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