It looked like said, like a chicken saute type thing.
Right.
It's really small anyway, so I ate it, but it was a bit weird. The guy next to me took one bite and he vomited on straight away at the table, at the table on top of people.
From The Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey. In today's episode, We're off to the Lost City of the Inkers Matchipitchew with Troy Branston. Troy is a senior columnist for The Australian, but he's also our in house renaissance man, a history buff author and an adventurous traveler. He's our very own Stanley Tucci. This
trip to Darkest Peru wasn't just a holiday. Troy was a guest of the Australian Museum and it's all in aid of their exhibition that's live now, Golden Empires of Peru. So Troy, had you heard of matchw Pitchu before he went on this expedition.
For me, I'd always been really interested in it, and I have this opportunity to go as a guest of the Australian Museum to see Matchupitchu. Immediately, when I have this opportunity, my mind went back to Indiana Jones and the Raiders Lost Arc the opening scene where he's in the Peruvian temple. He lifts up the golden fertility idol replaces it with a bag of sand. He thinks it's okay,
and then the boulder comes after him. Because Matchi Pitcher was only rediscovered about one hundred years ago, it has that sort of lur of being a place of mystery and magical wonder that people want to go and see for themselves, like you are, Indiana Jones.
That boulder scene from Raiders of the Lost Dark is of course referenced in almost every movie these days. I've recently watched Paddington in Peru twice, which is the extent of my research for this interview, which features Paddington making his way to match You, Pitch You, and then a giant boulder destroys the inco site.
Right, it is one of those things, you know, everybody knows, that famous picture from above of seeing this sort of city upon a mountaintop, wondering what it is, how it got there, And of course when the Spanish conquisitors came through Peru and South America in the early fifteen hundreds, they destroyed a lot of these sites, but they never found match You Pitchu, so it was untouched, and when the Yale University, Academic High and Bingham rediscovered it in
nineteen eleven, it became a world sensation. And then for the last one hundred years, people have been trying to work out, firstly, how on earth did this place come about and what was its purpose.
It's been said the key to understanding other cultures is to listen to their music. Over the past couple of decades, with shows like Parts Unknown and Netflix's Street Food, it seems it's food that's the most powerful when it comes to unlocking different cultures.
So it was in the spirit of.
Anthony Bourdin that Troy didn't shy away from one of Peru's delicacies.
I did try guinea pig.
That most people consider a household pet.
I wouldn't recommend it. It tasted a bit like sort of bland pork to me. But yeah, if you can get that image of the very little guinea pig squeaking away out of your mind, might really enjoy it.
I think you know, will have managed to come to groups with eating some kind of cute creatures, but guinea pig feels like a bridge too far.
Well, I think, unlike Australia, where tourists come and they eat crocodile or emu or something like that, a lot of Peruvians eat guinea pig. It's a big part of their culture.
He one of your traveling companions didn't enjoy it as much though.
Yes, another journalist I was on the trip with took one bite and he brought it up straight away. Now, I don't know whether that was the guinea pig. It might have mean, it might have been something else. He didn't finish it, But I'm proud to say that I struggled through to say that I did eat guinea pig. But as I say, Cloud wouldn't recommend.
Very manfully conquered the guinea Thank.
You, thank you.
That's my Indiana Jones prowress.
So let's talk about the Inkers.
This is a remarkable civilization, but they didn't have a system of writing that we can recognize. They didn't invent the wheel, and they didn't even use any kind of draft animals. So how on earth did they build this civilization?
Yeah? This is one of the lost cities of the Inca civilization, a very advanced civilization in many ways, and Peru's matic picture is a really good example of that because it's built on several fault lines, it's two and
a half thousand meters above sea level. It's constructed with this series of interlocking rocks, so there was a quarry on one side of the mountain, so they'd have to break the rocks massive stones and put them in place through a kind of interlinking system so that the seismic activity could be absorbed by these rocks moving back and
forth but not collapsing. There's a series of Roman style aqueducts, and of course they grew crops, and they actually genetically modified some of their crops for different altitudes so they could grow these crops for a self sustaining community. So there are still archaeologists and scientists examining this site today and still learning new things.
You mentioned the fertility symbol in rates of the lost ark.
Fertility.
Sexuality was a big part of their artistic expression, wasn't it.
Yeah, that's right. They believed in fertility of the land and often they would represent that through sexual imagery. So for example, the water is fertilizing the soil to enable crops to grow, and that might be represented by some kind of sexual imagery of what looks like a male or a female. The other thing is that they really believed in three terrestrial existences, so the moon and the stars above the land we live on, but also the underworld and those who are undead, so to speak, and
the relationship between all three is quite fascinating. And there's a number of objects in the museum which might be confronting for a lot of people because of this sexual imagery, but it's not often sexually based. It's based on fertility and agriculture and spirituality.
Gold is a big feature of the exhibition, But were the inc Is interested in gold for its kind of monetary value?
No, not really. I mean they would often use gold and silver for things like funery processions and even what they term is as ritual combat. So there was actually human sacrifice, and often it would be defeated warrior for example, from an opposing tribe would offer themselves up for sacrifice and it would be a great honor for them to be sacrificed in a highly ritualistic, elaborate ceremony that would
then be watched by the two tribes. So these kind of things and the knives that they used for ritual sacrifice are on display at the museum, and there come from a number of different cultures, not only the Incas.
Coming up how Peru is reclaiming its stolen treasures.
Being like so many explorers kind of looted it, you know, not only human remains, but also anything that wasn't kind of nailed down back to Yale. Many of those treasures only returned to Peru in the past couple of decades. It's analogous to other debates that are going on, like the elderin marbles, the return of indigenous people's remains to places like Australia. What's your perspective on the fact that Peru has been able to reclaim some of the stuff that was stolen from it.
On the one hand, these museums think that they're protecting these objects, they're bringing them to a wide audience, but you know, they often have ended up in those countries because they've been stolen, and sometimes they've been stolen with the approval of the authorities through corruption. You know, they're paying a customs official at a port to allow some kind of object to leave the country. So this is
a complex debate. The Peruvians, when I talk to them, are pretty happy with where their things are and that they have been able to own their own history. Many of the objects that are in this exhibition in Sydney come from the Museo Laco in Lima. That's a privately owned museum. The family has been collecting these things for
one hundred years. So I did actually ask the director of the museum about this, and she said, no, we have access to our own things that are in other museums, and things have been returned and they are, as I say, learning things themselves around the world.
Do you feel as though this is one of those sites that is actually returning some sort of benefit to the people of Peru by having its treasures to the world for example?
Absolutely, I mean people seeing this exhibition that they hope will think, well, I want to go there and see it myself. Tourism is a big part of the Peruvian economy. They're showcasing their history, their culture, their traditions to the world.
Troy is a senior journalist with The Australian and he went to Peru as a guest the Australian Museum. His story is in our review section, the home of all the best journalism about the arts, culture and entertainment. Pick up the paper at your local shop for the touchy feely joy of a purely analog experience, or check out all our experts anytime at the Australian dot com dot a slash review