Melbourne Gaol & Aquarium

Monday April 24th – Our adventure today began with a trip to the Melbourne Gaol. Built in 1845 and beginning with just one cell block the goal was quickly overcrowded after the discovery of gold in 1851. Another cell block was added in 1858 and a third built to house women only in 1864. 135 prisoners were hanged at the goal the most famous being Ned Kelly. It was closed in 1924 but was briefly reopened during WWII to house military detainees, mostly soldiers who went AWOL. The second cell block is all that remains and was opened as a museum in 1972.

It was a creepy but interesting tour. Many of the tiny cells have displays highlighting different facts about the prison, the prisoners, daily life, and death by hanging. The museum has a large display of “death masks” which are plaster casts which were made of each prisoner after their hanging. The myth of the time was that human behavior could be predicted through the “science” of Phrenology which is a theory which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head (reading "bumps"). Therefore the death masks were made to further ‘scientific research’.


Here is one of the liitle cells the prisoners lived in. It reminded me of Alcatrz, but much older, of course.

It was kind of a depressing museum but it did give you a sense of how hard life was during those times and the struggles that people without money went through, often turning to a life of crime to survive. Interestingly there is a night tour of the Goal which is a mix of pure facts and a bit of 'theatre' talking about the ghosts who haunt the Goal. Sounds to scary for me. Yes, I'm a wimp!




After the Gaol we went to the Melbourne Aquarium which was super cool! We watched feeding time at the coral atoll which is a floor to ceiling tank displaying eels, smaller sharks, sea snakes, rock fish, lion fish, an enormous humpheaded maori wrasse, and a variety of smaller brightly colored fish. During feeding they dropped pieces of fish into the tank for the smaller fish and brought the fish on the end of a stick to the sharks and eels.



Next we saw a beautiful display of jellyfish and octopus. They even had a giant squid preserved by the worlds-first technology of 'snap- freezing' in a block of ice. The squid is almost 23 feet long and was aaccidentally caught by commercial fisherman off the south coast of New Zealand in 2004.




Then we went into “the fishbowl’ which is a huge 580,000 gallon tank which holds large sharks, fish, stingrays (the biggest ones I had ever seen), groupers, and a few sea turtles. Again we were lucky enough to arrive a feeding time. This meant that two divers entered the tank and hand fed the stingrays, turtles, and yes, even the sharks! During the feeding there was a docent narrating what was going on inside the tank, identifying the different fish and what the divers needed to be careful of. She explained that the sharks are usually the calmest of the animals in this tank but the divers need to always know where they are because if they are hungry and don’t get fed right away they will nudge and ‘mouth’ the divers and their tanks. She then explained that normally the sharks only eat about two fish each week and feeding are offered twice a day so the likelihood of seeing the sharks being fed was pretty low. We were lucky because everybody was hungry including the sharks! There was so much frenzy and activity that the docent was a bit overwhelmed and kept commenting on how exciting and more active this feeding was then usual. The stingrays were so pushy they were a bit scary! At one point the stingrays actually knocked over one of the divers and pinned him to the bottom of the tank for several minutes until the other diver helped to pull them off. You couldn’t pay me enough to do that!