Perth Zoo, Scitech, a play, Museum of Western Australia and Fremantle Prison

I'm doing a reasonable job doing everything else and an atrocious job blogging.

Perth Zoo

While visiting relatives:

And now what follows is a ridiculous week in which we went to SciTech three times for homeschooling lessons for 10yo and 8yo, a stage play and we also squeezed in a trip to the museum on one of the Scitech days because everyone was in a good mood at the time (I won't say anything about the trip home from that day).

Scitech

The big two have done a couple of Scitech classes for homeschoolers.  Scitech have their brains on and just run homeschool classes where all you have to do is book in for them (which involves buying a ticket online) and rock up.  So much easier than trying to get a group together (though that can sometimes be fun too).  So well done Scitech for being forward thinking and imaginative (which is kind of required in that field but one would be surprised by what can be encountered in scientific circles).  I couldn't get the small into the class 8yo got into but he didn't feel like he was mssing out, he just scurried around and played with everything.  They're all in for a class later on in the year.

State Theatre Centre of WA

I had friends at uni that did Children's Theatre so I have exactly no idea why it's never occurred to me to look at children's theatre and instead just minced around wondering how old 6yo has to be before we can take him to theatre performances without him wanting to run up and down the aisles.  As it is, at 6 he has settled down a hell of a lot (although a tour guide at Freo Prison - photos of that further down - did wonder how he had managed to survive this long after a few heart stopping moments on a very high catwalk).  While we were on the CAT headed to the Barrack St Jetty to catch a ferry to the zoo side, the kids saw a poster for a play of the 26th Storey Treehouse and asked if we could go see it (before we went to the play 6yo kept referring to it as a film as they've been to cinemas but the last time we were at a performance was a dance performance four years ago).  I got some friends together and we went as a group (with one friend generously organising it and using their Ticketek account to get the group tickets which saved me signing up Yet Another Account...for now).

Obviously there are no photos of the performance (which the kids thoroughly enjoyed) but here we are with friends at the theatre.

Hoping to take them to at least one a year.  Theatre tickets are a bit pricey.

Museum of Western Australia

We'll have to come back and do this one again as we cut it a bit short due to how stroppy 6yo started getting halfway through (and they wanted to do the Art Gallery afterwards!).  We went left as I like ending up near the play area when we're done, and did the ocean gallery, the mammal gallery, the bird gallery, the butterfly gallery, had a very quick look around the Aboriginal gallery before shooting through the diamonds to dinosaurs gallery and heading home.

Fremantle Prison

The last time I explored Freo Prison was a few years ago.  Being World Heritage listed not much has changed inside.  8yo and 6yo didn't get a lot out of it at the time.  My in-laws have apparently never been to Fremantle Prison so I said "we should go!" Ages later we finally got around to it.  They decided to pay for us to get in and also bought us lunch and because they paid for us to get in they decided to do one of the packages which included two tours.  For future reference, taking a lunch break in between is an excellent idea and the tour guides don't mind if you tell them first apparently.  The guides are excellent and very informative and entertaining. 

I apparently have photos from the last time we were at Freo Prison in 2011 ("we" in this case was just me and the smalls, they insisted on coming with me when I had to take the car in for a long service so I'd left the eldest home with JJ and after dropping off the car we needed something to do for the next four hours) but strangely can't find the post they should be attached to.

This guy was fun, called the kids "little prisoners" and let them ring the bell that let people know that a tour was about to start.

Apparently Fremantle was supposed to be a free colony, but they eventually decided they needed the indentured labour and got some convicts sent out, and the first thing the poor buggers had to do was build themselves this lovely prison.

One of the 2011 pics, as it was a better shot of the skylight than I have now.  Yes I made pictures tiny back in the day when bandwidth was extra slow and monitors not so large.

I think it was No4 Division that held all the really dangerous characters.  One of them had cells which had their own bathrooms and yards because the people stuffed into them were either too dangerous to be allowed with the other prisoners or had to be kept away from other prisoners so they weren't lynched.

Massive kitchen was massive for obvious reasons.  Long term prisoners were trained up as cooks so they didn't have to keep training up replacements.  Apparently someone was murdered in the middle of the kitchen after telling one of the cooks that he didn't like his soup.

They changed the commandment to "thou shalt do no murder" or something to that effect from "thou shalt not kill" because there was still capital punishment in those days.  Slightly crooked because I was taking the pic quietly while trying to listen to the tour guide and keep an eye on 6yo

Who had to be told to GET OFF THE GATE.

And then we went on one of the tours that I hadn't been on yet.  I've either lost

Being told that they couldn't watch the weekly movies/plays was pretty good behaviour modification for a lot of prisoners.  Sorry about the quality, struggled a bit with the lighting.

Special cell constructed/modified for Moondyne Joe on the third floor because the guy got out of every other prison he was put in.  Giving a miner a pickaxe and hard labour involving breaking up rocks next to the prison wall is probably not the smartest thing to do at any rate.

Some of the cells had some really nice artwork in it.  I couldn't work out how to take photos without getting glare from the pieces of plastic that had been put over them to protect them from people who absolutely HAVE to touch things and I missed getting photos of some that may have been done by someone that mother in law suspects she went to school with as the name was familiar to her.

The original mural was destroyed (can't remember how, serves me right for not doing this blog sooner!), I think this one was reproduced from photos or something to that effect.

I think the warning signs only applied to the sides rather than the actual stairs but I still found it pretty funny.

This used to be the attached hospital.  Now it's an early learning centre (because what else would you use an old hospital for).

Exercise yards from the guard tower in one of the previous photos.

To the left is the outer wall.  I was only intending on taking a photo of the opposite wall and across the roofs but the shadow was in the right spot so I lowered the phone slightly.  That's 6yo standing next to me that I have a death grip on, he really wanted to climb the fence to look over the perimeter wall at what everyone else was looking at.  The tour guide (different from the last one) at this point started wondering how he had managed to survive this long.

Inside the reservoir building.  Would have taken a photo through one of the arches but wasn't sure if I would be able to get a good shot with how dark it was (even with flash) and was also worried about dropping my camera.

Didn't try to take pictures in the morgue because it was dark.  Apparently the tour guides have a lot of fun in there including banging the doors shut to startle people on torchlight tours and of course there will be a coffin with a staff member in it wo will suddenly "rise from the dead" to freak people out.   Our tour guide for this tour told us how he had zombied around on one of them before staggering over to the tour guide that was on and asking "Do you have anything that could help with my coffin?" and the poor tour guide completely didn't get it and said they would get him something between this group and the next one, in the meantime some of the tourists had caught the pun and were sniggering.

This pic is just here because I thought this alleyway looked cool.

This one was jumped from the red brick building on the left to the plastered building on the right by two out of three prisoners in an escape attempt.  The two that made the jump did actually escape for a bit and were later recaptured.  The third probably baulked when he shouldn't have and fell, managing to break a tap and his leg.