Famous US author of ‘westerns’ and game fisherman Zane Grey was a regular visitor to Bermagui for the fishing. Pictured showing local lad David Byrne tackle and reels, circa 1937. Photo: Bermagui Historical Society.
One of Bega Valley’s 10 museums has closed and another four are close to doing the same. The problem is a shortage of younger volunteers.
Ben Boyd History Centre has closed permanently and its collection is in storage. The Bega Pioneers’ Museum, Bermagui Museum, Cobargo District Museum and Merimbula Old School Museum could face similar fates if no-one puts up their hand to become office bearers. The Bega Valley Historical Society is holding a special general meeting on 28 September and two of Bermagui Historical Society’s four active members will stand down at its AGM on 10 November.
Don Bretherton has been president and secretary of the Merimbula Old School Museum for nine years. His wife, Liz, is the museum’s collection manager and curator.
“In a word, succession is the problem,” Mr Bretherton says. “The volunteers and the few office bearers are ageing and there are no young volunteers coming on.”
He says the demographics have changed. “In the 1980s there were a lot of families living here and a very active community. Now people are coming here for the lifestyle – the surfing, the fishing – not the history,” he says.
Sam Sinclair was the local blacksmith, located on the corner of Bunga and Lamont streets from 1920. Photo: Bermagui Historical Society.
Eden Killer Whale Museum’s collection manager and a heritage and interpretation consultant, Angela George, is the shire area’s only paid, professionally-qualified museum employee. She says museums, along with archives, are the struggling part of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector.
The Bega Valley has a council-funded visual art gallery and libraries with staff and premises. “All we have is a museums advisor for 20 days a year across the 10 museums,” she says. “That is not a situation unique to Bega Valley. Those two parts of the sector are very underfunded and very under-supported.”
Given the older age of their volunteers, museums around the world were hit hard by COVID. “The fear of contracting the virus saw most museums close down so there was no income and a significant number of volunteers didn’t come back because of the fear COVID created,” Ms George says. “We have a lack of human resources to open the doors and take care of the collections.”
Mr Bretherton says they have attended workshops on strategies to attract new blood but nothing has worked. Ms George suggests the museums may need to reconsider the way they present their histories, and even what they are presenting, to attract volunteers.
She is speaking with colleagues in Sydney and the Riverina to try to devise a region-wide proposal for the Bega Valley, and perhaps the Eurobodalla and Snowy Monaro, for a sustainable model. One suggestion is a multi-campus regional museum where they work together on promotion and funding.
Recognising that the shire, like many other rural areas, is very parochial, each community has individual identities that would need to be highlighted. Eden and Bermagui reflect their commercial fishing history, Bega and Cobargo dairy farming, and the Tathra Wharf Museum tells the story of the coastal steamers. Merimbula Old School Museum has Australia’s largest collection of oyster plates and dozens of digitised, recorded oral histories, while Montreal Goldfield, Mary MacKillop Hall, Bega Valley Genealogy Society and Ben Boyd History Centre each tell a unique story.
The skeleton of killer whale Old Tom is the only one of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere and only two in the world are on public exhibition. Photo: Eden Killer Whale Museum.
Ms George says the oyster plate collection and Eden Museum’s skeleton of killer whale Old Tom are just some of the 350,000 objects in the Bega Valley’s museums, many of which are highly significant from a state or national point of view. Preserving and managing them requires boots on the ground. “It is more than keeping the doors open,” she says. “There is cataloguing the collection, looking after it, storing it in the right environmental conditions to preserve and not harm it, accepting new donations and publicity.”
The museums perform valuable community roles. Bermagui Museum has more than 11,000 digitised photographs including 840 digitally reproduced from the glass negatives of Tilba resident William Corkhill. Secretary Wendy Douch says they regularly get requests for images of past family members. It also helped Reflections Holiday Park develop a presentation on its history. That includes being the campsite of American author Zane Grey who put Bermagui on the global map for game fishing. The Merimbula museum holds the minute books from the Twyford Hall. When the hall was redeveloped people accessed those records to tell the hall’s story.
Ms George says understanding our past is how we make sense of the present and the future, and museums’ displays of objects facilitate that. “People relate more to tangible things than the intangible or reading about something.” Old Tom’s skeleton is exhibited alongside a blue whale’s jawbone and a replica open whaling boat. “You get the idea of the size of the whales these men in the boat hunted.”
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