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In 2022 Thredbo Alpine Club turns sixty-five. To mark the occasion, the club’s directors agreed that my project for this semester should aim to highlight some of the club’s significant moments from its inception in 1957 to the present. My finished project involves the building of a webpage on the club’s website where viewers will find a timeline, a “Memory Box” and a photo gallery.

When I began the project, it became apparent that while some efforts had previously been made at compiling a history of TAC, the club’s story remains largely unknown to the membership. However, given that the club’s story is also the collective stories of its members, I have tried to make the project both collaborative as well as always remaining a kind of work in progress.

To achieve this, the timeline is intended to create a kind of story scaffold where my work becomes just the beginning. Further contributions can be easily added over time to deepen the story or to add other layers and perspectives. Part of the challenge is to encourage members to participate in the project to make it truly collaborative. This is the function of the “Memory Box” where I have invited them to share their stories – something I think is quite novel and I hope will inspire members to help build the community story and at the same time help them to think about the part they play in that community and perhaps even strengthen the ties they feel to the club.

I have been very fortunate that by and large the club’s record keeping has been quite thorough. As a result, the internal records of the organisation, have been a rich source of information for the timeline. I have had access to minutes of directors’ meetings, minutes of general meetings and financial statements spanning the life of the club, as well as newsletters from about the mid 1980s onwards.

In addition, I have been able to contact members and have gained valuable insights on historical events from their recollections. I have found some additional contextual information in publications such as The Australian Ski Year Book, as well as news items from local newspapers that are searchable on Trove. Finally, I have also made use of three general histories of Thredbo written by Jim Darby, Chas Keys and Geoffrey Hughes respectively.

The question at the heart of my project has been “How has Thredbo Alpine Club evolved over the past sixty-five years?” In response, I chose to focus on two main themes in the life of TAC: the evolution of the lodge building itself and the club’s involvement in ski competition. These I have tried to situate within the context of the development of Thredbo as a ski resort to illustrate how the Australian ski experience has changed over time.

Against the background of evolution and change in the physical shape of the club I juxtapose the enduring constants that hold the club together. To illustrate this constancy of club ethos, I have highlighted some of the “Faces of TAC”, just a few of those people who have made significant voluntary contributions to club life over the years.

Ultimately my argument is that while the club has changed with the passing of time so much has remained the same. The simple fact of sixty-five years of successful operations under a purely voluntary committee is itself an achievement, let alone contemplating the complexity of some of the projects undertaken by the club over the years. These are people bonded by a shared vision, just as the club’s founders were. It seems this ethos at the very least remains unchanged.

My final project is a podcast series called ‘The Mentors of AIME’, in which I interview five past mentors from Sydney Uni, documenting their stories of being a mentor and creating a product which can be used to attract new mentors to the program. Although this format is arguably highly saturated in the podcasting world, I felt that the volunteering world lacked a form of media where the facilitators of programs could share their experiences of delivering mentorship and gaining experience. Much of my inspiration stemmed from AIME’s own series of podcasts, interviews, short films and other videos, which documented the perspectives of First Nations people and their history.

My project is ultimately trying to argue that AIME’s mission to end educational inequality is one of the most important in modern Australia, and that university students can make a tangible difference to this issue. This is fairly explicit in my project, right from Episode 0, where I discuss the important work of AIME and the purpose of the podcast series. The project itself would not have been possible without the amazing AIME mentors who volunteered to be interviewed, and who provided the evidence and the stories needed to create the final series. Some interviewees I knew before starting, but some I met during the process.

It was incredibly interesting to see key themes develop over the course of the project’s development, namely the idea that mentors and mentees engage in a two way exchange of knowledge and understanding during the program. Each mentor I interviewed spoke about how much they had gained from the program, and how giving their time to students eventuated in the students giving knowledge and understanding back. This overall theme really helped to propel my project in the direction I originally wanted, towards a project which championed the message and work of AIME. 

My ultimate aim was to create a project which documented the stories of AIME’s mentors, and thereby would attract more mentors to the organisation. I know that AIME is always looking to recruit new mentors, and so I would like my project to serve that need, to act as a product which can be shared by AIME on their website or through their university societies. One of the mentors I interviewed was Janice, who currently works as an ambassador for AIME, running the USYD AIME society. She noted that reaching new university students to attract mentors was one goal for USYD at AIME, and so I wanted to work with AIME to create a project which balanced two goals – documenting the stories of mentors and attracting new mentors to the program. 

AIME’s work is inherently significant. By working to eliminate the educational gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, AIME is addressing centuries of racism, genocide and its ongoing effects. Working with AIME was incredibly enlightening but also sobering. Being able to create something which will hopefully help AIME continue with this work is incredibly personally significant, as I do not get many opportunities to make such a difference through my work at university. The more mentors involved, the more students AIME can reach. In some small way, I hope that this project helps to propel AIME’s goals and work. 

Over the course of the unit, I considered many different options for the presentation of my final project. Initially, I planned to create a set of educational resources aligned to the NSW History Curriculum using interviews from staff, material published by AIME and previous educational materials created by AIME (check AIME’s educational materials out here https://www.coolaustralia.org/imagi-nation-tv/). Unfortunately, this idea was a little out of reach, and so I ended up deciding to create a project which would have a target audience of university students, in order to spread AIME’s message and attract new mentors.

The podcast will be passed onto AIME and the USYD Society for them to distribute as they wish. Understandably, they might not want to distribute it but I hope that some episodes will be featured by the USYD Society branch, as a way of reaching mentors at Sydney Uni through O-Week stalls, social media posts and in person events. In the future, I would love to continue working with AIME as a mentor in 2023. I most likely will not be able to carry on the podcast due to time commitments next year when I start teaching, but it would be amazing to see the podcast featured in AIME’s work as a way of continuing the overall aims of my project.

Check out my final project here! A special shout out to Alice and Jen from our course who were extremely generous with their time. Another shout out to Phoebe, Janice and Kirsty who also volunteered their time! https://amcg0658.wixsite.com/thementorsofaime

If you wind through the corridors and stairways at the back of the curatorial building at The Australian National Maritime Museum, you will arrive upon a small room and – if you are with one of the few staff members with access – you’ll see an eclectic collection of donations to the museum, yet to processed. My project was working with one of the items in this treasure trove, and making a case for why it belongs in the Museum’s collection.

Unfortunately, some complex copyright issues prevent me from posting the images that my project centred around, but I was tasked with writing an acquisition concept proposal for a set of surfing photographs from the 1960’s. Most of these were of incredible women, who were pushing the sport forward in a time where it was, unsurprisingly, dominated by men and male champions and magazines filled with men and their achievements. The photographer of my images, Jack Eden, produced a magazine called Surfabout and while this did have female writers and acknowledge female surfing champions, but it also featured rather crude representations of women, like these examples.

My project was about assessing the significance of these images, understanding their history and (the most fun part!) considering their interpretive potential. This meant thinking about how these photographs could be used to tell historical tales. My project was something of a brainstorming exercise, of coming up with varied and creative ways to use the photos. They could be used to understand women’s surfing history, but also to understand how the Australian national identity is constructed in relation to our laid-back beach culture. They could simultaneously be used to demonstrate the controversial and admonished ‘surfari cult’ of excessively laid-back surfers and women dressed immodestly. Whilst I can’t show the images yet to be accepted, or reproduce the ones in the museum collections, this image is an example of a Jack Eden photograph of a female surfer that is similar to the items I looked at.

It was such a pleasure working with the ANMM and the staff could not have been more helpful. I’m excited to continue working on this proposal, if the donation is accepted into the Museum’s collection, and potentially write an article about the incredible women that were absolute pioneers of surfing in their day.

For my final project with the Sydney Jewish Museum, I compiled a 14-paged ‘education resource package’ on the stories of post-war Jewish migration to Australia, consisting of curriculum links, background content information, lesson plans and source booklets for teachers. Though this project only forms one part of a larger collection of pre-existing educational resources at the Museum, I focused on identifying and addressing the gaps in the repository of resources – those that are overlooked even by professional historians and educators, within such a fast-paced, busy organisation environment. For instance, not all on-site excursion programs have a complimentary lesson plan; resources tend to cater for ‘mainstream’ students than providing differentiation options for various ability levels; and all existing lesson plans focus on explaining the Nazi regime and political motivations behind the genocide, at the expense of telling further Jewish stories. In this regard, my project is significant to the Museum as a starting point to the longer, nascent endeavour to address these gaps in resources and ensure accessibility for a wider audience of students.

This project argues that the purpose of history is the preservation of stories from the past through the education of the future generations. The greater vision of the SJM Education Team and the Museum wholly is to preserve the voices of the past in light of the dwindling population of Holocaust survivors – and at the core of this mission is to educate and transmit the Holocaust memory to students, who are our emerging historians. It is not only crucial to ensure this education is accessible to as many students as possible, but is also engaging, for conversations to continue history beyond the classroom (pun intended) and preserve the Holocaust past in the public memory.

After publishing my project on the Sydney Jewish Museum website, the project will therefore benefit teachers, who frequently contact the Museum asking for resources that could extend student knowledge following an on-site excursion visit. It also will benefit students, as it provides various engaging yet enriching history pedagogies to understand the past. The resource is specifically targeted at Stage 5 students studying Migration Stories, though the difficulty of activities can be tailored to the age group and needs of students attending the on-site program. Overall, the resource ensures that students are well-equipped to preserve and further transmit the Holocaust and Jewish memory, and continue significant conversations that draw connections between the past and the present national identity and Australian Judaica.

This project has taken a bit of a turn. Within my last blog post I have mentioned that I was thinking of creating a video for the Millers Point Community Resident Action Group. Well things can change quite unexpectedly. Prior to my previous blog post I was still waiting on the volunteer work that I would do for this organization. However, I received a phone call after I had just finished work, from the President explaining to me what I could do. This work would include collating a number of Conservation Management Plans of buildings around Millers Point that could be easily accessed by the organization. After a discussion with my mum on how I could use this as part of my project, it was deciding that I would create a walking tour of a number of sites using the information providing within these management plans. So the Millers Point Historical Walking Tour was born.

I had received a list on which management plans needed to be collected, however some of these I have been unable to collect, namely the more popular sites such as the Palisade Hotel and the Lord Nelson Hotel (that one has quite a story). After reviewing these management plans, I have learned a lot about Millers Point and The Rocks, particularly that of the Bubonic Plague Outbreak as well as the resuming of the many of the properties within Millers Point and The Rocks by the Sydney Harbor Trust.

For this walking tour I decided to go with 10 sites, where I would write a brief description of the history of the site. I included the history of sites that might not be as well known as hotels or pubs because I feel that these small terraces do hold a history of their own for Millers Point and The Rocks. Many of these terraces were built as rental properties by wealthy families such as the Merrimans, which helps reveal the property market and local economy of the late 18th and early 20th century. As well as this, these are the original homes that made up the streetscape of this era, helping show the original layout of Millers Point and The Rocks.

The route for this walking tour begins at the Abraham Mott Hall and continues as follows:

• The Lord Nelson Hotel
• Argyle Place Terraces
• Cole’s Buildings (23-32 Argyle Place)
• Garrison Church
• The Hero of Waterloo Hotel
• Windmill Street Terraces
• Dalgety Terraces (11-13 Dalgety Street)
• The Palisade Hotel
• High Street Terraces
• St Brigid’s Church

Included is a map of the route.

The only main challenges I experienced in the creation of this walking tour surround gathering information for the more well known sites as well as finding historical photographs. While the majority of information that has been used in these descriptions were found within the Conservation Management Plans, I had to search within the NSW Heritage Register. While not as detailed, it still provided me with enough information. The majority of photographs used within this project were found within the City of Sydney Achieves, the NSW State Library Collections and the Conservation Management Plans. However for some locations I was unable to find any photographs. As well as this, I couldn’t really find any ‘old’ photographs. Well I mean old as in older than 1980. While a few of these images pre date 1910, I feel I could have really better expressed this history through photographs from the time.

I have decided to create a printed pamphlet that contains this walking tour, where people can grab one from the community center and begin their journey. However I feel that this alone will not be a long term plan. To maintain the longevity of this walking tour, I have proposed an idea of having a QR code that can be scanned that will provide a digital version of the walking tour, however I have not heard back about this idea.

Ultimately, the driving force behind this walking tour is to help promote the use of heritage listing as well as maintaining the history of one of Sydney’s oldest suburbs. Particularly during a time of development and remodeling, this is a important location in helping express Sydney’s history. By maintaining Millers Point and similar suburbs, their history and stories continue to live. While not as grandeur as the historical towns found in Bendigo or the U.S, this can at least give us a glimpse of the past and the original streetscape that has remained (mostly) unchanged.

My mum is a nurse and has worked in the building next door to the RPA museum for at least 10 years now, yet I never knew of the museum until taking this class. For whatever reason the RPA museum was not known to me until this semester. It is not in the main building of the hospital and is in the King George V memorial building on the 8^th floor, so it’s not the most obvious or advertised location. My mum herself has never been there and she’s never spoken about it to me. I walked past that building most days during high school to my mum’s work before I could drive home. It makes me wonder what other places I often walk by that holds something very interesting and significant, that I have no awareness of. That is probably something that happens to all of us more often than we realise. I discovered the museum from this class, and I am glad I have discovered it now. The museum is built around two preserved surgical theatre suits from 1941, filled with old equipment and is one of those special artefacts where you feel the age of the room and the air of the past within it.

During Sophie Loy-Wilson’s talk in week ten she mentioned how people bought the diaries of those involved in the First World War such as soldiers and nurses, and she said that nurses’ diaries were the cheapest people could buy. This spoke to me about the lack of recognition nurses often get for their work, not only in history but even during the incredibly trying last two years. The museum hosts an abundance of archives on nurses dating back to the 19^th century and I wonder perhaps there may be something there to do something on nurses who served in wartime. I will have to see about this however as I begin my work.

My contact is the curator of the museum and Director of Heritage and Environment at RPA, Scott Andrews, and Scott operates and handles the museum with the help of volunteers, until recently when all volunteers were stood down. He has also had help this year and previous years from master’s students from the University of Sydney and another student who took this subject in 2018. Like with many other local or more well-known museums, the past couple years with COVID-19 has been tough on the museum. It has been shut since early 2020 to the public and coincidentally, is finally re-opening in one months’ time, around when I will finish my project and volunteer work there. This makes my time there quite interesting and potentially important as Scott prepares to re-open the museum to the public.

The job I have discussed and begun with Scott is an inventory audit of a small collection room at the museum. Volunteers have accepted objects that may not have been recorded properly, or even at all. Some of these objects as well may have no real use or significance and so part of the task as I go through these objects is to ask the question of what is worth keeping and what is not. To get to study objects and help decide their value within the curation of a museum is a cool and interesting task, from a research and history standpoint, but also to be a part of the inner workings of a museum’s collection. Being that this archival work is my main job it will likely form the basis of my final project, though still I am not exactly sure what form that will take. I will catalogue and keep records of my findings in as I go along, and from this I hope to find something that triggers the beginning of a project. The room is full of potential as everything in there has not been catalogued or researched. Within this research there may be a story to tell, or an addition to a history of the hospital that has already been recorded. I am looking forward to the month ahead and getting stuck into archival work within a functioning public museum.

Tucked away in a small building behind a Lyons hall is the Central Coast Family History Society. Through the front door, past the foyer to the left, is the library. The shelves are full. A collection spanning decades chronicles the history of the Central Coast. Down the hall is the main room, lined with computers; people come to research their history. Across the hall is a treasure trove. The archive room. Floor-to-ceiling boxes of records, artifacts, maps and photos. 

Family history is a unique investigative process. It is a search for clues, one leading to the next, hopefully, to reveal some significant detail. Family history uses memories, oral histories and family stories; it searches for names in archives, through birth certificates, marriage records, newspapers, and obituaries to reconstruct lives. Small community organisations, like the Central Coast Family History Society, facilitate this search. They collect the clues that build family history and keep the flame of local history alive. The Family History Society connects people of the present to the Coast of the past. 

My first visit to the Family history society was overwhelming. There were so many treasures waiting to be found on the shelves. I toured the library and the archive room, seeing the books, artifacts and photos they contained. Some of the photos and older documents had begun to fade. And so, my role became digitising these records to protect them for the future and allow them to be more easily shared and stored. 

I started with a heavy leather-bound album. It had been donated after being found in the back of the shed. Most of the photos were from the mid-1800s. What was once a treasured and expensive heirloom was now in disrepair and forgotten. Digitising is a laborious process. You must delicately remove each photo, put it through the scanner and return it to the album. Scanning each photo, you cannot help but feel you are getting to know the people. As I turned the pages, I met the Sharp family.

Not many details of their lives remain now, but the album offers clues. I saw the children born into the family, the home they lived in, the family pets. There is incredible value to be found, even in the lives of people with no family left to remember them. Digitising and record keeping are some of the important roles of local history societies. It creates clues. Hopefully, these clues will prove helpful to others in the future. 

A picture is worth a thousand words. The more we interrogate photos, the more they reveal to us. To the living family, they offer a glimpse into the past and help fill in the blank branches of family trees. But to those without sentimental familial attachments, what can we gain? Surprisingly, a lot. Photos, particularly of everyday people, give granular details like what fashions were popular. On the reverse of most is the name of the photography studio in which they were taken; this is a valuable clue. The locations of these studios allow us to trace migration. For example, the beginning of the Sharp Family Album is taken in Liverpool and the end in Sydney. We can also use it to imagine a changing Sydney. Through the listed address on the back, we can see that George Street Sydney was once populated with numerous Photography Studios. With a little speculation and imagination, photographs offer a plethora of clues. 

Being at the Family History Society is like going on a treasure hunt. You start with some clue and must use that in the search for the next one. You follow the hunt hoping in the end, you will have something meaningful. I am pleased to be playing a part in creating these clues, which will hopefully be the key to some future person’s treasure. 

I discovered House of Welcome (HoW) following a discussion with a friend. I was talking to her about this class, telling her that I wanted to find an organisation that worked in the refugee space. One of the reasons for this is I strongly believe that refugees and people seeking asylum should be treated with respect when they come to Australia.  I know that our government doesn’t always do this and it makes me very angry, especially as someone whose family was once in this situation. How we treat migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum eventually makes it into our history books. I don’t want to just sit back and see these experiences and injustices pass by. 

In 2022, following the Novak Djokovic scandal, where he was held in an immigration detention facility, I became aware of the Park hotel in Melbourne where refugees were being held. After reading a newspaper article talking about the hotel; detailing the stories of people who were living there, how they worried about Covid, and that the health and living conditions were subpar, I was angry. I was angry and shocked that I did not know that this hotel existed. I was aware of the offshore detention process however I was not aware of the hotel in Melbourne. I was angry because neither the news nor newspapers were reporting on it. 

I kept asking myself why a country as rich as Australia was putting people through experiences like that? People who had been deemed as refugees by the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation. In my mind, my Australia could not do that. After all, I believed that we were a fair dinkum country that celebrated egalitarianism. I was also angry because the migrant experience is integral to Australia, to its identity and historical narrative. We are a country of migrants, whether it be recent migrants or migrants from 1788. As of the 2021 census 27.6% of the population were born overseas. That is why when I was talking to my friend I was immediately drawn to House of Welcome because I realised that this was my opportunity to get involved and have a say. 

House of Welcome is an organisation that welcomes, shelters and empowers people seeking asylum and refugees. It helps people of all ages, genders, sexualities, nationalities and religion. Their purpose is to ‘[t]o uphold the intrinsic dignity of each person by providing support and advocacy to empower the most disadvantaged and marginalised within our community.’ They achieve this through their activities and programs which address homelessness, destitution and social isolation among people seeking asylum.

For my project I am organising a Table Talk. A Table Talk is part of the listening component of the organising cycle. A listening session is a collection of table talks – where a small group of people discuss their experiences/stories in relation to an issue, or topic together around a table. It is a gathering of people where they share stories and hear the pressures that their community faces, usually on a particular topic and issue. These stories will decide on the pressures the majority of people face and what an organisation will first work on to solve.

My project will be the report that I write after the event, because that report will become a historical document. It will record the event, what happened, what was discussed, who attended and it will be of use to the organisation as it will guide their future actions. 

The Australian National Maritime Museum

Before this project, I was quite unfamiliar to the unique and important work achieved by the Australian National Maritime Museum. What I previously did not realise was the highly complex and diverse nature of Australian waterways and its associated stories of resilience and loss.

Upon our recent visit to the museum, I was amazed at my initial sighting of their Welcome Wall which has almost 30,000 names of people who have travelled from various locations to make Australia their home. The inscriptions not only highlight the diversity of the Australian community but further stress the museum’s central message for national unity and multiculturalism. Herein, while the Maritime Museum is home to significant naval vessels and boats, it is more importantly a centre for the many unique stories of human triumph and tragedy.

A Focus on Migration

Since the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, approximately 10 million settlers have moved from across the world to start a new life in Australia. This significant figure is reflected in the over 10,000 objects in the Maritime Museum’s collection which relate to Australia’s rich immigration history. Whether beginning from Indigenous fisherman who initially explored the Australian waterways, or to the over 15,000 asylum seekers accepted in Australia between 2019-20, migration through the Australian waterways has continued to be a highly prevalent experience within the national identity.

My initial interaction with Australian naval matters was through previous readings about the SIEV-X incident of 2001. This tragedy brings to light the highly politicised nature of Australian maritime control, in conjunction with revealing the complexity of the waterways for being both a symbol for hope and immense loss. In this realisation, my research extended to the Maritime Museum’s work in displaying Australia’s rich immigration history.

Here, I found their 2020 National Maritime Collection conducted by Peter Dew. Drew’s repurposing of photographs from the National Archives incites commentary on the treatment of asylum seekers specifically during the White Australia Policy, but further extends his critique on current issues of non-European immigration. The striking images of Monga Khan and Gladys Sym Choon dressed in cultural attire is superimposed with the word ‘AUSSIE’. Through highlighting the struggles of integration for asylum seekers, Drew captures the paradoxical experience of non-European immigration to Australia and provokes important conversation about what epitomises a ‘real Australian’. In doing so, the museum does essential work to humanise the marginalised and difficult experiences of migration by sea. Through its exhibits, it challenges traditional narratives of national identity, to rather empower the diverse communities who lack agency to tell their story.

Future Project

Despite not having begun volunteering work with the museum, the project will be based upon a donated object which can be potentially brought into the National Maritime Collection. I hope to positively assist the museum through continuing their work in growing awareness of the migrant experience to Australia. Through developing my understanding of the curatorial process, I hope to learn how to effectively empower and give agency to marginalised communities who reside outside traditional national frameworks. The Australian National Maritime Museum plays an important role in conveying the tumultuous experience of migration, where I look forward to future collaboration with their team to further investigate this rich history of Australia.