Gold, Torah crowns and Fringe, February 21

Saturday, February 21, 2015

We started the day with a visit to the Perth mint, where to this day gold prospectors bring gold to be weighted and sold to the government.  In this wheelbarrow are reproductions of some of the largest nuggets found:

Of the 20 largest gold nuggets ever found, 19 of them were found in Australia!  To this day large nuggets are sometimes found in the gold fields.  Unfortunately, no photos were allowed in the mint, but we saw the largest gold coin ever minted, a 1000 kg. coin with a kangaroo on one side and an image of Queen Elizabeth II on the other.  It was quite a sight.  We also saw the making of a gold bar.  The raw gold was heated to melting in a crucible and poured into a mold, from which, after a few minutes, it was removed, already hardened, and cooled to room temperature in a water bath.  It was an impressive process.

From the mint we went to the Western Australia Museum where we had a guided tour of the Aboriginal section with an anthropologist.  She gave us a great introduction to the Aborigines of Western Australia and of the very spiritual world in which they live.  The word “Dreaming” is the best translation into English of the complex ideas which include much ancestor reverence and references, a code of behavior, a belief of a very profound integration of the land, the water, ancestors and dreaming into a way of being.  An attempt to explain all of this was in a sign in the museum:

The Law comes from the Dreaming.

The Law is a set of rules for behaviour.

Elders maintain the Law and ensure that it is passed on.  People say “It’s the Law” to explain the rules they follow.

Lore also comes from the Dreaming.  It is the stories that contain the Law.

There was a man with us from one of the aboriginal communities who also explained some of the differences between those communities.  These differences included language dialects and alternate ways of carving shields, spears, digging sticks and other everyday things.  It didn’t seem as if the differences were as great as those we had among the Native American tribes in North America, but the stories of the abuses of the native population by the Europeans are horrible and equally as bad as ours.

Here’s a shelter typical of those built by the native people out where the wind is ferocious.  The closed end of the shelter is into the wind, and the shape of the shelter creates a wind break for a fire to be built in front of the open part.  The wind carries the smoke away, and yet the heat of the fire warms the inside of the shelter:

There is so much more to learn, and we’ll continue to have instruction on the aborigines as we get into the southern part of the Northern Territory.

After lunch we were on our own for the afternoon.  Joyce had found a notice that there was an exhibit at the nearby art gallery of artifacts from the Jewish Ghetto of Venice.  The introduction to the exhibit explained that in September of 1943, as the Nazi armies invaded Italy, two elderly men who had been responsible for the religious service of the Spanish and Levantine Synagogues in the Venetian Ghetto, concealed a selection of liturgical objects.  The men who hid them died in the concentration camps, and the objects were forgotten until the recent restoration of the Scola Spagnola—the Spanish Synagogue.  We were excited to see this exhibit as we will be traveling to Rome, Florence and Venice with the Melton program out of Hebrew University in Jerusalem in October.  The items were spectacular.  Here is a pair of Torah crowns:

 And here a selection of rimmonim (Torah-top finials):

 The exhibit moves from here to Paris and then back to Venice some time in 2015, but the exact dates were not given and it’s not clear if these items will be in Venice when we’re there.

Finally we went back to the hotel, washed up, and went out into a combination of Saturday night, Chinese New Year, and Fringe Festival.  The city is hopping.  Loud, boisterous but good-natured crowds, music, alcohol, people dressed in an amazing variety of looks, with the young women, especially, in very revealing and provocative outfits along with shoes impossible to walk in.  We had dinner at an Outback themed steak place—delicious---and sat at a table on the sidewalk enjoying the parade in front of us.

Tomorrow, Sunday, we board the Indian-Pacific train and will spend two nights on it, arriving in Adelaide on Tuesday.  No internet on the train, so more in a couple of days.