Canberra hosted a large AUSTRALIA 75 Arts and Sciences Festival and I was asked to coordinate a large exhibition in Melville Hall of about 15 stands displaying how Australia was integrating the Arts and Sciences in Australia’s manufacturing industries. It was an ambitious event featuring many Australian inventions which has stimulated our industries – including the dung beetle program which eradicated the blow fly and house fly from Canberra, the Moon display with its small rock sample. The exhibit showed how ANU’s Earth Sciences had helped to analyse samples of the moon rocks brought back by the US explorations, CSIRO’s contributions to the wool industry and many others which my memory cannot encompass.
View of the Moon Landscape exhibit which I designed. It was a big cylinder suspended from the ceiling with the bottom rim about shoulder height when standing, which the viewer had to duck under the edge to see a 360º photo of the landscape as seen from the lunar lander. It was almost as if the viewer were looking under the bottom rim of one of the booster rockets under the monster Atlas rocket above. The 360º photo can just be seen above the seated man’s headThe moon rock was a separate small exhibit in a glass box – not shown in this photo.
In the entrance foyer I arranged a running series of photomicrographs of rocks and other natural structures which showed that science and art were closely related when presented visually at high magnification.
Professor Arthur Birch as President of the Academy of Science and I collaborated closely in the design of the very large exhibition and it was a huge success. Unfortunately I cannot find any photographs of the event at all. I remember we used UV lights everywhere to highlight special exhibits – most effective.
