Stephen Clarke, The giant lizard that terrified and fascinated a generation of Brisbane kids at the Queensland Museum, ABC News, 26 October 2024
The enormous lizard raises its head, its tongue flicking in and out.
It squats at the edge of a small gorge, surveying its next meal — the decaying body of an enormous wombat-like marsupial known as diprotodon.
The scene is dimly lit and accompanied by the background cawing of crows, one of which is tearing at the poor creature’s eye.
That vivid scene is likely a core memory for many children (and adults) who visited Brisbane’s Queensland Museum in the 1990s and were transported back tens of thousands of years to a time when giant beasts ruled the harsh Australian landscape.
That memorable exhibit was part of the Dragons and Diprotodons exhibition, which opened to the public in October 1990.
Megalania Prisca was the largest lizard to ever exist.
It’s believed it would have been up to three metres in length.
Details about the exhibit are sparse to non-existent online, but people were quick to share their memories of the scene.
❝
Scared the $%*$ out of me! I think the tassie devil was eating the guts out of it too. Wouldn’t do that these days!
— Nicky
❝
This exact exhibit is the root of my lizard phobia.
— Maya
❝
My kids were freaked out by it when they were young.
— Samantha
❝
Core memory.
— Shaun
The electrical technician
The exhibit hearkened back to a time when interactive animatronics were an exciting new addition to museums, says 79-year-old former electrical technician Bill Brooker.
Bill had an early interest in electronics – he spent his teen years building transistor radios in his hometown of Gatton.
He went on to complete an apprenticeship and soon realised it was his true passion, moving to Brisbane to pursue a career as an electronic technician.
He worked a series of different jobs, including maintaining X-ray machines for a medical company, helping design, build and maintain an automatic packing machine for XXXX brewery and working in the physics department at the University of Queensland.
In the early 1980s he landed a job at the Queensland Museum at its original site on Gregory Terrace, in what is now a heritage-listed performance venue.
“At that stage, the museum had an enormous production facility,” Mr Brooker recalls.
“They had their own preparators (a person who prepares scientific specimens or museum displays), designers who design them, metal machinists to build metalwork and restore objects and cabinet makers. It was all done in-house.”
Queensland Museum explores Australia’s prehistoric era. Click here to view video.
Mr Brooker was part of the team when the museum first started dabbling in more interactive exhibits for inclusion in the new museum being built at South Bank.
“The first one was a whole sequence of bird calls, you could press a button and hear a particular type of bird call,” he says.
“Then there was an early video game called Feast or Famine that was based on the rat plagues of western Queensland. It ran off one of the first Apple computers.”
In the late 1980s an exhibition called Dragons and Diprotodons was proposed.
“Once I saw this giant lizard in the design I thought, hey, we could put animatronics in this.”
Mr Brooker built a “crude” wooden mock-up of the internal mechanics and passed the work on to a machinist who accepted the challenge.
Mr Brooker went on to build the electronic controls and a sculptor modelled the external features.
The sculptor
Paul Stumkat is a natural history artist and sculptor who began his career at the Queensland Museum as a volunteer when he was in his early teens.
In 1984 he became a cadet and helped in the transition of some two million collection items that had to be packed and transferred to the new museum site.
Mr Stumkat later worked as an exhibitions officer alongside Bill Brooker and said it was an exciting time working behind the scenes.
“We pretty much had no experience, no idea what we were doing, but we all forged ahead with great excitement and gusto.”
The work could be tricky, especially when it came to designing a skin for the Megalania.
“We had to come up with some sort of product that would be flexible enough to withstand moving a couple of hundred times in a day in the same motions, over and over.”
The reaction from children seeing the exhibit for the first time made it worth the work.
“It certainly sent a few little kiddies running screaming to their mums. We used to sit up there on smoko and just watch the entertainment. It was great.”
The collections manager
Kristen Spring is the senior collection manager for geosciences at the museum, a position she has held for more than two decades.
But in the early ’90s she was a teenager who would regularly catch the train into South Bank to visit the museum by herself.
“It was my escape place where I could just come and enjoy the displays, and Dragons and Diprotodons was by far my favourite,” she says.
“The kids of today would look at it and go, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so cheesy,’ because the animatronics were so mechanical. Of course technology has advanced quite a bit from the eighties and the nineties, but to me it was magical.”
Kristen said she felt a connection to the display because she knew it was what south-east Queensland had actually looked like thousands of years ago.
“I think often when we see dinosaur displays, we can’t put ourselves in the picture. Whereas with this you just felt this kind of immersion into the display.”
A few years later Kristen began a summer internship at the museum – a dream job for an admitted dinosaur-junkie.
Kristen helped to take down the exhibit in 1999/2000 and it was set up again at the Cobb and Co museum in Toowoomba where it presumably spent some time terrifying and fascinating another generation of children.
Unfortunately for those hoping for a happy ending for Megalania Prisca, like his real-life brethren he eventually succumbed to wear and tear and has since gone extinct.
Because the museum recycles much of its exhibits, his internal metal structure was likely re-used in new exhibits, so perhaps it’s safe to say he still lives on.
