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Community museums display 10 treasures which tell 10 stories
Tasmania is filled with small community museums and history rooms and if you travel to enough of our regional towns you’re sure to stumble across them. Small they may be, but these modest museums are frequently home to fascinating treasures, which is why every year since 2013, Arts Tasmania has held its 10 Objects 10 Stories exhibition.
Roving curators Veronica Macno, left, and Melissa Smith have hand-picked 10 of the most interesting and lesser-known items from regional collections around the state, bringing them together for an exhibition at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart so these items and their interesting stories can be shared with a wider audience.
The exhibition is held in a different location every year – last year it was at Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. Macno and Smith’s main role is to assist the smaller museums with managing their collections and also training staff and volunteers.
“We’ve been making contact with about 140 small museums around the state, starting these conversations about some of their collections and making a shortlist of interesting objects and the stories that go with them,” Macno says.
“The story is the main criteria for selecting objects for the show. Without the story the object doesn’t come to life in the same way. The groups who are the custodians of these objects are also the people who keep those stories alive.”
Macno says small museums excel at capturing the history and broad picture of their regions and often live or die on the efforts of small groups of dedicated volunteers.
“During and after each one of these 10 Objects displays, visitor numbers to the museums involved tend to increase noticeably, so we know this is raising awareness of them. This year the display includes a map of the museums so people will know where to go to see the rest of their collections.”
This year’s exhibition features objects from as far as King Island in Bass Strait, to the Tasmanian Transport Museum in Glenorchy and Campbell Town Museum in the Midlands.
Objects on show include: a three-dimensional papier mache advertising shop display, based on the Fox Frames company logo, from the National Trust of Australia’s Old Umbrella Shop at Launceston; a recorded interview with the last Anzac, Tasmanian Alec Campbell, from the Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania Collection; and a bush violin in myrtle, blackwood and waratah by Wilfred James “Wif” Campbell.
Wif, who went on to become a much-loved Burnie hotelier, crafted the violin in 1932 while working as a sleeper cutter for the Emu Bay Railway Company on the West Coast.
“He made this absolutely beautiful instrument with very basic tools from the materials that were available around him,” Macno says. “It’s a great example of making do in difficult times. And I don’t know if it still sounds OK, but over its history we can see that the bridge and strings have been changed or replaced, which suggests that someone has played it.
“There is a huge amount of cultural heritage in these regional and small museums.”