Mephisto (Again)

Last week we had a few days up in Brisbane. One of the entries on my list of Things To Do was to go to the Queensland Museum and see the only surviving German WW1 A7V tank, Mephisto, in its 'natural habitat'. Several years ago I got to see it in Canberra, where it had been loaned to the War Memorial, nominally for the centenary of WW1, but apparently mostly because the gallery in which it was displayed in Queensland had flooded, damaging the tank. 

Anyway, here it is in all it's glory in a new gallery built especially for it. My thinks to the lovely museum guide who not only took a couple of pictures of me next to the tank, but took some time out to chat about it as well.

Here's my younger offspring, Fraser, posing next to it for scale.

Rear view. It has six machine-guns pointing in all directions but the front. The front has a 6pdr gun.

In Front Of The Tank Selfie.

More loot. Australians were apparently very adept at looting German equipment, and brought loads of it back here. A special unit existed to distribute the trophies to towns and communities across the country, which is partially why so many of our RSLs have various pieces of artillery outside them.

At the top of the standard German MG08 machine0gun. Below it is the world's first dedicated anti-tank weapon - a German anti-tank rifle.

A trench-mortar. Apparently a lot of these found their way Down Under.

Back to Mephisto.

Mephisto scaled with a 5' 8" ageing transvestite who is on holiday.

Rear-view of the tank. That round plate under the angle is the escape-hatch.

And that's enough photos of the tank.

We did other stuff in the museum as well. My favourite was this horribly life-like and life-sized model of the extinct monitor lizard Megalania. Once again Fraser is there to provide scale, but so is my grandson, who very much likes to see dinosaurs and such-like.
 

Second best thing of the holiday was Bluey's World. I'll spare you the photos.