Early Australian Convict Orifice Grindset

3 April, 2023 | Sydney, Australia

After a pretty lackluster breakfast at bills (-1 Lonely Planet), I ran off to the relatively close by Jewish Museum that sits next to a park with a memorial to all the queer people the Nazis killed during the Holocaust.

At the base of the triangle read:

We remember you who have suffered or died at the hands of others, Women who have loved women; Man who have loved men; And all of those who have refused the roles others have expected us to play. Nothing shall purge your deaths from our memories.

There isn’t a lot of these kinds of things, or for that matter, many other memorials to the enormous number of people fascists killed in addition to Jews - socialists, the disabled, Romani, etc. A large part of the reason might be because those groups continued to be suppressed and discriminated against basically instantly by both of the major victors of the conflict. Fun fact: if you were imprisoned by the Nazis for homosexual acts, you were staying in prison in West Germany even after the war was over and the camps liberated. They wouldn’t scrap that law until 1994.

I was about to enter the Jewish Museum but a literal entire school started going in first and I thought better of it.

Instead, I walked to the central train station and headed to Circular Quay (pronounced “key”).

I was headed for the Australian Museum, but along the way I passed the large number of ferries that berthed just outside the station; including one to an amusement park named Luna complete with the requisite horrifying clown visage:

The Australian Museum was free. Which was a good thing too because it was sparce.

I’ll note one excellent exhibit here on the top floor - a video presentation that seemed to be a walk through place and time.

• The surface level imagery - heavy-handed as it felt - only lightly obscured some underlying themes; the travel between rooms was…and I don’t want to sound like a perv here, but…like going through an orifice; even vaginal. Especially the first room felt like zooming into a Georgia O’Keefe painting.
• It felt strange and familiar at the same time? Difficulty articulating this. There is an obvious progression in time with both positive and negative aspects of “progress” explored
• The fake commercial for a pharma drug that makes you happy like a dog (or similar to happiness when around dogs?) was excellent and, for me, a little poingant, I miss my little trash goblin.