New face of Indonesia's only geological museum

By Yuli Tri Suwarni

BANDUNG (JP): If you are fond of visiting museums, does the Bandung Museum of Geology ring a bell? Over the years, there has been no news about this museum, a legacy of the Dutch colonial rule.

Museums remains unpopular. But there are still a few people concerned about this museum, located on Jl. Purnawarman.

Built in 1929, the museum has had its interior renovated. After renovations lasting 18 months, it was reopened on Aug. 22 by Vice President Megawati Soekarnoputri.

The museum is the only one in the country and has the largest collection of Indonesian geological features.

To people who visited the museum before the renovations, they must find it difficult to recognize the interior because it was totally renovated.

Eight geologists from the Center for Geological Research and Development have turned it into an area where a series of journeys into the history of the earth will never bore you.

The first thing that they did was to expand the exhibition room from one floor to two. Head of the center Bambang Dwiyanto said that before the renovation the exhibition room measured only 1,600 square meters but that now it was about 6,000 square meters.

The interior has been renovated without changing the unique art deco style of the building. A society concerned with the preservation of historical buildings in Bandung, Bandung Heritage, has recommended that museum be designated an historical building, reflecting the unique features of the city.

"As for the exterior, we have only had it repainted to make it look neat. We did not dare to change the shape of the building because art deco buildings are protected," he said.

Rocks and fossils

Prior to the renovation, the center neglected the beauty of rocks and a number of fossils, regarding them as simply heaps of inanimate objects deserving a place in old cabinets, also a legacy of the Dutch. Besides, a lack of qualified museum guides also made visitors struggle to guess whether what they saw was a piece of rock or a fossil.

Today, however, about 1,000 kinds of fossils and rocks in the collection of the museum, representing the natural and mineral potential of all the regions across Indonesia, are neatly arranged. Bambang even went as far as guaranteeing that with the help of written information, these objects could speak about their origin and development. Audiovisual materials are also available to enable visitors to have an interactive "dialog" with the objects exhibited.

"I guarantee that even in the absence of a guide, as long as a visitor can see and read, he will get complete information about the objects exhibited," he told reporters in Bandung late last week.

Until the 1970s, the museum's collection, dating back to the Dutch colonial times, followed by the brief Japanese occupational period, was made up of some 250 kinds of rocks and fossils. Between 1970 and 1980, the collection was enlarged to encompass some 1,000 kinds of rocks and fossils. By then, the museum had served as a center for geological historical research in Indonesia.

Now, the information about Indonesia's geological features is sufficiently available either in Indonesian or English. The museum, now up to international standards, has often been made a destination of foreign tourists, particularly geologists from all over the world.

Origin of the Earth

Stories covering the origin of the Earth and the use of geology to mankind are divided into three large themes, each of which occupies a separate area. The west part of the lower floor illustrates the geological condition and potential of Indonesia's nature and is made up of 11 compartments.

The story about the origin of the Earth begins with the Nebulae hypothesis, about how the Earth came to be created some 4.5 billion years ago. Here, you can see heavenly bodies such as a meteor entering the earth's atmosphere. This section is also home to a collection of lithic meteors.

There is also geological history and phenomena in six major islands in Indonesia: Sumatra, Java, Nusa Tenggara, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and the Banda Sea up to Irian Jaya. In one of the compartments on the ground floor, the Volcano Room, you can also clearly see a map on the potential of most of Indonesian's volcanoes, of which 129 stretch from Sumatra, Java, Nusa Tenggara, Banda Island up to North Sumatra. In addition, it also clearly shows you potential earthquakes caused by the activities of the Indo-Australian and Pacific Ocean faults.

In the eastern part of the ground floor of the museum, the theme of the history of life assumes dominance. Systematically displayed here is a collection of objects relating to the history of life spanning from about 3 billion years ago to the present.

Panels there present the early formation of rocks, the emergence of early signs of life, the development of marine life and the environment of the Earth. One of the replicas of a rare animal in the museum's collection is a reptile from prehistoric times, Tyrannosaurus rex, which existed some 96 million to 210 million years ago and became extinct along with other kinds of dinosaurs about 65 million to 97 million years ago.

"We also display a collection of the legs and eggs of dinosaurs here," Bambang added.

In the History of Life Room, there is a display of a neatly arranged collection of prehistoric human fossils from Indonesia and other countries. Also on display here are artifacts from a number of regions in Indonesia, such as finds from the layer forming Bandung Lake, such as a collection of fossilized snakes that once lived there.

On the second floor, visitors will see the adverse and favorable effects of making use of geology in the interest of human life. It presents a map showing the mineral riches that most Indonesians are not aware of.

Unfortunately, the museum does not give detailed information about the quantities of the exports of Indonesia's natural wealth, the proceeds of which usually go into the coffers of international mining companies instead of being used for the promotion of the community's welfare.

Another regret is that this room does not display a map of environmental pollution due to the waste of mining activities, a case which is spotlighted only inconsistently in domestic mass media.

Bambang declined to mention how much money had been spent on the renovation of the building where the Dutch colonial administration used to keep the results of geological and mining surveys.

"Enough. But not so much that we possesses a fairly complete collection. The collection needs to be cleaned and reconstructed," he noted.

This museum also has its own library, a laboratory and equipment for workshops on conservation. This equipment includes, among other things, water blasters to clean fossils and an X-ray machine to determine if fossils are genuine. Thanks to all this, Bambang said, the museum had achieved international standards.

"There is hardly a geological museum in Southeast Asia with separate units like ours. Therefore, this museum has the potential to lure tourists with an interest in geological matters," he said.

To help domestic students, the center applies methods to enable students understand what they see. Usually, he said, the students were given a questionnaire which must be completed using the names of objects found in the museum. After the visit is over, the questionnaires are collected and checked by museum officials and later given to the teaching assistants.

Before its closure for renovations in November 1998, the museum was visited by a large number of people. During the course of 1997, for example, some 140,000 people visited the museum, free of charge.

It is a pity, though, that very soon, visitors will have to pay for a ticket to enter this museum, at the request of the center.