Big Kids’ Scary Night Out
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Big Kids’ Scary Night Out

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On Saturday October 27, Scienceworks will celebrate the scientific, disconcerting and occasionally horrific world of the creepy crawly creature. The third instalment in Melbourne Museum’s popular adults-only Big Kids’ Scary Night Out, the event will feature live exhibitions, films, a lightning show, a meet-and-greet of the museum’s spider community and a range of education and informational exhibits.

Patrick Honan, Melbourne Museum’s manager of live exhibits, says Big Kids’ Scary Night Out is both an exploration and celebration of particular subject matter – in this case, spiders, cockroaches and the like – and an opportunity for adults to experience the wonders of the museum environment. “This is the third in the series of these events,” Honan says. “It’s a way of allowing people who don’t necessarily feel a strong affinity with the museum to come in and experience what the museum has to offer.”

Scienceworks, like other elements of the Melbourne Museum, prides itself on having a family-friendly aesthetic. But for Big Kids’ Scary Night Out, the focus is definitely adults-only. “That helps to encourage adults to come along,” Honan says. “This event is about entertainment, but it’s also about information.”

Honan is well placed to draw the connection between scientific understanding of spiders and insects, and the extreme psychological reaction to these creatures. “One the night I’ll be talking about arachnophobia, and entomophobia, which is something I’ve talked to people, and helped them with, in the past,” Honan says.

Honan says just about everyone – himself included – will be surprised by the unexpected sighting of a spider or insect. However, it’s the instant reaction to that sighting that defines arachnophobia or entomophobia. “Everyone gets surprised, but the difference is how you deal with it,” Honan says. “You can react calmly, or you can completely freak out. I get surprised if I see a spider, but for me it’s not something that worries me.” Honan cites stories of people jumping out of moving cars, hastily escaping through windows of buildings or obsessively taping up doors and windows of houses in an effort to keep spiders and insects out of the domestic residence. “When people seek treatment about their arachnophobia, it’s usually because it’s started to rule their life,” Honan says.

Honan divides his approach to treating arachnophobia into two streams. Firstly, there’s the educational aspect. Typically, your average arachnophobic doesn’t have a well-developed understanding of the spider – or in the case of an entonomophobic, the broader insect church – an ignorance that feeds initial fears. “People tend to be scared of what they don’t know, so the first step is purely educational,” Honan says. “A lot of people incorrectly assume that spiders are unpredictable, but that’s not the case.” After education comes relaxation. “The other part of the treatment is managing reaction, so I do things like teaching breathing techniques.”

And then there are the popular misconceptions about spiders and insects. Honan points to the erroneous assessment of daddy long leg spiders as being a particularly venomous spider as one of his favourite spider myths. “A lot of people think the daddy long legs spider is extremely venomous, or indeed being venomous,” Honan says. “But that’s not the case. I’m not sure where that came from – maybe because daddy long legs eat redbacks and white spiders, both of which are venomous, and therefore it’s assumed it must be even more venomous because it’s eating harmful spiders,” he says. “Spider stories sell newspapers, and the stories are spread on the internet – there are whole websites dedicated to perpetuating some of these stories.”

But while scientists know a lot more about a spider’s life and social activities than is generally understood, we’re still yet to reproduce that most valuable of commodities – spider silk. “There are scientists all over the world trying to replicate spider silk,” Honan says. “Efforts to replicate it have really stepped up over the last few decades. No silk is as strong as spider silk; if we could replicate spider silk, it would revolutionise our world.”

Big Kids’ Scary Night Out, however, is more than just a trumped-up Curiosity Show. “There will be boiling cauldrons, scientists with fright wigs [think Beaker in The Muppet Show, perhaps] and shows in the Lightning Room, and the Planetarium has a selection of films,” Honan says. Visitors are encouraged to get into the spirit of the evening and dress up as a “ghoulish geek, zombie scientist or scary science experiment”, with a prize for the best dressed on the evening. Even the humble household cockroach – a creature whose hardiness is celebrated in Kim Salmon’s freakish Cockroach track from 1991 – will make an appearance. “A lot of people don’t realise that most of the cockroaches they see around are introduced into Australia,” Honan says. “There’s three or four hundred species of cockroach in the bush, and they’re all an important part of the ecosystem.”

BY PATRICK EMERY