Skip to content | Change text size
 

Exhibition gets presidential approval

22 July 2009

Flash video player not found

Upgrade / install Flash player for optimum video viewing or refer to the alternative versions below.

East Timor exhibition video

Alternative versions:
Windows media (wmv 7.7 mb)
Quicktime Video (mpeg4 7.6 mb)
Text version
 

The President of East Timor Jose Ramos-Horta has thrown open the doors of his presidential executive offices to a Monash geological exhibition.

The 500-piece exhibition includes marine fossils and rocks from Timor, along with east-timor-dinosaur fossils and rocks from Australia.

Monash staff worked with the Australian Defence Force to transport the pieces from a community hall in central Dili, where it had been housed temporarily since November 2008, to its new home. Energy company ConocoPhillips provided funding to put the exhibition together.

It will remain in the entrance foyer of Ramos-Horta's new offices until the National Museum of East Timor is completed.

Already thousands of school children have visited the exhibition, including its star attraction, the Tarbosaurus (a close cousin of the Tyrannosaurus Rex), something that brings much pleasure to paleontologist and Director of the Monash Science Centre Professor Patricia Vickers-Rich from the School of Geosciences.

"The exhibition has not only provided new educational materials to East Timor, it has also created new jobs for Timorese people with the president hiring four staff to explain the content to visitors," Professor Vickers-Rich said.

"The fact that people are so interested is fantastic. One of the most wonderful things I saw was one of the guards in full gear, spelling out where the island of Timor has come from over the last 250 million years."

Professor Vickers-Rich got to know President Ramos-Horta through his passion for science, geology and astronomy. The pair recently completed two children's books together.

"The government is very focused on building education infrastructure and improving literacy," Professor Vickers-Rich said.

President Ramos-Horta said he was very grateful to Monash for making the exhibition possible.

"It has been enormously successful; it's the first time ever that an exhibition on the long prehistory of Timor has been put on show in East Timor," President Ramos-Horta said.