It was an amusing, albeit jolting reminder that time marches on as visitors passed a display of 1980s memorabilia in the Royal B.C. Museum’s Century Hall the other day.
Items included a VHS copy of Roxanne, the 1987 Steve Martin comedy filmed in Nelson, an old Kaypro IV compact computer and a bulky mobile phone the size of a brick.
“When I was 16, I owned one of those,” laughed Brandi Scott, 39. “It was so big it wouldn’t even fit in my purse. It was like a small weapon.”
The Langley woman was one of hundreds of visitors passing through the museum’s modern history galleries, some on one-hour Spring Break tours of the large area that includes a replica of Capt. George Vancouver’s HMS Discovery, coal mining, sawmill and gold rush exhibits, where an elderly docent said: “Welcome to Barkerville!” before inviting visitors to pan for gold.
Ask anyone who lives here to list their favourite things to do in Victoria, and they will invariably name the provincial museum.
“It’s such a great museum with so much to see and do with the kids, and it’s reasonably priced,” said Camosun College social-work student and mom Sam Hampton during a stop beside replicas of salmon at the Brittannia Cannery with her husband Kris Granneman and their two-year-old daughter Fox.
Old Town, with its Grand Hotel based on Nanaimo’s Royal Hotel (1890), Columbia Printers (1899) and Port Moody Railway Station, complete with telegrapher’s shack, remains as popular as ever.
“This is my absolutely favourite part, the whole Old Town,” said Charlene Ebdon, 15, who came down from Nanaimo for the day with friend Rebecca Godard, 15.
“We’ve been here a couple of times before. We just love it,” said Godard, after they checked out some Charlie Chaplin flicks in the tiny Majestic Theatre, a cinematic jewel box.
This kind of feedback is music to the ears of the senior history curator, Lorne Hammond, tipping his hat to the docents such as Janet Davies, today’s tour guide, who enthusiastically leads specialized tours.
“We have great big fat binders for them to go through, and they invest a lot of personal time,” he said. “We don’t have specific lines for them to deliver. There’s flexibility for interpretation.”
While guides receive classroom training and illustrated lectures from Hammond, they can dig deeper.
“You get a better tour when it’s emotionally important to the tour guide leading you.”
Hammond says he views the galleries as “a narrative that flows,” with the railway station and classic cinema still “amazingly popular” places to rest.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Old Town, he says, is that it never changes.
“In fact it changes a fair amount,” he says. “That shop that used to sell sporting goods now sells china, and the fishing gallery [commercial fishery display] has been redone to reflect the influence of Japanese Canadians.”
Behind-the-scenes tours are also popular, says Leslie Johnson, gallery and theatre program producer.
“Often visitors look at the museum as a place of exhibits but the root of what we are is based on our collections,” she said.
There’s much more to come under the leadership of the museum’s new CEO, Jack Lohman, including Our Living Languages, a new exhibit under construction that focuses on language revitalization in B.C.’s First Nations communities. The exhibit, being presented in partnership with the First Peoples Cultural Council, opens June 21.
Meanwhile, a lighthearted April Fools Weekend Scavenger Hunt will take place between March 28 and April 1.
royalbcmuseum.bc.ca