This year the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum (NSIHM) decided to enter the ABC Radio National 2009 Regional Museums Award.
This was the second year of the Award and as a small Museum run almost entirely by volunteers, we were asked to tell our story. There were over eighty museums who accepted this challenge from every Australian state.. We were thrilled to find we were judged the overall winner. When it was announced, this feeling seemed to spill over into the general community, accepting they were part of the Museum as well.
NSIHM Committee members Elisabeth Gondwe and Petrina Walker and volunteer Talisah Edwards were in Newcastle attending the national museums conference when the overall winner was announced. Petrina Walker accepted the award on behalf of the Museum from Hon Peter Garrett Federal Minister for the Arts.
The following summary appeared on Radio National’s website.
North Stradbroke Island Historical Society Museum tells the island's story to a permanent community of 3,000 residents
The Museum was judged to have the best overall performance across the range of criteria. It has a range of permanent displays, well supplemented by temporary exhibitions. Its members are active in regional development issues and in developing heritage projects of interest to the community, visitors and schools. It actively collects objects, photographs, video and oral histories, which have been used in publications and is developing a website around its Heritage Trail.
The Museum is also the location for many local events, and has a thoughtful volunteer recruitment program. Among its treasures it holds a stretcher from the Australian Hospital Ship Centaur, which was torpedoed by the Japanese Navy near the Island in 1943, and the Oodgeroo Collection, which was deposited in 2008 by the family of the late Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal.
The team from Radio National's Life Matters program will visit North Stradbroke Island a little later in the year to record a program for broadcast to our national and international audiences.
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Under 8’s Week at the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum.
The 2009 Under 8’s week theme was Imagine. Each year the Dunwich State School Prep to Year 2 teachers organise a day of activities to celebrate Under 8’s Week.
The Museum hosted 3 of the 9 activities on the 28th of May. The other 6 activities were at the Prep campus.
The University of Queensland Marine Research Station conducted a smell based workshop at the Museum. The children had to identify various odours and engage with smell as a trigger to memory. Dr Kathy played Mozart in the background and the children expressed themselves through pen on paper.
Elisabeth Gondwe had the children imagine the future and asked each child to archive something in the Museum that would reflect themselves for future generations. The children represented their chosen thing through felt pen on card. These representations are to be collated into a book and accessioned into the permanent collection of the Museum.
The third activity at the Museum was a sausage sizzle and a mandarin.
From the museums perspective the objective of the day was to engage and reflect the children in our community and give them a sense of ownership of their Museum.
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Museums Alight 2009
Each year the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum (NSIHM) celebrates International Museums Week.
Museums Alight is an initiative of Museums and Gallery Service Queensland and aims to ’shine a light’ on collection items, contemporary art exhibitions, historical venues and stories of museums and galleries in every region of Queensland.
The 2009 Museums Alight theme is based around the International Council of Museums’ theme Museums and Tourism.
On Friday the 22nd of May the NSIHM held a wine and cheese evening with a slide show of historic and contemporary images loosely themed around tourism. The NSIHM has approximately 5000 historic photographs of the Island and is actively collecting images that will contribute to the social history of North Stradbroke Island. We are also collecting contemporary images and ephemera.
Approximately 50 people attended the wine and cheese evening and enjoyed the photograph slide show and screening of old film footage of the Paxton Street jetty.
