WALLACE & GROMIT’S WORLD OF INVENTION
When: May 19 – November 11
Where: Scienceworks,
2 Brooker Street, Spotswood
Preview: Mary-Jane Daffy
THEY’RE the clay animated characters who have kept a generation entertained with their wacky inventions and cheery vagueness. Wallace & Gromit, the British inventor and his four legged companion, have graced our screens since 1989 in such films as A Grand Day Out, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, A Matter of Loaf and Death and, most recently, the TV series Wallace and Gromit’s World of Invention.
Now the famous duo are coming to Melbourne. As part of an internationally touring exhibition Wallace & Gromit will leave the UK and set up a lifesize replica of their home, 62 West Wallaby Street, at Scienceworks.
“The exhibition will have a lot of the flavour of Wallace & Gromit,” curator Martin Bush explains. “But there’ll be an Australian focus to the inventions.”
Interactive stations, taken straight from the scripts of Wallace & Gromit, will have little kids and big kids alike attempting to operate Wallace’s remote control. The invention so often associated with Wallace and his mornings in bed – the mechanical page turner – gets a run, a welcome contrast from the modern day e-book.
Bush has delved into the archives and added an Australian flair to the quintessentially British pair. Great inventions such as the electric drill, invented in 1889 and patented in Melbourne by engineers Arthur Arnot and William Brain, are included. The Wolseley No. 3 shearing handpiece from 1912 will also be on display, a nod to the first mechanical shearing machine having been invented in Australia in the 1870s by Frederick Wolseley. It’s all dished up with a whole lot of Wallace & Gromit wackiness. “The exhibition is hosted by Wallace & Gromit. You’re invited into their home,” Bush says. “But then it expands and becomes about history, invention and, of course, a lot of fun.”
