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UNE Heritage Centre to coordinate travelling exhibition

January 10, 2006

McLennan3.jpgThe University of New England’s Heritage Centre in Armidale is to coordinate a travelling historical exhibition that will tell stories about the everyday lives of women in the New England / North West region.

Titled “Women of a ‘high lean country’”, the exhibition will involve museums and historical collections in Glen Innes, Gunnedah, Inverell, Narrabri and Tamworth. The NSW Ministry of Arts has granted funding of more than $10,000 for the project.

Dr Nicole McLennan (pictured here), Curator of the UNE Heritage Centre, will train people from the local museums in the skills they will need for planning, developing, and mounting their exhibitions. She said the project represented a new, collaborative approach to historical exhibitions in the region.

“Unlike other collaborative travelling exhibitions that are developed in major metropolitan museums, this exhibition will be developed locally and travel locally,” Dr McLennan explained. “About a third of the objects, images and stories in each local display will be provided by the host museum. Through our collaboration we will all learn about the wealth of material contained in each others’ collections.”

“The travelling component of the exhibition will comprise items from the UNE Heritage Centre’s regional collections,” she continued. “It will be the first opportunity since their donation for those items to travel back to their places of origin. The exhibition will thus include material of both regional and local significance in documenting the rich social history of women throughout New England and the North West.”

“Instead of the orthodox account of women’s history – settlement, home, family, community – the exhibition will use emotive themes to organise episodes in the region’s past,” Dr McLennan said. “These episodes will not centre on grand events; rather, they will be personal recollections of everyday life.” (Items already chosen include a hand-written account by Christina Cameron from Glen Innes of the death of her nine-year-old daughter Maggy in 1867, and a scrapbook compiled by Eleanor McIntyre from the Inverell region charting the progress of the Country Women’s Association, which she helped to found in 1922.)

Work on the exhibition will begin around the middle of this year, and it is expected to go on tour in 2007. The local museums/collections involved are the Land of the Beardies Museum, Glen Innes; the Water Tower Museum, Gunnedah; Narrabri Old Gaol and Museum; Calala Cottage Museum, Tamworth; Inverell District Family History Group.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at January 10, 2006 03:13 PM