Mon Carnet de Voyage

This week I began my series of visits to meet the Education Managers at other cultural institutions in Paris. It’s a great opportunity for me to go behind the scenes, in some of the world’s most popular museums. Paris of course, has the most popular museum in the world - the Louvre, which has 8.3 million visitors per year. That’s nearly 23,000 people a day. The second is the Pompidou Centre with 5.5 million visitors per year.

I started with the Musée Guimet. This is the National Museum of Asian Art. Situated at a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, this museum built in the same year, houses a collection of 45,000 sculptures, paintings and objects d’arts, that illustrate the diverse cultures and civilizations in Asia covering an area as vast in time (five millennia) as in space (India to Japan).

The Education Unit caters for 10,000 students per year, with three full time staff and several casual staff, all of whom are university trained in Asian Art or Asian History. Their programs were really exciting, involving lots of creativity, theatre and even yoga.

Next stop was the National Archives of France. Keeper of the Constitution of 1789, and 78 snippets of dress fabric samples of those worn by Marie Antoinette, amongst a swag of other very cool things - all kept tucked away in a giant iron armoury at the centre of the building. This was actually my third visit to the Archives (because it’s a really cool place) but this was the first time I had spent time talking to the Education staff about their services. The staff there are passionate, and it is obvious that they really love what they do. It was great to meet another team like my own, who focus primarily on curriculum as their programming platform, and, with connecting kids with their heritage. Whilst I was there, a double lesson taking place in the classrooms.

In one room, I observed a non-school linked leisure activity for kids (Wednesday afternoon is like Saturday here, as kids knock off school at lunch time): a calligraphy workshop, where about 15 enthralled children were practicing their lettering using medieval style utensils.

In the next room, a calligrapher was working with adults, doing the same task, but on a slightly higher level. One woman was illustrating a piece of parchment, which soon she would start to illuminate with gold leaf. The classes used authentic materials, such as papyrus and parchment, and even oak tree resin.

It was great to see an institution (similar to our State Library of Victoria) offering programs for adults and children alike, as extension activities, and celebrating lifelong learning.

Monday we had an office ‘lunch’, as it was Remi’s last day, another ‘stagiaire’ such as myself whose six month project was on researching autonomous guide strategies in exhibitions, for his Masters degree.

As my contribution to our lunch, I had spent Saturday hunting down all the ingredients for making Anzac biscuits, and finally, had found everything I needed at Galleries Lafayette. As I do not have an oven in my nun’s quarters here at the convent, Copine Anne-Sophie generously invited me to bake my patrimonial biscuits in her oven on Sunday afternoon.

The resulting Anzac Biscuits (complete with my verbal essay on what they mean exactly) were a hit. So was Mike Shuttleworth’s Apple Crumble. Mike, Program Coordinator at the Centre for Youth Literature in Melbourne (at the SLV) is here for three weeks on holiday with his family, and he took time out of his busy tourist schedule to pop by to meet the French troops at the Library.

It feels quite timely to make Anzac biscuits…for this year is the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. And…this Anzac Day will see the 90th anniversary of a particular battle in The Somme, at a town that was in fact saved by Australian troops on on the third anniversary of Anzac Day - April 25, in 1918. Villers Bretonneux, is a small town about 25kms from Amiens, and there, they love Australians, for this is one town that knows its history very well. In fact, their town logo is a kangaroo. After all, 52,000 Anzacs died over the three years that they fought on the Western Front.

In celebration of this moment in history, I am travelling to Villers Bretonneux for the Anzac Day weekend to partake in the first ever Anzac Day Dawn Service there. Some people say that the Anzac Troops in fact won the war that day for the allies, as it made the Germans retreat from France in that battle, and the rest is history…

Long live the Anzac spirit and may we never forget.
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The below picture, is of the Primary School in Villers Bretonneux, which was destroyed in WWI. A primary school in Victoria, Australia raised money to rebuild it after the war. The school in Australia is called The Victoria School. Both schools have a museum inside devoted to the memory of WWI Australian soldiers.