Mephisto (Again)

Last week we had a few days up in Brisbane. One of the entries on my list of Things To Do was to go to the Queensland Museum and see the only surviving German WW1 A7V tank, Mephisto, in its 'natural habitat'. Several years ago I got to see it in Canberra, where it had been loaned to the War Memorial, nominally for the centenary of WW1, but apparently mostly because the gallery in which it was displayed in Queensland had flooded, damaging the tank. 

Anyway, here it is in all it's glory in a new gallery built especially for it. My thinks to the lovely museum guide who not only took a couple of pictures of me next to the tank, but took some time out to chat about it as well.

Here's my younger offspring, Fraser, posing next to it for scale.

Rear view. It has six machine-guns pointing in all directions but the front. The front has a 6pdr gun.

In Front Of The Tank Selfie.

More loot. Australians were apparently very adept at looting German equipment, and brought loads of it back here. A special unit existed to distribute the trophies to towns and communities across the country, which is partially why so many of our RSLs have various pieces of artillery outside them.

At the top of the standard German MG08 machine0gun. Below it is the world's first dedicated anti-tank weapon - a German anti-tank rifle.

A trench-mortar. Apparently a lot of these found their way Down Under.

Back to Mephisto.

Mephisto scaled with a 5' 8" ageing transvestite who is on holiday.

Rear-view of the tank. That round plate under the angle is the escape-hatch.

And that's enough photos of the tank.

We did other stuff in the museum as well. My favourite was this horribly life-like and life-sized model of the extinct monitor lizard Megalania. Once again Fraser is there to provide scale, but so is my grandson, who very much likes to see dinosaurs and such-like.
 

Second best thing of the holiday was Bluey's World. I'll spare you the photos.

The National Gallery Of Victoria

Mrs Kobold and I were away in Melbourne this past weekend, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. As is our wont when away on holiday we mostly did museums and galleries, and since we'd never been to Melbourne before we found ourselves with a whole city's worth of places to explore.

Naturally I took some pictures of things I thought might be of interest to readers of this blog. This post will mostly cover the National Gallery of Victoria; I have a second lot of pictures from the Melbourne Museum to sort through as well*

First up are these rather nice pictures of ships by Jyūnisen zu, painted in Japan c1720. They're part of a collection called Twelve Ships, but the museum only displays three of them

Continuing the naval theme, there is this painting in the 19th Century Salon gallery. The Salon is an awesome 'slap all the pictures on all the walls' gallery, with the downside that some of them, like this one, are too high up for you to really see what's going on. Fortunately there's an electronic guide you can use to locate paintings, and see what they're about. The guide told me that this picture is by Norwegian artist Johan Benneter, and was painted in 1876. It shows an action in 1799 off Madagascar where the ship of the line HMS Jupiter fought an inconclusive action with the French frigate Preneuse. Rough seas prevented Jupiter from deploying its lower-deck guns.

Continuing the nautical theme we have this one, showing Ulysses and the Sirens, painted in 1891 by J.W. Waterhouse. I'm a bit of a fan of Pre-Raphaelite art (mostly from an early exposure to the incredible collection in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery when I was growing up), and I'd not seen this one before.

The sirens are beautifully rendered, as is the ship, so it's full of good things. I love the siren bottom left in this picture, harassing the poor crewman.

Every gallery should have a grand battle painting, and the NGV is no exception. I give you 'The 28th Regiment At Quatre Bras', painted by Elizabeth Thompson (later Lady Butler)

Take that, Polish lancer!

And that, French cuirassier!

We found this (unexpectedly) in the State Library - Ned Kelly's armour. 

Bullet holes and everything!

Once I get them sorted I'll post the pictures from Melbourne Museum as well.

*I actually have some pictures from our trip to the Northern Territory in October 2022 to post here too; one day I'll get around to them ...

Birthday Sharks

Whilst most people spend Christmas Eve getting ready for Christmas day, we spend it celebrating Catherine's birthday, and that usually involves some kind of outing.

This year Catherine had let drop the hint that she wanted to see an extensive exhibition about sharks at the Australian Museum in Sydney, so that's what we did.

It's pretty spectacular; there's lots of information boards and videos, as well as preserved specimens from the museum's collection and some lovely life-sized reproductions of various species.

Anyway, whilst I know that there are people here who would find sharks blog-worthy in their own right, this post was really an excuse to post a few pictures I took that wargamers might find of interest.

Part of the exhibition looked at various Pacific island-groups and nations and how sharks were part of their culture and folklore. I dropped the ball here by not making any notes on some of the mythology and folklore stuff which may of been use to fantasy gamers, but I did get some pictures of some of the weapons and armour on display.

These are two-handed cutting weapons from Kiribati. They're a decent size and, as you can see, edged with shark-teeth.

To protect against them, the natives of Kiribati wore suits of armour. This was made up of a set of overalls and sleeves made from coconut fibre, with a coconut fibre cuirass worn over the top. The  cuirass had a high backboard to protect from attack from behind, and was often worn with thick belts made from woven coconut fiber or dried ray skin to protect the vital organs. The armour decorated, either with human hair, feathers or shells.

The armour was worn with a helmet mad from a dried puffer-fish.

Warriors also sometimes carried knuckle-dusters edged with shark-teeth. These are from Hawaii.

This is a small club or hand-weapon from Hawaii.

For those that love the bizarre, this is a reconstruction of Helicoprion, an extinct shark from the Permian shark with a distinctive helical lower jaw. As the shark closed its lower jaw, the teeth would fold back into the mouth, dragging and cutting anything the shark had caught. It is thought that whilst it fed on soft-bodied animals, it could also use this jaw to deshell such creatures as nautilids, ammonites and belemnites.

And, finally, here is the birthday-girl herself, standing inside a reconstruction of a Megalodon jaw.

 

A Visit To The Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum

Coming back from our camping holiday we passed through the tow of Lithgow on what we will charitable call a day where the weather wasn't fine. We needed a break so looked around for something we could visit that was indoors. we ende dup at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum.

Opened on 8 June 1912, the factory initially manufactured rifles for the Australian military during World War I. During World War II, production expanded to include Vickers machine guns, Bren guns and, postwar, branched out into sporting goods (such as civilian firearms and golf clubs), tools and sewing machines. It still produces rifles for the Australian army.

The museum is locatd in some old administration buildings and is run by volunteers. It houses a collection of  military and civilian firearms manufactured at the factory and elsewhere. In 2019, the museum was placed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register which lists influential collections and documents considered key to Australia's history. 

Once again I failed to be a proper blogger and take detailed notes of everything I saw and photographed, so really you're just going to get lots of pictures and you'll have to take from them what you can. 

The displays at the museum are concentrated around a fantastic selection of military firearms downstairs and a donated collection of handguns from a private collector upstairs. There are galleries showing some of the factory's non-weapon products, as well as ephemera and memorabilia aboutthe factory itself and the life of the workers. There's an intersting display of water-colours from an artist who worked in the factory during WWII.

On to the photos.

These plates were used to show the penetration of various rounds.

A German anti-tank rifle from WWII. (In Goulburn's small military museum is the WWI equivalent)

Rifles from the colonial and WW1 era.

A Lewis Gun. At this point I went all WWI aircraft weaponry fanboy.

And the Bren Gun poster. I forgot to take any pictures of some of the 17,500 Brens that the factory produced during WWII.

More rifles. I think if you click on the picture it will be big enough that you can read the labels.

A wall of machine-guns. You should find a lot of your favourites there. I was unreasonably excited by the Schwarzlose.

A Vickers. The factory prodiced 12,500 of these from 1929 to 1943.

More guns. See the rifle-grenade thingy in the middle?

Bigger guns.

The volunteer we chatted to reckoned this was something unusual, but didn't know the story behind it - it's a sten-gun with a wooden stock. 

Some Soviet classics - a PPSh and an AK47. The AK47 is smaller than I thought it would be.

Upstairs is the Hayes handgun Collection. We were in ned of lunch by the time we hit this bit, so only gave it a cursory exaination. But if you're into handguns, then this is the place for you. It's a private collection that has been donated to the museum.

These teeny-tiny pistols are adorable.

So if you're into guns, the Lithgow Small Arms Factory Museum is the place for you!