Audio Transcript

[00:00:00]
Ellie Downing: If you get down to pure museum theory of what the space should be, the space is altruistic and really democratic. The idea that that’s what drives the museum is we strive towards that. You don’t need to be Australia’s oldest museum in order to create that. At a school, you can just give kids this space and be like, “Hey, put what’s really important to you here.”

[00:00:27]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

[00:00:46]
Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. This week we’re speaking again with Ellie Downing from the Australian Museum. Now, you might remember Ellie way back when we spoke with her and Catherine Polcz from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences about the upcoming Sydney Science Festival. And seriously, it’s only a couple of weeks away as we record this session.

[00:01:10]
Ben Newsome: However, I thought I might just have a chat with Ellie in regards to what actually happens at the Australian Museum itself, because they run a major festival within the Sydney Science Festival called, funnily enough, the Australian Museum Science Festival. Now, the thing is, we don’t just talk about festivals. We also talk about what museums are actually about when it comes to education and public engagement with the sciences, and Ellie certainly has a lot of experience and a lot to say about that.

[00:01:35]
Ben Newsome: Now, you might notice during the recording that we have a few people talking in the background. That’s because Ellie had to squirrel away in a little spot in the corner somewhere in the museum to be able to have a bit of a chat, because seriously, it’s a massively busy, vibrant, humming community of museum educators and scientists really preparing for National Science Week. And it’s a seriously big deal. So she was lucky to find a spot where she could kind of record just for a moment and you’re going to hear a little bit of background noise, but that’s the thing: it is a working museum.

[00:02:08]
Ben Newsome: So, without further ado, we’re going to listen in to Ellie Downing all about the Australian Museum and what museums are all about. Ellie Downing again, welcome to the Fizzics Ed Podcast!

[00:02:12]
Ellie Downing: Thank you so much for having me again. It’s a joy!

[00:02:23]
Ben Newsome: I really wanted to have you back on. I know we’ve got the Sydney Science Festival coming up and you’ve been very, very busy working with Catherine on that, and all of Inspiring Australia. But I wanted to actually look at it itself. You’re from the Australian Museum and you do lots of stuff and have been doing lots of stuff for years, and in a couple of weeks, you’re going to be doing lots of stuff. So I thought I might focus in on that and get a head around why museums do this type of thing, and specifically what the Australian Museum does for the public. So Ellie, with that broad scope, let us know what you do.

[00:02:53]
Ellie Downing: So I’m actually a trained museologist. I’ve done two degrees specialising specifically in museums and within that, I’ve quite specialised in education. So museums do this type of thing and it’s kind of the core of what a museum is all about. Museums and public museums in Australia are driven by this really big educational theory.

[00:03:15]
Ellie Downing: It’s really cool because rather than education like in schools where there are syllabus points and you kind of have to report to a matrix, museum education is about core identity formation. It’s about creating this incredibly safe space for people to explore, to be curious, to ask questions, to have difficult conversations and test who they are and what they think and their ethics and their principles in a really informed and conscious space.

[00:03:44]
Ellie Downing: It’s really cool because it’s really heady, big philosophical education things, except the iterations of it are that you get to do fun explosions! So you swing wildly between looking at core museum education theory. For me, it’s my personal favourite education theory because everyone has one. There’s an amazing guy called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who came up with a theory in 1990 and it’s called the Theory of Flow. What it looks at is self-motivated learning.

[00:04:18]
Ellie Downing: Museums are these incredible spaces and we have these amazing objects and collections. Museums like the Australian Museum have the Australian Museum Research Institute. Not only do we have physical objects, but there’s also this intangible object of a museum, which is the knowledge of all the staff and the knowledge that’s being created around objects. And what we get to do is then work out how we can make that accessible to the public.

[00:04:41]
Ellie Downing: As a public state institution, we have a responsibility to make sure that everyone in New South Wales and also Australia and the world, really, can come here and access it and know that they’re entitled to it and feel okay about looking at things and ask questions and find out more and freely explore what’s going on. It’s just really fun. So during August, we do a really big education event for school students as part of the Sydney Science Festival. The museum’s this beautiful, mutual space, so we can invite lots of people into the space, like yourself, and you get to leverage this really considered space and do really cool stuff that is just—I can’t even explain it. It’s just my jam so much!

[00:05:29]
Ben Newsome: Well, you’re not short of objects. You have thousands and thousands of artefacts and things, and that’s only a small snippet of what you’re dealing with from the back end as well that the public doesn’t get to see either. It’s a huge research institution.

[00:05:43]
Ellie Downing: It is. At any one time, I think we’ve only got about 3% of our collection out on the floor. The museum has over 18 or 19 million objects. There’s no way that we would ever fit it all out on the floor, but there are other cool things that you can do to sort of reveal all the knowledge and the objects that we have.

[00:06:12]
Ben Newsome: I just had this weird sort of—you often hear about these factoids where people say, “Oh, your DNA is so long if you pull it out of your cell,” etc. I kind of wonder, how long would a whole bunch of your insects lined up head to abdomen be? All the way around the city! It’d be interesting.

[00:06:29]
Ellie Downing: I feel like we could get halfway across Australia. Even if we just line up all of our malacology shells, we’d make our way around Australia.

[00:06:42]
Ben Newsome: Maybe that’s some sort of new SI unit that we can contextualise everything in.

[00:06:47]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, it does. I think everything’s measured in football fields, isn’t it?

[00:06:52]
Ben Newsome: No, we’ll change that. We can measure it by the breadth of our malacology collection. Perfect. All right, you can lead the charge. Deary me. Well, we can already see this is digressing already. But look, one of the things I want to get into is obviously what museums do, but without context, I kind of feel like I want to know why you got into it personally. Like, why museum education? Clearly you’re a science boffin, but why this?

[00:07:19]
Ellie Downing: I started a teaching degree, but I found it—because I really love the idea of helping people access information. To me, there’s nothing more rewarding than if you can facilitate somebody and they learn something, but they know that they did it themselves. You’re not spoon-feeding them. It’s the look on people’s faces, the sense of pride and accomplishment they get. There’s just nothing like it.

[00:07:44]
Ellie Downing: So I was interested in teaching and I felt that that was a space where I could achieve that, but I found the syllabus quite limiting. Schools and teachers have a really hard remit to try and achieve all of this stuff in a really short amount of time within a really narrow framework. I’m highly impressed by anybody who is a teacher, but it just wasn’t the right fit for me.

[00:08:06]
Ellie Downing: So then I started looking at libraries, because I really did hone in on the fact that I like helping people access information. But again, it just wasn’t quite the right fit. All of a sudden, I had no idea until I’d done my library degree and worked in libraries for a year or so that you could do museum degrees. So I started looking into that because I’d also always had an interest in science, but not really wanted to be a research scientist.

[00:08:30]
Ellie Downing: This was just as the science communication field was getting more traction and people were starting to understand a little bit more. I saw this cross-section of science communication and museums, which I thought was a really interesting space. I did a Master of Museum Studies by coursework and that was excellent and the best and I really liked the education theory. If you couldn’t tell about me definitely having my favourite theory.

[00:09:02]
Ellie Downing: And then I wanted to study it again, so I did another research Masters and I was looking at citizen science within the space because again, citizen science is just something I really love because it’s quite loose and free and it’s really focused on people as opposed to science that’s focused on knowledge and facts. So it’s kind of this little bit of a subversion of the framework around how science happens, but it still has the same calibre of outputs and it’s really cool. And then I’ve just been lost in this spiral ever since!

[00:09:31]
Ben Newsome: It’s not quite a tailspin though.

[00:09:35]
Ellie Downing: No, it’s just like this amazing whirlwind of both science communication and citizen science and arguably even museological theory kind of amping up and everything’s kind of getting more refined and everybody’s working out how everyone can work with one another. So no longer do you have disciplines that sit separately or aren’t cohesive. Everything’s starting to be able to work together and you can do incredible projects and collaborate with amazing people.

[00:10:07]
Ellie Downing: So you can have ridiculously talented research scientists working with me, who has three arts degrees and no scientific training, and facilitate somebody who then goes on to do incredible innovation work or just find a way to do something bonkers that makes a huge difference in the world. It’s the best!

[00:10:24]
Ben Newsome: I can imagine. You’re at Australia’s oldest museum. It’s quite venerable, well-known in this area, but at the same time, you’ve got this vibrant staff doing lots of cool stuff from all these different disciplines. It must be an interesting challenge to sit around a room and go, “What are we going to put on next for our next exhibit?” You must have a lot of input from different areas. It’d be an interesting conversation to listen in on if you’re a fly on the wall, I’d imagine.

[00:10:53]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, no, it’s really cool. I think one of the things that is really great is that with anything within a museum, you do work within your specialised team, but everything has to be able to work together. We have an exhibition team and we have exhibition specialists who really are incredible and know how to do stuff, but they come talk to education teams, they talk to the scientists.

[00:11:15]
Ellie Downing: Exhibitions will be built around research innovations that have happened or new discoveries that we’ve made. People think that to work in a museum is to already be hyper-specialised, but even when you’re in the sector, there’s so many different specialties and you can work across. You can just be so trained in one specific thing that you can’t work in isolation. You work as a team.

[00:11:40]
Ellie Downing: It’s really cool building exhibitions because you do have people who know how to create these spaces that it’s really easy for people to move through, to create narrative around how you place objects and the text that you put with it so it’s easy to understand. And then the programmes that sit beside it so it can reinterpret and reimagine what’s going on in a different way and make it more accessible. And then the scientists who sit beside that and have this really incredibly high calibre knowledge of what’s going on and contextualise it in an academic setting but also reveal to you the relevancy of it.

[00:12:12]
Ellie Downing: So it’s not just an object that is sitting there that has no meaning to you, but it’s impacted your life in some way or we’ve learnt something from it or we’re still learning from it, which means that the way we do something in the future might change. And it’s just mind-boggling.

[00:12:27]
Ben Newsome: Exactly. Especially when you think about the interpretive stuff that needs to be out there, whether it’s a sign next to a particular artefact or the digital stuff that goes along with that, plus the lessons. You’re not exactly just catering for one age group, you’re dealing with everyone who can get into the building, whether it’s digitally or not. That becomes interesting. It’s almost like creating layers of an onion of the same content presented in different ways.

[00:12:53]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, it’s really interesting. So this is the core of what museum education theory’s about, which is how do you make something accessible to the most number of people. And so at the core of it is, lots of education theory talks about the personalisation of objects. So how do you facilitate somebody coming in and looking at something which might be quite foreign to their experience in life, but get them to connect with it in such a way that it’s familiar to them. So an example would be, a Monarch butterfly in a scientific museum would classically be presented in a taxonomical way. So it would be presented as part of the family of butterflies, it would be scientifically explained, the distribution and things like that. But then through public programming you can reintroduce this new interpretation of it and describe how in the Sydney area during the 1930s there might have been a sudden influx of Monarch butterflies.

[00:13:49]
Ellie Downing: Or you can get people to sit back and reflect and think about times that they’ve seen them, and all these stories might come out about how you might remember seeing them when you used to go visit your grandparents out at the farm. And so when you see these butterflies, even though it’s presented really scientifically, you’ve got all these quite personal feelings associated with it. And so the museum’s really cool because these things sit together. So as opposed to school where you have the segmentation of science versus maybe family history, in a museum there’s space for them to coexist and they’re just as valid as each other and there’s not a hierarchical frame imposed on what’s more valid. So no matter what your experience or interpretation of the object is, that’s really valid and that’s great and there’s space for it to exist.

[00:14:36]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I mean, I was actually just remembering a conversation we had on this podcast with Sam Leah from the Museum of the Riverina, where her work was on, well she’s an historian, and what they’re doing is getting primary students to recreate the steps that Queen Elizabeth II did as she came to a very brief visit into Wagga Wagga on this big trip across Australia quite a few decades ago.

[00:15:01]
Ellie Downing: Is that what Mortein was invented for?

[00:15:04]
Ben Newsome: Well, this is the thing! What they’re doing in this spot is, I wasn’t too sure about the Mortein thing, please tell me more by the way on that, but tell me what is that about? Because I was going, really?

[00:15:17]
Ellie Downing: I’m pretty sure Mortein or one of the fly sprays was invented in Australia because the Queen was coming and they were super freaked out that she would get bombarded with flies, which wasn’t very regal for her to be swatting them all the time.

[00:15:31]
Ben Newsome: Oh, I love that story. I didn’t know that. This is why anyone listening to this, the reason why I interview people is I tend to find more stuff out myself. There you go, I did not know that story, that’s excellent. Geez, we’ll have to go get some fact-checking on that, but I think it sounds very true, the fact that you’ve got that in your head.

[00:15:50]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, it’s Mortein or Aerogard or one of those. One of the fly sprays was invented because it’s unseemly for the Queen to be swatting flies.

[00:15:58]
Ben Newsome: See, this is a perfect example of what you’re talking about. So we’re talking about an artefact, in this case an historical event, where Sam Leah was talking about getting these kids to recreate this using robotics and creating virtual reality.

[00:16:10]
Ellie Downing: I love that. It was the best, and there was a cute little parade of robots which was mimicking the Queen’s parade.

[00:16:16]
Ben Newsome: Exactly right. And it’s brilliant, and it’s creating this fantastic installation of STEAM, because it is 100% STEAM, I’ve got to put an A in there somewhere, because funnily enough there’s history. But then you’ve gone on the tangent with Mortein, which means you can totally go down into pests. That’s the fun part about it, and hence me saying the fly on the wall in your conversations would be perplexed, and I guess also scared because you’re talking about Mortein, right.

[00:16:42]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, I know, the fly wouldn’t feel great.

[00:16:44]
Ben Newsome: No. But it’s interesting.

[00:16:47]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, I think that’s why I’ve really settled into museum education, is that there is this freedom to explore and to think collaterally, as well as more logically, and in a more traditional narrative. You can just explore all these weird spaces. So the fact that somebody might come to an exhibition, and it might be about flies, and then that was just a weird little factoid that we had included because it’s pretty funny. They left knowing that. It’s really great because a lot of effort and people pool all this knowledge and this expertise, but then at the other side of it, however you respond to it and whatever you take away, there’s space for that, and that’s really valid.

[00:17:37]
Ellie Downing: And so we’re not dictating how people should feel when they come in. It’s really nice and gentle and it just fosters this really creative thinking. So all of a sudden you can come in and see what would be a quite scientific exhibition about, well, we’ve got mammoths on at the moment.

[00:17:56]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I’ve seen that exhibition. It’s brilliant.

[00:17:58]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, and there’s some heavy science in there. So they’re talking about extracting cells from baby Lyuba’s stomach, the mummified baby mammoth, and then looking at the contents of her stomach to understand the environment that she was living in. There’s evidence of the fact that there was some of her mother’s milk in there, and so they’re doing this high protein analysis, heavy, heavy science. But then there’s also all these amazing recreations of mammoths in there. So there’s this fantastical imagination sitting right beside them, but that’s all based on the skeletons and rearticulating the fossils they find to create these.

[00:18:36]
Ellie Downing: And there’s just space for that to all coexist in the one exhibition. So you can come in and engage with cutting edge technologies and simultaneously imagine what it was like to live with bears that just tower over you. And that’s one exhibition, that’s one room! It’s the best.

[00:18:55]
Ben Newsome: And the thing is, you might be looking at something that’s quite a few thousand years ago, these artefacts, and yet you can still be layering in current technologies as well to bring out the best of those sites. I kind of wonder, in this field, you must come across a number of museums and other cultural organisations doing some really cool stuff with tech to help people understand their artefacts. What have you seen out and around the world in journals and things?

[00:19:25]
Ellie Downing: I think my favourite is, we do a lot of work with ANSTO, and they’ve got research facilities, and there’s a lot of joint research projects. But forever my favourite is a gentleman there called Dr. Joseph Bevitt, and he’s a nuclear chemist, and he does a lot of neutron microscopy, and he focuses on dinosaurs. So it’s really funny to think of a nuclear chemist who works pretty much exclusively on dinosaurs!

[00:19:55]
Ellie Downing: What they’re doing is, rather than looking at the fossilised bones of dinosaurs, they’re looking at the fossilised organs and soft tissue. Using the imaging technologies that ANSTO has developed, if you think about MRIs and all of those techniques to look at soft tissue, they’re applying it essentially to these fossilised soft tissue parts of dinosaurs, and then from that they can work out the contents of the stomach. I was talking to him about a year or two ago, and he was saying that they’re at the stage where they can almost work out the blood temperature of dinosaurs based on the fossilised eggs.

[00:20:32]
Ellie Downing: Bonkers things like this, where you can just find out all this new information. The fossils they’re working on might have been dug up for 10 or 50 or 100 years, but there’s just all this new information coming out, and it’s insane. It’s so insane.

[00:20:48]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, I remember speaking with a student once, and they asked me, what could a scientist like that get to do? Give me some context. I said, “Well, kind of think of it like CSI, sort of. Only real and less Hollywood.” But it’s true, because you really are using any technique you can, using the stuff that’s in front of you, to create new knowledge. It’s cool.

[00:21:17]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, it’s funny, we use CSI as well. At the museum we’ve got the Australian Wildlife Genomics Centre, the only wildlife forensic scientists in the Southern Hemisphere are housed here at the museum. Dr. Rebecca Johnson and Dr. Greta Frankham. We ran a workshop called Wildlife Forensics. Traditionally in forensics, CSI and things like that, they deal with one species, which is humans. Super cool, except there’s so many other species in the world, which is where our two scientists come in. If there’s a case and there’s DNA from literally any other species that is not human, they come to us, and we can help them.

[00:21:59]
Ellie Downing: Trying to explain to kids and flip them around, because the world of forensics already seems really deep and specific and quite intense, and then you just drop this bomb on them like, “Yeah, but that’s one species. Think about the number of species you saw on your walk to school, or even if you just go out on the weekend, how many species do you see? Imagine all the ones you aren’t seeing.” We have to find all the information around that, and we do really cool stuff, like map the genome.

[00:22:30]
Ellie Downing: We’ve just finished mapping the koala genome. That took us about five or six years, but now it means that we can do bonkers things like help create new medicines. There’s a retrovirus that’s attacking koalas at the moment, but now that we’ve mapped the genome, the medicine can be modified. Because they have a diet of eucalyptus, which is highly toxic, they’re really good at processing toxins and anything in their system. If you give them medicine, they process it faster than they can absorb it.

[00:23:08]
Ellie Downing: But now with the genome mapped, we’re able to create medicines to treat everything that’s going on in koalas and get it to a stage where they can actually absorb it as opposed to just process it through their hectic digestive systems. And it starts with being like, “Do you know CSI?”

[00:23:26]
Ben Newsome: Yes, that’s right. And that’s the thing. I love watching learners try to explain what they know, and it gets me thinking about what you’re talking about, what happens in museums and different ways that you can present bits of knowledge. I kind of feel like, wouldn’t it be cool if you’re out at a school and there’s that spare classroom that pretty much has just got storage stuff in it and no one touches it? Let’s be honest, some schools have no spare room whatsoever and they just cram the kids in just a little bit more, but some schools have that spare space.

[00:24:02]
Ben Newsome: I kind of wonder, wouldn’t it be cool even at a simple level that if you gutted that room a little bit and turfed the stuff that you’re clearly never going to use because it’s been there for 15 years, and then create something that was for the students, by the students.

[00:24:18]
Ellie Downing: That would be the best.

[00:24:20]
Ben Newsome: I mean, people listening in, if you’ve seen something like that, I reckon it’d be cool because it seems to me like, I know that at a particular school, they’ve got this little STEM space, which a lot of people have their maker spaces now, but they have put it as a sort of museum as well. So they’ve created the thing and now they’re creating artworks and signage and even starting to peddle a little bit with augmented reality and stuff like that around these things they’ve made.

[00:24:50]
Ben Newsome: Which is cool because it means it’s an interactive space which was kind of like an activation, like you’d say at a festival. This site wasn’t being used, and I wonder whether there’s an opportunity in many schools. You don’t have to have the fancy artefacts, you don’t need the nuclear physicist, but you can do some simpler stuff, and I like the idea of weaving some history in on those things too. I wonder.

[00:25:14]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, you touched really nicely, if you get down to pure museum theory of what the space should be, the space is altruistic and really democratic. That’s what drives the museum, we strive towards that. You don’t need to be Australia’s oldest museum in order to create that. At a school, you can just give kids this space and be like, “Hey, put what’s really important to you here.”

[00:25:43]
Ellie Downing: Giving kids the agency and endorsing them even before you see what they do instils this confidence in them that they have the capacity and they can do it. Because there’s so much idea around what a museum is for a child at that age, they think about them as these big sandstone institutions, to then validate what they’ve done by classifying it as a museum, their faces explode with pride and they’re so chuffed and happy.

[00:26:19]
Ellie Downing: What they’ve done is just bring a stick in from home, and it’s the best! And written a copy label of why they think it’s important. It’s so important and really valid, and being able to give people a space to do stuff like that is really lovely. During Science Festival, that’s kind of what we do in the sense of we work with people to get students and kids to feel safe and comfortable around science, and to understand that even if you’re not doing really well at school, it’s fun to explore.

[00:26:50]
Ellie Downing: You don’t have to be doing well at school in science to be able to be part of science. It’s just really fun and safe and everybody’s curious and you have a right to ask questions and to explore. It’s just another way of thinking.

[00:27:04]
Ben Newsome: And you alluded towards what’s coming up, the big festival which you’ve been running for quite a few years.

[00:27:10]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, I think this is my sixth one.

[00:27:13]
Ben Newsome: Sixth? Have to get you some candles on the cake.

[00:27:16]
Ellie Downing: I’m on two hands now.

[00:27:19]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, it’s good. Growing up! The thing is though, it might be the sixth year, but every year these festivals get bigger and better, and more things get layered on top. I know you’re involved in the Sydney Science Festival, but the Australian Museum also has its own very specific festival as part of the greater part of the Sydney Science Festival. Maybe just give people a bit of a picture of what actually happens during that quite hectic time.

[00:27:46]
Ellie Downing: It is quite hectic. What we do is we take over every single nook and cranny of the museum. Even the temporary exhibition spaces, the two galleries that currently are housing Mammoths, which is an exhibition from the Field Museum in America, we kick them out and we take over the space!

[00:28:05]
Ellie Downing: We also hire venues next door, and then we open it up to our staff, but also the wider Sydney science community. So presenters like yourselves, the other universities across the city, other institutions and museums, and we invite everybody in to showcase what they can do and try maybe new experimental stuff. It’s this super high energy showcase of what Sydney science can do.

[00:28:32]
Ellie Downing: I think last year we had over 400 presenters come through. Across two weeks, we saw over 9,000 students come physically on site. We were running over 300 activities. Kids will come in, they’ll come at 9:30 and they’ll stay until 2:00. Part of the days we’re in one of the big exhibition spaces, we install an expo, so there’s about 20 booths. Rather than just paper and people standing there talking, all the booths have incredible activations.

[00:29:05]
Ellie Downing: Kids get to do hands-on tactile learning, and they get to have a go at things. Because they’re in the museum, and because it’s not a school classroom, they can do the left of field stuff. We can do really cool stuff because you’ve got all these specialists and all these experts. It’s kind of this next level experience with science that you can’t quite achieve in the classroom.

[00:29:27]
Ellie Downing: One of the workshops that is always a smash hit is just squid dissections. Literally all they’re doing is cutting open squids! But they get to do it here at the museum, they get to do it with staff who are trained marine biologists, and we’re able to talk about the squids and show them what’s going on and explain why they’re so weird and wonderful.

[00:29:46]
Ellie Downing: For teachers, that’s really cool because that’s something they might not feel comfortable to do in the classroom. We get lots of comments that the teachers are learning just as much as the students. That happens across the board. The presenters who come in are incredible and so skilled and it’s this high explosion of science energy and good time vibes.

[00:30:10]
Ben Newsome: It’s good fun. Imagine trying to pull this together 40 years ago when you didn’t really have that much access to computers because they were too expensive, and spreadsheets and everything.

[00:30:20]
Ellie Downing: I know! Letter writing!

[00:30:22]
Ben Newsome: Can you imagine just sorting that out? We are lucky, anyone who’s in a position where you’re in a major institution considering doing a festival like this. We have so many tools available for us. The next thing comes the network, and obviously pulling funding here and there to make stuff happen, but it is easier than it has been. At the same point in time, because there’s so many people doing so much cool stuff, you end up with these mega enormous events very quickly.

[00:30:51]
Ellie Downing: Bigger than Ben-Hur.

[00:30:53]
Ben Newsome: Yeah.

[00:30:55]
Ellie Downing: There’s a beautiful, blessed curse which is we are limited by the size of the museum. If we had limitless space, I think we could fill it, because there’s just so much incredible stuff happening. People are so skilled and talented. To be able to bring them all together, rather than running individual separate events, pulling it all together under this one banner, pulling it all together at the one venue, means that you just get this incredible experience for visitors.

[00:31:23]
Ellie Downing: They come and just see this amazing cross-section of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, arts, all the other humanities, histories. But then for the presenters as well, we rarely get to see one another because we’re just so busy running events.

[00:31:38]
Ben Newsome: That’s true.

[00:31:40]
Ellie Downing: So it’s really nice at our level, because all of a sudden we can see what everyone else is doing, we can talk to one another. This is how collaborations come out, this is how we as a sector start refining our practice and kicking it to the next level. Because we work together, somebody might have solved a problem that you’re coming up against right now, or they might have a problem and you’ve got this hare-brained idea that could work. It’s this really big sense of community.

[00:32:06]
Ellie Downing: For visitors it’s fostering their confidence and their science literacy, in the sense of being exposed to scientific ideas, understanding new words, understanding the ethos behind contemporary science research and education. And then for the presenters involved, it’s a chance to get to work with one another and see what everyone does, and create this community of practice.

[00:32:26]
Ellie Downing: You get ideas flowing, or help one another out, or find weird and wonderful ways that we can work together. Or a friendly competition of, “You did that really good this year, next year I’m going to do it even better than you.” Which means that everybody, we’re an under-resourced field and we’re a field that has a lot of stuff pitted against us, but everybody bands together. It isn’t competitive in the sense of we tear each other down, everyone just builds one another up, and it’s so beautiful and lovely.

[00:33:03]
Ben Newsome: And it does work. I’ve seen some other festivals that do this. Holly was letting me know, I didn’t get to go to this, I’m a little bit jealous that she got to go over to SciFest Africa and participate in that. One of the things that she was saying is there is very much a presenters’ day where they just present it to each other just for a laugh. Which is really cool because that means you can learn off each other without having to scream off and go run your own event for a moment in time, which is a good thing.

[00:33:38]
Ellie Downing: It’s also, even though you know you’re good, and you see the reaction visitors have, being able to talk to one another and validate each other’s practices is something that we don’t have a lot of time for. And it’s just so important. You might be doing the same thing every day, and you kind of know that it’s good, but you lose sight of the fact that it is really good and you are incredible and you are very skilled.

[00:34:00]
Ellie Downing: Being able to create a space where presenters can validate each other’s practice is also really lovely. We then as a community understand just how talented and amazing we are. You can exist, even though we might not be getting the government support we need or we might not be getting funding, we have each other to support what we’re doing and know that we’re really trained and really good at what we do. It’s just amazing and incredible to watch and really quite special to be able to facilitate that.

[00:34:32]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, absolutely. Now, I know there’ll be some people who want to potentially last minute get involved in this festival. How would they get in and find out about that sort of stuff?

[00:34:46]
Ellie Downing: If they head to the Australian Museum website, which is australianmuseum.net.au, and then you can search the site for either the Science Festival or science engagement and events. Lots of information will come up about this year’s event, but also what we do throughout the year.

[00:35:05]
Ellie Downing: We go on outreach tours, so this year we’re going up to Tamworth and hanging out up there and having a good time in Tamworth. Last year we were out at Broken Hill via Dubbo and Nyngan. We go down to Albury-Wodonga all the time. We travel all around as well as running events here in Sydney. Go to the website and check it out. You can read blogs, we have little videos, you can have a look at the events that are running this year as well, so if you do want to come down, we would love to see you. There’s just great information on the website about lots of weird stuff.

[00:35:38]
Ben Newsome: Absolutely. And if you can’t make it down, also jump on the Inspiring Australia website. Just type in Inspiring Australia, I guarantee you’ll find it in your search engine, and you’ll be able to find events that are happening all over the place in Australia. If you’re overseas, some of these events you can connect with as well, because we’ve got this digital thing which is kind of handy.

[00:35:56]
Ben Newsome: Thanks very much Ellie for coming in. I thought before I let you go, I might let you know that I was just thinking, “Have we got a museum?” We kind of sort of do have a museum sort of thing happening in our front foyer. We’ve got this funny little spot, it’s a couple of glass cupboards to be honest, but we were cleaning stuff out and we found stuff like Fizzics’ first sun cream.

[00:36:21]
Ben Newsome: Hidden in a box somewhere, I know it really should have been thrown out, it has an expiry date of 2004, which basically was when we all started! So we put that there and we started finding other bits and pieces like broken radiometers and an old bell jar and bits and pieces. So we’ve got this kind of nostalgic little quaint corner opposite a door that’s hard to open.

[00:36:41]
Ellie Downing: That’s really important.

[00:36:43]
Ben Newsome: Yeah, it’s cool. It’s kind of this weird little thing, which is a case in point that you can turn anything into something which has a narrative around it, even if it’s only a little cupboard. For you, you have a large sandstone building, but…

[00:37:01]
Ellie Downing: I think we’ve got several. The museum’s actually 12 buildings if I’m very honest.

[00:37:06]
Ben Newsome: It’s hard… my brain’s trying to think about, because you’re all interconnected aren’t you?

[00:37:12]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, so we had Australia’s first gallery, and then over the years more sandstone buildings got added, and then more brick buildings, and it’s just this movable beast, which is kind of great.

[00:37:26]
Ben Newsome: Yeah. Especially after the renovation as well. It looks stunning, which is really cool. But I imagine there’s quite a lot of effort to work around the heritage elements.

[00:37:35]
Ellie Downing: Yeah, but I think it’ll be really cool. With the master plan, what they’re doing is they’re going to create a new entrance for schools, which is really exciting. We got our first truly accessible entrance to the museum back in 2015, which is the first time that everybody could walk through the same door. So if you’re a wheelchair user, or if you had a pram, or if you had mobility limitations, everyone can walk through the same door now, which is just the best.

[00:38:03]
Ellie Downing: With the new renovation, what we’re doing is we’re getting this incredible new exhibition space. So in 2021, we’ll open with Tutankhamun in there, which is just going to be mindbogglingly amazing. But in order to house the exhibition we actually have to build this new space because it’s just so big, and there are objects in there that at the moment don’t physically fit within our building. So we’re building a new space for them as well as a new space for schools and education, which is really cool.

[00:38:33]
Ben Newsome: That’s awesome. I always think, by extension, where does it go eventually, like hundreds of years later, and the place is getting bigger and bigger, and now you’ve got almost like an aircraft hangar for buses to arrive to dump the kids out to go to the site. But that’s amazing you’ve got to build a building to be able to house an exhibition. That must be really exciting. When’s it actually landing so to speak?

[00:38:56]
Ellie Downing: 2021. So we’ve got three years to get the space ready. And there’s also all these other funny things, I think we’ve got the biggest three-door lift in the Southern Hemisphere. To move and bump in exhibitions, you do need a lot of space to move objects through, or sometimes they have to get built inside the gallery. At the moment with Mammoths, we’ve got these huge life-sized models of mammoths, which had to come into the museum in parts and then get built inside the gallery, just because they’re so big. Lots of fun things like that which go on behind the scenes.

[00:39:34]
Ben Newsome: So if you’ve got young students and they’re playing with jigsaw puzzles, you’re training!

[00:39:41]
Ellie Downing: Oh my gosh, the world of exhibition bump-in and people who build exhibitions is just incredible. They’re really, really skilled. Even if you make puppets, there’s all the models and the casts that need to happen. Sharks, because they’re cartilage and they don’t have bones, they can’t be taxidermied or things like that. What you can do if you wanted to show aspects of it is create really life-like casts, which has the benefit that you can touch it a lot more.

[00:40:10]
Ellie Downing: When I said before that people think that museums are specialised, but the reality is that we’re just so diverse in terms of what’s inside the sector. This is the type of stuff. There are people who are specifically trained to make casts of animals for display in museums, and that’s a job that I could never do even though I’ve got two degrees in museums. It’s just insane.

[00:40:31]
Ben Newsome: It’s a forever learning path, that is true.

[00:40:37]
Ellie Downing: It’s the best.

[00:40:38]
Ben Newsome: Yeah. Well thank you very much Ellie. No doubt I will catch you in the festival, but the chances are that you’ll be presenting, I’ll be presenting, I might see you as we go ‘Hi! Bye!’ through the corridors, and that’s about it.

[00:40:51]
Ellie Downing: We can do a drive-by wave.

[00:40:53]
Ben Newsome: We can do that. I think that’s the scicom wave for August in Australia.

[00:40:58]
Ellie Downing: Yeah.

[00:40:59]
Ben Newsome: But look, fantastic. Thank you very much for letting us know a little bit of an insight to what’s going on at the Australian Museum, and have a fantastic and slowly getting warmer day.

[00:41:10]
Ellie Downing: You too. I hope you have a wonderful Friday and weekend and August and everything. I will do a drive-by wave for you during the Science Festival.

[00:41:20]
Ben Newsome: I’ll look forward to it.

[00:41:22]
Announcer: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. Why don’t you book us for a science show or workshop in your school? We love seeing students get excited about science, and you will too. Go to fizzicseducation.com.au and click on schools for more info.

[00:41:38]
Ben Newsome: Well there we go. We were just speaking with Ellie Downing from the Australian Museum, and you can really tell that museums are generally about visitor engagement and experiences that really, truly matter. You can totally hear that in her voice. So if you want to get in touch with the Australian Museum, certainly drop them a line.

[00:41:54]
Ben Newsome: And I tell you what, if you happen to be in Sydney during the middle of August, the Sydney Science Festival, and in particular the Australian Museum Science Festival as well, are some massively awesome things that you can get yourself into in all sorts of capacities. Everything from science in the pub through to science at the museums and everything in between.

[00:42:13]
Ben Newsome: So look, I hope you get a bit out of this podcast and I hope you can get involved in that festival. But until next time, you’ve been listening to me, Ben Newsome from Fizzics Education, and you’ve been listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. I’ll catch you next week.

[00:42:29]
Announcer: You’ve been listening to another Fizzics Ed Podcast. We’re excited about science. Subscribe to us on iTunes to download the next episode as soon as it’s released. And don’t forget, for hundreds of ideas, free experiments, our new Be Amazing book and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s physics spelled F I Z Z I C S.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the “Theory of Flow” mentioned in the episode?
Developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1990, the Theory of Flow refers to a state of self-motivated learning. In a museum context, it describes the immersive experience where visitors engage with objects and information at their own pace, driven by internal interest rather than external requirements.

How much of the Australian Museum collection is actually on public display?
The Australian Museum holds a massive collection of over 18 to 19 million objects. At any given time, only about 3% of these items are out on the floor for public viewing. The remaining 97% are used for scientific research or kept in specialised storage.

What was the significance of mapping the koala genome?
Mapping the koala genome took approximately five to six years and has allowed scientists to develop more effective medicines. Because koalas process toxins from eucalyptus very quickly, they often process medicine before it can be absorbed. Understanding their genome allows for modified treatments for retroviruses that the koala’s system can actually absorb.

What does the Australian Wildlife Genomics Centre do?
It is the only wildlife forensics facility in the Southern Hemisphere. Unlike traditional forensics that focus on humans, this centre deals with DNA from any other species. They assist in cases involving illegal wildlife trade or environmental crimes by identifying species through genetic analysis.

Discussion points summarised from the Museums & Education with AI assistance, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Classroom as a Democratic Museum Space
Consider how schools can repurpose spare rooms or cupboards to create student-led museums. By giving children the agency to curate objects that are important to them—even something as simple as a stick from home—and write their own interpretive labels, educators can foster a sense of pride and scientific identity that traditional syllabus-heavy lessons might miss.

Layering Narratives in Science Communication
Reflect on the “onion layer” approach to presenting information. A single object, like a Monarch butterfly, can be a specimen for taxonomic study, a data point for 1930s migration patterns, or a prompt for personal family histories. How can we use multiple narratives to make complex scientific data more accessible to diverse audiences?

The Value of Intangible Collections
Beyond physical artefacts, a major part of a museum’s value lies in its “intangible collection”—the collective knowledge of its researchers and educators. How can schools better tap into these human resources, through virtual excursions or citizen science, to bring cutting-edge research like genomics or forensics into the classroom?