Working Spaces 4 Conference

Sarah-Jane and I drove down to Galong last Friday to attend the famous Working Spaces 4 conference at St Clements Monastery. This is the fourth year this highly popular conference for museum volunteers has been put on, organised by the Museums Australia Lachlan Chapter.

St Clements Monastery is located about 20 minutes from Harden in the Southern Tablelands. It is a huge red brick building surrounded by farmland, complete with a grotto and a rather filmic gothic cemetery. It even has a small museum which tells the fascinating story of the original residents of ‘Galong castle’.

Around 40 participants from as far as Orange and Victoria were there and it was great for Sarah-Jane and I to catch up with some old friends and put some new faces to names. Treacherous weather meant some attendees had a somewhat interesting journey, with several people delayed by the conditions.

The conference covered many areas of museum practice such as paper conservation, writing Oral Histories, Significance, working with schools and graphic design; and aimed to provide volunteers with “hands-on” practical experience.

We presented a morning session on the Art of Winning and Writing Grants. We were lucky to have a really great group of enthusiastic volunteers from places such as Willoughby, Liverpool, Temora, Queanbeyan and Lambing Flat, who were clearly dedicated to their organisations and keen to develop different projects to keep their museums thriving. We discussed different funding avenues they could try, went through our Grants & Funding booklet and detailed the VIM grants now available from M&G NSW.

We gave them some tips on what makes a great grant application (and not so great ones!). More resources here.

A highlight of the weekend was ‘Postcards from Home’, held after dinner on Saturday night. Representatives from each museum presented for 2 minutes (precisely timed by a cow bell!) on what they felt was their most interesting collection item. It was then put to the vote, decided by the participants and also the presenters. There were so many captivating and intriguing stories, provoking a lot of debate during the deliberation! Winners were the Lambing Flat museum, who took the prize for ‘People’s Choice’ with a photo of the highly significant “Roll Up” banner, from the Lambing Flat riots of 1861,

and Cootamundra Heritage Centre taking out the ‘Presenter’s Choice’ with their unique set of 163 handmade dioramas depicting aspects of Cootamundra’s social history.

Big congratulations to the MA Lachlan Chapter, organisers of Working Spaces on another hugely successful conference, in particular to Glen Johns who is stepping down from the committee this year.

Sarah-Jane, Glen Johns and Phoebe