Museum Volunteers

We are extremely grateful for the generosity of museum volunteers David and Michelle Cullen from Camden, New South Wales.

Michelle and David first came to Norfolk for their honeymoon in September 1987 and this year marks their tenth visit and their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary.  Both of them work in the finance industry, David’s profession is Money Market Derivatives and Michelle is a Business Analyst.  David’s interests include environmental conservation and history; he has been a volunteer with National Parks and Wild Mob on previous visits to Norfolk. 

They visited Norfolk during the anniversary week of the 225^th wrecking of the HMS Sirius in March 2015 and it was at that time they thought they might have some skills to offer the Norfolk Island Museum as volunteers.  Since then, David with his keen interest in Norfolk’s history and Michelle with her eye for detail and systematic approach to tasks have made a fantastic team undertaking cataloguing projects for the Norfolk Island Museum. 

Back on Norfolk at present and now into the third week of their ‘volunteer holiday’, they have completed an enormous project of cataloguing a backlog of files, books and items into the Norfolk Island Museum Trust Collection, over 150 catalogue entries have been completed in the past three weeks.  Initially they said they would be available for two weeks of their four week holiday, but they wouldn’t stop until the whole job was done!  They both stated, “it’s been difficult to stay on task with the processing as we just wanted to read through everything”, and they also said that it has been their pleasure to be able to provide such valuable assistance to the museum and have thoroughly enjoyed pouring over the interesting documents and books and learning more of our history.

This is the second volunteer project Michelle and David have completed for the museum, back in July 2015 they both worked for two weeks to complete the final step in the process of cataloguing the Les Brown Collection files which amounted to two filing cabinets full of files.

This type of project also reminds us of the generosity and foresight of the people that have donated these items to the museum to complement and improve our repository of information, it serves to not only preserve our history and heritage but also develops this resource for researchers and provides a basis for further analysis of historical information. 

To David and Michelle, a huge thank you for your careful processing of these items, it was a huge project that we could not have achieved without your dedication these past few weeks.  

 Thank you.                                                                                                            Janelle Blucher

               

Digistise your slide collection and preserve our island stories

Digitise your slide collection and preserve our island stories

Do you have a slide collection tucked away in an old shoebox that you’d like to bring out for a ‘slide night’?  It’s sure to impress your friends!  Seriously though, if you have a collection of slides that tell us something of our Norfolk story, we’d love to hear from you.   

Over the past couple of months Mark Hallam has generously provided his time and equipment to digitise the Norfolk Island Museum slide collection.  Any day the weather is not conducive to volunteer his skills at the National Park you will find him in the old Guardhouse building in Kingston working on this digitisation project for the museum.  It was Mark that suggested we develop the Museum collection through digitising community owned slide collections.  Once Mark has digitised your slides, you take them home along with the digital copy; and the museum also retains a digital copy to add to our collection.

Firstly, call us on 23788 to discuss the content of your slides to ensure it fits with our collection focus, following that we will arrange a suitable time for you to hand them over to Mark to check the  condition and undertake the digitisation process. 

Already Mark has completed scanning thirteen hundred slides from our collection and just as he thought he was nearing the end, we received a parcel from Rita Hillier; and it was a box of slides.  Some may remember the Hillier and Harper Newsagency in Burnt Pine some years back and Rita’s photographic book “Norfolk Island” is still sold on the island today.    There’s sure to be a fantastic part of Norfolk’s story in amongst those slides.

It’s worth recognising that the pictures we take throughout our lives capture much more than personal memories.  They allow others now and in the future to have a glimpse of the landscape, buildings, people and style, activities and events at a point in time that would otherwise be unobtainable.

Contact either myself or Natasha on 23788 if you would like to share and preserve your part of our island’s story.

Janelle Blucher


 These images are from the Bill Davidson Collection - a visitors experience on Norfolk Island