Naked City: The Museum of Old and Nasty Artefacts

They were largely the innocent playthings and ephemera of our youth, loved at the time but these days either banned, shunned, or banished to a dusty box at the back of the garage.

For all intents and purposes they are ‘gone’ but definitely not ‘forgotten’. Hobart has its remarkable Museum Of Old And New Art (aka MONA) and with a similar acronym we would love to see a Museum Of Old And Nasty Artefacts. So what the hell are we talking about?

Let’s start with chocolate cigarettes, which were a real hit with kiddies in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and a favourite at the local lolly shop. They came in a realistic package that mimicked the big adult ciggies but quickly melted when you stuck them in your back pocket to take to school. They may well have been perceived as a sinister conspiracy to get kids started on the real thing but looking back they seemed relatively harmless – and yummy to boot!

The National Museum Of Australia in Canberra lists a wobble board amongst its collection but we wonder, given the current series of events in London, whether the Masonite wonder has been temporarily withdrawn from display. Likewise the stylophone was another musical novelty closely associated with and promoted by the now disgraced Rolf Harris. Regardless of the outcome of the trial underway, we would hate to see these musical oddities shunted to the very rear of the archives.

When it comes to literature there are too many children’s titles on the unofficial banned list to catalogue in this column but Enid Blyton’s Three Golliwogs series stands out as a real no-no in the primary school library. Like toy golliwogs in general, they are a relic of a less enlightened past, but still deserve their place in the Museum Of Nasty Artefacts.

Similarly the old cowboy and Indian costumes for kiddies, which paralleled the early days of TV in Australia, did nothing to awaken an early respect for racial harmony as the Battle of the Little Bighorn raged furiously in suburban backyards. The body count was always abundant but nothing compared to modern day video games where the enemy is blasted with all manner of high-powered armaments.

We certainly endorse the current campaign towards healthy eating, particularly when it comes to school tuckshops, but who could forget those totally indulgent items that were once on sale circa the 1960s. Yes we’re talking cream buns and cream horns, the latter a cone shaped pastry packed with sugary mock cream and guaranteed to give even a robust ten-year-old a coronary. A giant cream horn, oozing a river of artery-clogging gunk, would be a fitting monument to grace the foyer of our museum.

There are probably hundreds of other artefacts we have failed to mention here but one essential for our very own MONA would be a shoe fitting fluoroscope – a big-ticket item to rival the Tassie MONA’s infamous Cloaca ‘poop machine’. The fluoroscopes were a standard fixture in the big department stores of the ‘40s and ‘50s and a real hit with kids as they stood against a large box-like object and peered down at an x-ray image of the bones of their feet in a new pair of shoes. The only problem was that they delivered a mean burst of radiation, particularly if you were one of those punters who had to try on twenty pairs before you settled on the shoe you liked.

If there’s a moral to this exercise then it’s probably this: if the cream horn didn’t kill you, your feet no longer glow in the dark, and you are still around today to wallow in their nostalgia, then you might deserve to be in a MONA!