Not all of the trip was about food and theatre. Part of it was me wanting to see the World War I exhibit at the Melbourne Museum, produced in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum in London. Now had I just been feeling well enough to take it all in...

However in the War In The Air section this caught my attention. An L Type aerial camera, used by the allies from 1917onwards. A bullet hole in the side suggests that the observer was hit along with the camera, though his fate was unknown to those curating the exhibit.

On one of the audio presentations we heard from a pilot of that era (an interview recorded long ago) who described how his camera had only a single glass plate, and how he had to take off his gloves and reach into the freezing airstream to do the exposure. On many occasions the glass plate ended up being dropped, making the one-shot mission effectively worthless. It's unlikely that he was referring to the L type, though, which carried a cassette of 18 glass plates.