sunday selections – tasmanian museum & art gallery

Here are some photos for Sunday Selections (if you can get past my ramblings on why I have these photos). Sunday Selections is hosted by River at her blog Drifting Through Life, and I have been an occasional participant over the past few years. It’s all about posting photos you’ve taken but never shown anywhere – and I have heaps of those.

If you’ve been persisting with my on-again off-again blog efforts, you’ll know that I’ve been through a fairly stressful time at work, and as a result, I decided it was time to take some time out just for me.

I decided to take four weeks of long service leave, which was not an easy decision to come to. I always thought I’d take long service leave when I had something particular to do, or an overseas holiday to take. But I got to the point where I realised that in almost 20 years of (almost) continuous work, I have never taken any leave longer than about a week to do whatever I want to do.

I know I’m incredibly lucky to been employed for this period of time and I’m grateful for the opportunities that I’ve had. Some of the work has been challenging to my beliefs at times, but I’ve also been fortunate to have pretty much always worked with people who have supported me, challenged me and put up with me.

If you’d asked me 20 years ago where I’d be in 20 years time, I doubt I would have said “the public service”. It was the last place I ever expected to be.

I’m going to explore this a bit more later, because this isn’t the point of this post.

The point of this post is that I am on leave, and part of my plan was to have adventures. Juniordwarf thought this was very exciting, and when I asked what he thought I might do, he said, “I don’t know, they’re your adventures, not mine”.

So the plan was to go to places I hadn’t been to, or places I’d not been to for a long time.

Mondays are adventures in Hobart days, and I have a huge list of places to see in Hobart, which I’m not going to get through in four weeks.

My first port of call was the newly refurbished Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery. Juniordwarf’s class went there earlier in the year and I’d wanted to go with them, but I got caught up at work, so I missed out.

It was a great first adventure to have. I found myself moved to tears, excited and inspired, and it has set the scene for my upcoming adventures.

The story of the Europeans’ arrival in Tasmania stirred a lot of emotion.

There’s a whole room devoted to the Thylacine

Spirals

Model cottage

Butterflies

I remember a lot of these stickers from my childhood

Puppets from iconic Tasmanian puppet company Terrapin

Stairway to nowhere