarre as the work gets more interesting. I took this to mean that he grew tired of making superhero after superhero, and just went on tangents.
Here is a model of Aquaman in bath. Get it? He’s wet.
We head out into the museum proper, looking for what else could amaze us, with the kids already forgetting they had seen it.
Oh great. My phone alerted me to the fact our time was up. The parking had expired and we had to get back in and go find another one hour car spot.
The staff greeted me with the kind of mournful looks you usually only see on railway staff.
This is when the moments began poling up to equal my ill-fated trip to Telstra Tower. (Telecom Tower seemed kinda cool in the 1980s. It was tall, you could see for miles, and it was broadcasting phone messages into the future, or something. In 2015, it is less than cool.)
The Powerhouse still has a big train — this was always the most eye popping feature of the Powerhouse. But it is still there, same immovable object, a hollow, dusty memory of a bygone era replete with clay people spookily sitting inside carriages. And though children are permitted to touch many items in the museum, this is not one of them. So… big train? We couldn’t care less.
But wait! Read the plaque — this was the first… NEXT!
Hey look, this train set lets you move a lever and it goes around. Yes. It does. Like that $12 train set you got from Aunty Aldi. NEXT!
We’re lost. That didn’t take long. And suddenly I remember how much this used to happen. Mr 5 reminds me to look at the map, but then also reminds me that it won’t help because it can’t tell me where we are.
We look up and see spaceships. That seems cool. But it is a VERY long way into a different area and then up two escalators to get back to the space travel are and then inside the Challenger Space Shuttle. (Hang on, isn’t that the one that… oh don’t worry kids.)
Once inside the shuttle nose, you are out of it. It is a poor replica with nearly nothing to see. Space travel has moved on so far that a museum dedicated to science and technology could possibly have included something from the last 20 years. What they did have is a malfunctioning replica Mars Rover with iPads showing an error and a science-looking guy who paid us no attention. Maybe he found a new kind of replica rock?
In the next ten years, there is expected to be private spaceflights with reusable rockets, and journeys into the outer Solar System. No sign of that here. There is a pissweak anti-gravity chamber where the outer wall turns slowly around you as you stand on a perspex catwalk. This quickly made us all feel sick.
NEXT!
Another toilet stop. But this one was easier to find and revealed a really well designed piece combining science and technology — a baby change table. I was singularly impressed.
I don’t know what that large light fixture is supposed to represent but we were about to stumble upon a Safe Sex display.
Really, in a museum that is primarily aimed at school children, do we need a corridor of display cabinets fixated on procreation and the way people have pleasured themselves throughout the decades? I was dumbstruck and whisked my kids away to find something genuinely boring.
NEXT!
Nearby was a naked lady, or so Mr 5 announced. No, I explained, that’s just someone without skin. And she has buttons you can press — I assume they make the naked lady move. But alas, they were locked in a box. As in, actually locked. It was a pine shipping crate with padlocks.
So, instead of interacting with something educational, we just pretended to be learning. “Just imagine how your body works” I said, laughing at myself, but they had already wondered off.
Now, it wasn’t all bad. There was a wonderful moment when my kids found a spongey circular couch and, with noone around — like, not anywhere, we saw about five people in the whole place — they ripped off their sandals and started jumping. They thought it was a trampoline. This was horribly ironic because I passed up taking them to a trampolining warehouse to come to this buzzkill.
The day ended appropriately enough, on a weird note.
Not knowing where we were, at any point, we came across some weird neon silhouettes which had no explanation except the presence of what I could only assume was Australia’s first electric chair. The silhouettes were probably a touching tribute to the convicts we killed with it, I guess. Either that or it was a place for lost museum patron to quietly end their pain.
