The Durban Natural Science Museum finds itself with less
elbow room than a submarine as it celebrates International Museums Week today.
ROWAN PHILP and MARJORIE COPELAND visited DURBAN's
Natural Science Museum is starting to make Noah's Ark seem like the Serengeti plains. Already
the most popular museum in South Africa - with over 340 000 visitors last year - it's also
the smallest of its kind, and getting smaller. A warehouse's worth of specimens,
dioramas and artefacts representing, well, life, the universe and everything, have been
jammed into a meagre 1 300mē of gallery space on the first floor of the Durban City Hall.
Yet despite almost ludicrous budget and space restrictions - and even threats of
closure - staffers are using every Heath Robinson plan, conservancy trick and municipal
loophole to stock it with further attractions.
While the South African Museum in Cape Town enjoys a staff complement of 130, just 20
employees and a handful of volunteers work feverishly to keep Durban's heritage showcase
ahead of the rest.
A life-size Tyrannosaurus rex was the first exhibit to burst the venue's seams when its
grisly head was inserted through a skylight into the Durban Art Gallery on the floor
above. But the unnerving spectre was apparently too much for the genteel sensibilities of
art patrons. Curators had to cut a metre and a half off its neck.
Surrounding its legs, dozens of palaeontology exhibits now fight for space with a brand
new diorama on southern Africa and - strangely - at least 20 giant photographic murals of
deep space, awaiting erection for a British Council exhibition this week.
Around the corner, part of the marine life exhibit has been uprooted to crowd in the
Waterhole Coffee Shop, where city by-laws on food and perforated walls at the City Hall
are quietly flouted to accommodate the masses.
The delivery of a magnificent leopard-and-prey from leading taxidermist Katrina Hecker
had curators stumped, since the mammal gallery is absolutely full.
So they simply erected it over visitors' heads, three metres above the aisle.
In the even more crowded museum offices, claustrophobic visitors should choose their
exits carefully when fleeing through the maze of filing cabinets, props and specimen
trays.
One leads directly into a reptile diorama, another is a staircase which leads into
nothing but ceiling - sealed off for offices above - and a third bursts out on a ledge
over the pipe organ in the City Hall itself.
"Space is a problem," says museum director Dr Brett Hendey. "But I think
we've done remarkably well with the limited resources available to us."
The museum was recently "promised" spacious premises at the old Receiver of
Revenue building in Aliwal Street, currently being vacated by the Public Works Department
- which is waiting for the recent fire damage at Commercial City to be repaired for its own
relocation.
But the Central Lending Library - currently at the City Hall - has poached the building
in a somewhat acrimonious Metro Council deal, leaving the museum to hope for part of the
library space downstairs.
Still, its remarkably energetic curators aren't going to wait.
In fact, they're not even content cramming "history and life on earth, both past
and present" into the tiny venue.
They have decided to squash in the universe as well.
While Cape Town and Johannesburg have major planetariums, Durban has had no such
facility until the launch of a simulated version at the Natural Science Museum this month.
This follows years of complaints by school teachers, astronomical societies and museum
personnel themselves that the region had no facility with which to explain the universe.
Although it has neither the three-dimensional night-skies dome nor the astronomical
equipment of its counterparts, the new planetarium uses a computerised multimedia system
and the passion of education officer Mario di Maggio to enthral its audiences.
More importantly, though, it has been made possible because it uses no extra space.
The planetarium is based at the 112-seat museum auditorium, and is, in fact, nothing
but a sophisticated data projector coupled to a multi-media computer. The Friends of the
Universe, an offshoot of the South African Astronomy Observatory, donated the projector
and Sappi the computer equipment.
If visitors can ignore the stuffed mammals looming on their "horizons" in the
lecture hall, Di Maggio takes them on a fantastic ride through the sky.
In fact, they can choose any night sky over a period of 14 millennia and see it as it
was then - albeit in two dimensions - since the Home Planet Internet programme can go back
to the year 4 000BC and forward to 10 000AD.
Take January 1 1700 AD, at 4.47am South African time.
It was a bright night with the moon three-quarters full and Mars clearly visible in the
north east.
Di Maggio describes how a lady weighing 65kg who travels to Mars would instantly shed
41kg to weigh just 24 - and this is scientific fact, not fiction.
The downside is that if she gets a taste for space travel, she must avoid Jupiter at
all costs where she'd have a catastrophic weight gain of 87kg!
The reason, he explains, is simple. Gravity on Mars is weaker than Earth's, and much
stronger on Jupiter.
"Most people don't know anything about space, and many want to," says the
32-year-old.
"Unfortunately, the growth of pseudo-science has gripped a lot of minds, which is
very worrying. Kids know all about Area 51, The X-Files and other fictional bunk and
believe it to be the truth.
"The funny thing is, astronomy is not only scientifically sound, but much more
interesting."
Di Maggio will tell you how to send your name to Mars; show you the birth place of
stars; and also visit Galaxy M13, to which a user-friendly message was sent from Earth on
November 16, 1974. It will, however, take 25 000 years to arrive at its destination.
Only five planets are visible to the naked eye, and yet four of them will be together
and in one corner of the sky this week - an event which occurs only once every few
decades.
Between today and May 23 - from 5am-6am - Saturn, Mercury, Venus and Jupiter (in
ascending order) will line up and be clearly visible over Durban's eastern horizon.
On May 22, the moon tually will join the planetary parade.
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