I went to the museum in Victoria yesterday and I had a bit of a shock.

I’ve lived here for nearly four years now and this is the first time I’ve gone. Partly that’s because I’ve been to severally really great museums and so now I tend to measure all new museums against their measure and that is really not very fair.  I spent, for example, a lot of time as a child in one of the Carnegie-Mellon museums, and in the British Museum and to tell the truth they’re pretty hard to measure up to.  And while the Royal BC Museum is really wonderful in many ways, it is not a museum with anywhere near the breadth of the C-MM or the BM.

Still, I liked what was there. They represent, for example, various parts of BC history and environment in permanent dioramas that do a really good job of giving a visual sense of what they variously represent.  There is also, on another floor, a First Nations exhibit (also permanent) that provides story, examples of art, culture, etc.  Now I find exhibits of First Nations a bit difficult.  There’s the history for one thing  – imagine Turks staging historical displays of the Armenians, or the Taliban leadership building a loving memorial to women, or a Nazi museum to all things Jewish.  That may seem a bit harsh, but there you go, that’s feeling for you. But for the shock…
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