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Interpretive Empathy

A recent posting by Gretchen Jennings on the Museum Commons blog has got me thinking about empathy, and the role it plays in interpretation. Gretchen was writing mostly in the context of how museums (can fail to) respond empathetically to traumatic events in the local community. But I want to broaden the concept out and assert that empathy is essential for good interpretive practice full stop.

Back in 1999 Zahava Doering identified three main ways that museums could relate to their audiences:

  • As strangers: the museum’s primary responsibility is to the collection; any public obligation is fulfilled grudgingly:  “The public, while admitted, is viewed as strangers (at best) and intruders (at worst). The public is expected to acknowledge that by virtue of being admitted, it has been granted a special privilege” (Doering, 1999, p.75). They might be a dying breed these days, but we all know those museum professionals who think the museum would be a whole lot better than all those visitors messing up the place.
  • As guests: museums take responsibility for their visitors and want to provide them with beneficial experiences.  “This “doing good” is usually expressed as “educational” activities and institutionally defined objectives. The visitor-guests are assumed to be eager for this assistance and receptive to this approach” (ibid, p.75). It could be argued that these museums have well-meaning but ultimately paternalistic views towards their visitors. The implicit assumption is that we know best and are smarter than the average visitor.
  • As clients: the museum’s primary responsibility is to be accountable to the visitor. “The visitor is no longer subordinate to the museum. The museum no longer seeks to impose the visit experience that it deems most appropriate” (ibid, p. 75).

When Doering wrote this in 1999, she suggested that most museums were in a “guest”- style relationship with their audiences. While social and technological developments have changed the nature of the museum-visitor relationship since, the “guest” mode probably still prevails. So what does this have to do with empathy?

Well, I think it boils down to relating to visitors as fellow human beings. Unless we are genuinely interested in our visitors as people – their backstories, their worldviews, their life experiences, then how can we expect them to become engaged with us? Engagement is a two-way street and we should want to connect to visitors as much as we want them to connect with us.  I enjoy talking to visitors. It’s one of the things that attracted me to visitor research, and I love going to presentations by other researchers who clearly share this empathy for the audiences they interact with.

If there is a barrier to engagement, perhaps it’s because we’re being too clever for our own good. Those of us who work in museums are part of the community, not apart from it. If we see ourselves as somehow separate, then that’s inevitably going to translate into how we go about doing our job – we’ll default to “guest-mode” thinking.

When I’m thinking about interpretive empathy, I’m not sure if the “client” model that Doering described is quite what I’m getting at. I’m wondering if it’s more of a “compatriot” mode, but I’m not entirely happy with that term either. What do you think?

Doering, Z. D. (1999). Strangers, Guests, or Clients? Visitor Experiences in Museums. Curator: The Museum Journal, 42(2), 74–87. doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.1999.tb01132.x

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Forbidden City Audioguide

I’ve recently returned from two weeks in China as part of the Student Leadership in International Cooperation project. While most of the trip was spent visiting university campuses, we did manage to fit in some sightseeing. On our first day in Beijing we had a couple of free hours in the afternoon, so we headed to the Forbidden City (otherwise known as the Palace Museum).

Forbidden City 1

It’s a huge site and we were on a tight timeframe – we just managed to buy tickets before the box office closed at 4pm, giving us an hour to make our way through before the site closed at 5pm. We hired the location-aware audioguides that are available in multiple languages:

The audioguide incorporated a map of the Palace Museum using LEDs to indicate your location. Sites still illumianated are those you have yet to get to.
The audioguide incorporated a map of the Palace Museum using LEDs to indicate your location. Sites still illumianated are those you have yet to get to.

The audioguide was small and light, with minimal controls – basically just volume adjustment and a pause function:

Rear of the audioguide, made by lightour based in Beijing.
Rear of the audioguide, made by lightour, a Beijing-based company.

The introductory track starts pretty much as soon as they give you the guide – which means I missed it the first time around while I fiddled with the earpiece so that it didn’t keep falling off (an issue exacerbated by the filter mask I was wearing due to the high pollution levels in Beijing that day). I accidentally changed the language by pressing “option”, but was able to scroll through until I was back at English. “Help” restarted the introductory track and then I was back in business.

Overall it worked fairly well and it was useful to have the guide double as a mini-map. However it does not lend itself well to the “walk and look” approach you tend to take when you’re trying to get through a site quickly (like we were). It meant that sometimes the audio description cut out mid-way through because I had moved out of range. There also didn’t seem to be a way of restarting a description if you wanted to. But the location awareness of the device meant that it was pretty much set-and-forget, which is probably a reasonable tradeoff of control for simplicity.

As far as I can tell from the Lightour website (using Google translate as I coudn’t see an English version), it seems that this technology is being used in several tourist sites in China, but apparently nowhere else as yet.

Forbidden City 2

Has anyone seen or used anything similar?

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“Hot Interpretation”: Telling Difficult Stories

There is probably no such thing as “value-free” interpretation. But some stories are more sensitive, contested or emotionally-laden than others.

In the context of heritage sites, attention to the emotional content of a visitor experience has been described as “hot interpretation”, to distinguish it from the more cool, detached, and primarily cognitive approach that heritage interpretation has traditionally emphasised [1]. In hot interpretation, emotional engagement is seen as a way of challenging visitors to reconsider their values, preconceptions and beliefs.

There is no doubt that telling difficult stories is an important thing for heritage interpreters to do. This often involves acknowledging past wrongs – such as formal Government apologies for the Stolen Generation in 2008 and forced adoptions last week (to cite two Australian examples). But both of these examples have shown that there is a need to handle the issues sensitively and carefully, and to do your homework – much damage can be done by the wrong choice of words.

A 2012 article by Ballantyne, Packer and Bond [2] identified some general principles to guide the development of ‘hot interpretation’, based on visitor research at the Broken Links exhibition (about the Stolen Generation):

  1. Personal stories: including personal stories of real people helps people make a connection to the subject matter – stories connect more than statistics do. Allowing people to make multiple personal connections gives a story an emotional resonance that isolated facts and statistics do not.
  2. Balance despair and hope: despair is disempowering and ultimately unengaging. Hot interpretation means invoking difficult feelings – anger, shame, regret. Unless there is a way for visitors to deal with and work through these feelings, and see some cause for hope and optimism, they may get overwhelmed or otherwise enter denial.
  3. Educate, not persuade: if visitors get the sense that the interpretation is biased, or is forcing them to reach a particular conclusion, they will put their defences up. This will limit personal engagement with the story and render the interpretation less effective. Personal stories need to be balanced with verifiable facts and avoid propaganda. Of course, bias is in the eye of the beholder and it’s probably impossible to avoid accusations of bias entirely. 
  4. Provide space to reflect: the paper describes reflection as the ‘missing link’ between experience and action. Thus, if the purpose of hot interpretation is to encourage visitors to reconsider previously held attitudes and beliefs, there needs to be an opportunity for visitors to do this. Comment walls and other opportunities for visitors to participate, leave their own thoughts and see the reflections of others were suggested as effective ways for visitors to reflect.
  5. Focus on the past to inform the future: like the need to balance despair and hope, hot interpretation should not dwell solely on the past but also look to the future. What lessons can we learn? What can we do to avoid the mistakes of the past? What can we change about our own lives?

NOTES:

  • Disclosure: two of the authors of this paper, Jan Packer and Roy Ballantyne, are my PhD supervisors. This is just a quick (and possibly ham-fisted) summary of a far more detailed body of work and I encourage you to go to the original source if possible.
  • This blog post came about because someone sent a query to me via this blog’s comment form about difficult content for interpretation. Writing this post seemed like a good way to answer their question. Do you have a question or a suggested topic for a blog post? Feel free to ask me – I’ll do my best to answer if I can.

[1] Uzzell, D., & Ballantyne, R. (1998). Heritage that hurts: interpretation in a postmodern world. In D. Uzzell & R. Ballantyne (Eds.), Contemporary Issues in Heritage and Environmental Interpretation (pp. 152–171). London: The Stationery Office.

[2] Ballantyne, R., Packer, J., & Bond, N. (2012). Interpreting Shared and Contested Histories: The Broken Links Exhibition. Curator: The Museum Journal, 55(2), 153–166. doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.2012.00137.x

 

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Open to Interpretation?

The end of the year is a time to reflect.

As I look back over the year, the things I’ve read and the discussions I’ve had, it’s given me pause to think about my own biases, assumptions and weaknesses. How do these shape my work and my approach to interpretation?

First, some context: my academic background is in the sciences. My subject choices at school became increasingly sciencey as the years progressed. Of course, to choose science was also to reject other options. In my case I think it’s just as telling to consider the path not chosen as the one that was. Was I drawn to the sciences or repelled by the arts? Perhaps a bit of both.

I dropped art fairly early on in high school – mainly because I lacked any real creative skill or talent in the visual sense. I was, however, fairly skilled at writing and this was my creative outlet. For as long as English lessons focused on the mechanics of grammar or the creativity of free writing, I enjoyed it and did well. But that all stopped when English ceased being about creation and started being about criticism. Frankly, it got all opaque and impenetrable to me.  We were now supposed to deconstruct the intent of another author, find metaphors in poetry and hidden meanings in literary text. I just didn’t get it! If an author wanted to say something, why didn’t they just say it? I struggled writing essays with minimum word counts when I felt I had said all that I could meaningfully say in half that.

By contrast, school science was an oasis of sense and logic – there were rules; you learned them; you applied them. As you grasped the rules you started to see the patterns in them. Chemistry in particular made perfect intuitive sense to me. Inevitably, I was drawn to the certainty of the sciences rather than take my chances on the humanities, where so much of your grade seemed to be down to teacher judgement or sheer luck.

While age and maturity mean I now have a renewed appreciation for the arts and humanities, I’m still stumped by things like poetry. Every now and again I duck into literature, but I worry that there is some grand metaphor that I’m completely oblivious to, and that I’m really only seeing the tip of the iceberg. In short, sometimes the arts can make me feel pretty darn stupid.

So what does that mean for my approach to interpretation?

I think it means I’m particularly wary of anything that does not make its intent explicit – anything that expects me to “make my own meaning” with minimal support. Make my own meaning with what? How? How do I know that I haven’t got completely the wrong end of the stick? While I might critique it once I know it, I still want to know what the ‘official’ answer is supposed to be.

I’m aware some people are polar opposites. They love the freedom to make their own meaning and can find interpretive tools (that I find essential) a distraction or even an intrusion. Perhaps they grasp something intuitively in the art or literature in the same way I did in chemical equations. Perhaps they have confidence in their own interpretations in a way that I don’t. Perhaps their brains are just wired differently. I don’t know. I do know when I meet such people though, as they tend to find interpretation “shouty”, overbearing, or dumbing down. I’ll call such people “meaning makers”, to distinguish from people like me who are probably more “meaning readers”.

Being a meaning reader must influence my approach to interpretation. To my mind I’m putting clarity before confusion. But is that how a meaning maker would see it?

In any case, how can we accommodate both in the same experiences? How do we not shout at the meaning makers, while still providing enough context to ensure the meaning readers don’t end up feeling like they’ve missed the point?

Are you a meaning maker or a meaning reader? What does it mean for your approach to interpretation and exhibitions?

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Rising to the “Future Challenge”

Last week was Interpretation Australia’s National Conference, titled Future Challenge. As IA President Sue Hodges said in the opening ceremony, Interpretation faces challenges in the present, as well as the future. Economic downturns lead to budget cuts, which often disproportionately affect funding for interpretive projects and staff. In light of this, how can interpreters adapt to changing circumstances and make a better case for the value they add to natural and cultural heritage?

Our opening and closing keynotes gave two very different perspectives on this issue.

Genevieve Adkins, Director of the Centre for Interpretive Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, highlighted the importance of interpreters having a solid grasp of the theory that underpins their work. Theory confers rigour, and rigour is necessary for funders and other stakeholders to take interpretation seriously. Judicious application of theory can also lead to better returns on investment in heritage interpretation projects.

For the closing keynote, Dee Madigan, Director of Madigan Communications and probably best known as a regular panellist on ABC’s spin-deconstruction program Gruen Planet, gave an ‘outsider’ perspective on the issues facing interpretation. She highlighted some of the parallels between advertising and interpretation, and how there is common ground in needing to understand the motivations and wants of your target audience.

I’ve prepared a storify of the tweets from Day 1 and Day 3. Day 2 was mostly taken up by field trips to destinations around Regional Victoria – I went to Point Nepean National Park and learned some of the history of the site as a Quarantine Station and later as an Officer Cadet School.

Ships and their passengers en route to Melbourne were held in quarantine at Point Nepean. The station was in use from the mid 1800s until the 1970s.
Quarantine was strict – passengers belongings were fumigated and all passengers had to go through special bathing procedures. Even the mail was fumigated! This case shows equipment used for fumigating mail.

I also gave a presentation based on Chip and Dan Heath’s 2007 book Made to Stick: why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck. In keeping with the Future Challenge theme of the conference, this paper was intended to show how the Heath brothers’ ingredients for ‘sticky’ ideas are a useful checklist for interpreters. Conversely, it shows how the business world is hungry for sticky ideas: are there potential untapped markets for people with interpretive skills?

 

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Review: Eastern State Penitentiary

I very nearly didn’t visit Eastern State Penitentiary. But I’m very glad I did.

It was the first Saturday in August, on my last day in Philadelphia. I had spent the morning trekking around the Philadelphia Museum of Art (yes, the one from Rocky – and people actually do train on those steps in the mornings before the museum opens). So I was feeling pretty museum-ed out. And I had to be on a bus to New York later that afternoon. AND the weather didn’t look like it was going to hold out and I didn’t want to get stuck in yet another East Coast summer downpour. But I decided to go anyway, and was pleasantly surprised at the quality and variety of their visitor experiences, which had been simply and sympathetically achieved.

Eastern State was built in 1829, when it was widely thought that it was a good idea to completely isolate prisoners so that they had a chance to silently reflect on their misdeeds and become truly ‘penitent’. Over the years the prison was expanded and solitary confinement was eventually phased out. It was in use until relatively recently –  the last prisoners were transported out in 1970. Over the next couple of decades, the site fell into disrepair, but from the late 1980s onwards was gradually rehabilitated and opened to the public.

A view down a typical cell block at ESP. These cell blocks all radiated from a central zone in a hub-and-spoke design; additional spokes were added as the prison was expanded.

Site interpretation was through a combination of audiotour and signage.

A group takes advantage of the juxtaposition of seating, signage and audiotour track.

The audiotour used a combination of guided and self-guided tracks that I thought worked quite well. The audioguide was one of the typical select-track-number-to-play types, so in theory you could choose whatever track you wanted whenever. However, the idea was that the first 10 tracks or so took you on a guided tour from the visitor centre around the site so you could get your physical and conceptual bearings.

The final part of the ‘guided’ part of the audiotour was called ‘Voices from Eastern State Penitentiary’, and it was paired with images displayed along the cell block. The idea was that each image was paired with oral history quotes from people with links to the site – former inmates or guards. The text above each image was the first line of spoken words associated with the picture, so you were clear what audio went with what picture. It was a simple but effective way of pairing sound and pictures that were being presented independently of one another.

From there you could choose from a further 20 tracks or so peppered around the site. On the site map you were given, these additional tracks were organised by topic (art installations, famous prisoners, etc), so you could follow particular areas of interest if you wanted to.

For the most part, ESP is preserved as a ruin rather than restored. This section, which you encounter early in the ‘orientation’ section of the auditour, is a recreation of what the penitentiary would have looked like in its early years of operation.

There were also face-to-face “Hands on History” stations around the site, where staff would do brief (10 minutes or so) demonstrations at regular intervals. I didn’t take part in any of these as I was more interested in doing things at my own pace, but these sessions appeared to be popular with family visitors in particular.

However, while ESP does cater for families (those with older children at least – I think they discourage younger children because of the subject matter), they don’t shy away from providing more confronting topics for adults. Some of the audiotour tracks are only accessible by getting the track numbers from reading certain graphic panels. As well as frankly presenting episodes from the site’s past, they presented interpretations and artworks that went to the heart of present-day issues.

The bar chart on the left shows the dramatic increase in the USA’s prison population from 1970 to the present day. The bar chart on the right shows that the USA imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world – at tremendous cost.
“GTMO” – one of the several art installations at ESP. The contents of the cage are the possessions that are allowed an inmate in Camp X-ray in Guantanamo Bay.

The other thing that struck me about this site is that it came across as very visitor-focused: a good variety of interpretive media, clear orientation, friendly staff, recognition of visitors’ intelligence. Upon departure one of the guides at the entrance was even so kind as to direct me to the nearest bus stop to take me back across town. A little thing maybe, but it finished my visit on a high note and helped make ESP one of the unexpected highlights of my visit to the US.

 

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Museum App Review: MCA Insight

I recently visited the newly re-vamped Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. One of the recent additions to the visitor repertoire is the MCA Insight smartphone app, and I thought I’d give it a go.

The MCA Insight home screen

Choosing the ‘Explore’ option takes you to a clean and easy to use interface that lets you look for specific works or see a map of the gallery. It uses the Museum’s wi-fi to locate you so can also select the option for it to only show works that are near you. This works most of the time but in some cases it got a bit confused due to the location of gallery walls – sometimes you were physically near something you couldn’t actually get to.

The “Explore” screen

If you were looking for something in particular, you could use the app to locate it in the gallery. If you were already nearby the work this was helpful, but the lack of gallery labelling or signposting of locations beyond the level number and the location of walls could make it difficult if you were using this as your principal way to find your way around.

The location of a work on MCA Insight

As you walked around, the Insight app gave you more information about the works. In most cases it was nothing different from the label, but it was often easier to read the text on your phone while standing back to take a work in, rather than having to peer at the text on the wall. Overall I found the app quite easy and fun to use.

An example of a label on the MCA Insight app

I was a bit underwhelmed by the follow-up though. On the way you were able to collect works to add to ‘My Gallery’.  Then, if you enter your email address, the app promises to send a record of your visit. I think I was a victim of my own expectations here – I was expecting to receive something akin to what you get with MONA’s “O”. This sends you a wireframe model of the route you actually took through the museum as well as the artworks you selected. I was looking forward to seeing my meandering route through the museum rendered in 3D. However, what I got was a straightforward list of the works saved in My Gallery (mine is here), along with some additional details about the works and the artists. This was good enough (except in the cases where the only additional information was the page where you could purchase a $49.95 catalogue), but I was a bit disappointed because of my loftier expectations. I think it would be better if MCA re-worded how they describe the ‘record of your visit’ so that it’s a better description of what is actually offered by the app.

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New Interpretive Trail at West Terrace Cemetery

Last Sunday was the launch of the Beliefs Attitudes and Customs self-guided interpretive trail at West Terrace Cemetery. This trail complements the Heritage Highlights tour (featured in this 4-minute video) that was launched last year and won a 2011 tourism award.

The trail was launched as part of a Victorian funeral re-enactment staged during the About Time history festival. Over 400 people attended the re-enactment, which was an impressive turnout.

Crowds photographing the funeral procession as it enters the cemetery

I was responsible for writing the signage and self-guided leaflet for the trail, with the assistance of historian Geoff Speirs who helped me with some of the background research and sourcing of images.

In contrast to the Heritage Highlights tour, the Beliefs Attitudes and Customs trail focuses less on individual personalities and more on how the cemetery reflects both the religious diversity of South Australia and the change in social attitudes since the colonial era.

So this trail encompasses the different religious sections of the cemetery, the funeral rituals of these different faiths, and how these religious sections came about in the first place. It is also an opportunity to compare the practices of colonial times, which to modern eyes can seem very rigid and superstitious, with the more ‘scientific’ view of death and the grieving process prevalent today. However in the absence of the prescribed social norms of yesteryear, we now may find ourselves at a loss regarding how we are ‘supposed’ to deal with death and grief.

I have to confess that while fascinating, some of these more abstract ideas proved difficult to write about in a way that was clear, engaging and succinct. Time will tell how successful we were in this goal.

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Audiences: a vicious cycle?

Are our audiences our audiences because that’s who we think our audiences are?

Let me explain. Say our audience appears to be from a particular demographic. So we tend to target that demographic in the way we position ourselves. In so doing, we create the impression that what we have to offer is primarily of interest to that particular demographic. Thus (surprise, surprise!) that is the demographic that primarily visits. But by setting ourselves up as being for a particular demographic in the first place, who are we excluding? Are we narrowing our appeal instead of broadening it?

Is there a circular logic to the way we see or audiences?

My thinking was first triggered by this article, which contends that by predominantly targeting families with kids aged 8-12, science museums are limiting their appeal to adults (this has a lot of implications for science and society, but I won’t cover that here – read the article!). Parents will say that they don’t go to the science centre anymore because their children have ‘outgrown’ it. Is it possible to ‘outgrow’ science? Can you imagine anyone saying that about an art museum?

Since then I’ve had similar conversations about other types of cultural heritage sites. If we make too many assumptions about who our audiences are, are we sending the message that we don’t have anything to offer anyone else?

It’s a tricky balance: saying you’re for “everyone” is too much like saying you’re for no-one in particular. But conversely, it would be prudent to challenge the assumptions we have about who our audiences are, and think more about who they could be.

 

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Interpretive Signs of Kangaroo Island

Following our visit to the Flinders Ranges (see previous post), we recharged our batteries for a few days in Adelaide before heading down to Kangaroo Island. K.I. (as we South Australians call it) is renowned for its wildlife and interesting landscapes. Interestingly, even though we were a few hundred kilometres and several hours’ drive away from the Flinders Ranges, both KI and the Flinders are part of the same ancient geological region. But once again, of course, this post will concentrate on the interpretive signage.

Flinders Chase National Park

While this park covers more or less the whole western third of the island, the most popular destinations are Admirals Arch and Remarkable Rocks, both at the south western tip. At the entrance to the National Park, there is a visitor centre which also acts an an entry checkpoint, where you pay your park entrance fee. At first my (UK-based) travelling companions were a little surprised at this, but were satisfied that the money was being well-spent when they arrived at Admirals Arch to find well-maintained boardwalks and viewing platforms. It took plenty of stairs to get down to the arch itself, but even for older visitors this was not too big a problem.

First, notice the positioning of the signs – they were located at the bottom of the boardwalk platforms at an angle, so you could read them as you were taking in the view:

Interpretive sign at base of boardwalk, viewed in profile
View of interpretive sign from boardwalk. Seals are basking on the rocks beyond as the waves crash around them.

I thought this was a good way for the signs to be positioned. As you were looking down from the boardwalks they were in easy sight without being intrusive. However, the sea air is obviously not good for them – as you got further down to the Arch itself, they got increasingly more tatty, and at the bottom of the arch the interpretive sign (whatever it was about) was so degraded as to be just a yellowed and dog-eared blank rectangle.

A sign interpreting the arch structure itself. Notice how this one is showing more signs of wear and tear than the seal identification one.

Around Admiral’s Arch there were a few walking trails, including some that were a bit more of the “off the beaten track” variety. On one of these we encountered some signs about the strategies the local flora use to survive in such a windswept and saline environment:

Sign on the Cape du Couedic walking trail

While walking this trail (ostensibly a loop), I started to get the distinct sense that we were doing it ‘backwards’ compared to the way that the designers intended. One clue was that the order of the interpretive signs seemed to be telling a story in reverse – in itself no big deal. A bigger problem was that we sometimes had trouble picking up the trail among the undergrowth, as the line-of-sight direction arrows of the trail were presumably placed on the assumption that you were heading in the opposite direction and sometimes were obscured from the other way. A lesson to trail designers – make sure your wayfinding and directional signposts work in both directions!

Remarkable Rocks

Still in Flinders Chase National Park, Remarkable Rocks are a short drive from Admirals Arch. (Incidentally, the rock structures were formed by similar geological processes to those which created Uluru [Ayers Rock] – something I picked up from reading the signage.) As well as interpreting the formation and significance of the rock structures, safety is a strong message here.

Signage hut on the way from the car park to Remarkable Rocks
A safety message. The salutary tale here is that you are risking the lives of others, not just your own, if you stray into prohibited areas.
A sign featuring then-and-now photographs, highlighting the continuing erosion of the rocks

Seal Bay

Another stop on our travels was Seal Bay, famous for its colony of sea lions. I don’t have any photographs of the signage here – access to the beach is via guided tour only, and the boardwalks overlooking the beach have signage of identical design to those at Admirals Arch. They must have all been commissioned together. But we did take the guided tour, on which I learned:

  • The difference between seals and sealions: the former are predominantly ocean dwellers; the latter are equally at home on land and on sea.
  • Sealions are related to wolves and bears, so you’d better keep your distance! Especially during the breeding season, it’s essential to keep your distance. This point was made more than once, and I wondered if the analogy to wolves and bears was to reinforce, particularly to international tourists, that these animals are not to be taken lightly.
  • Female Australian sea lions have 18-month pregnancies, with only two weeks off in between. So they are almost constantly pregnant with one pup while nursing another. The long gestation period makes it slow for a population to recover if their numbers are reduced for any reason.
Prospect Hill
Our final stop on the way back to the ferry terminal was Prospect Hill. I’m not sure how many steps it is from the car park to the summit, but it sure is a long way up!
View from Prospect Hill, facing Penneshaw. We climbed up here from the car park at highway level - quite a trek!

Once at the top, there was a lookout with a few signs about the view, the exploration history of the site (apparently Matthew Flinders climbed up in 1802, without the help of the stairs . . .) and the local wildlife to keep an eye out for.

Interpretive sign on Prospect Hill

Another sign (elsewhere on the island) had included diagrams of the different kinds of footprints you may see in the sand, and what animals might have left them. Unfortunately, from this vantage point, all I could see was evidence that the Trainer Wearing Off-trail Tourist (Inconsideratus destructii), had been by recently.

NB: For the benefit of Australian readers, I assure you that the timeliness of this post is completely unintentional. And that no payment has been received 😉