Great expectations

For many years, friends and colleagues have recommended a visit to the Pioneer Women’s Hut, so it was with great expectations that I finally got the opportunity to visit the museum, located seven kilometres from Tumbarumba on the Wagga Road.

The humble entrance to the museum conceals a delightful collection, which concentrates on the common, everyday objects that are usually discarded when worn out. However, here, they make do and mend ethic of earlier generations is celebrated, along with the female instinct to creatively decorate even the most prosaic of items. Themed displays relate to rural domestic history, revealing “the ingenuity of women in finding solutions to the challenges of looking after a family in early rural Australia.” http://www.pioneerwomenshut.com/home.aspx

Decorative utilitarian household items appear in many of the displays. “Coping with flies” (November 2012), features this eye-catching food cover and fly-swat.

Another personal favourite was the tea-cosy pictured below; the whimsical, tumbling flowers caught my eye. It was easy to imagine a group of women, sitting on a veranda after a hard day cleaning, cooking and mending, enjoying a cup of tea, and maybe a plate of scones with jam and cream, carefully protected from flies with a decorative food cover.

The theme of Making-do runs through every display; darned socks, sheets that have been patched many times, trivets made from covered bottle caps (pictured below), packing-case furniture, patchwork clothing and quilts.

The 75 quilts in the collection motivated staff to develop a new building dedicated to their storage and display. Opened in 2011, the Heritage Quilt room currently features the “Gift of Thrift”.

Glenroy Cottage Crafts is a little shop on the same site, selling locally made products, including jams and pickles, knitted wares, jewellery and the very amusing garden critters made from recycled materials.

So, expectations met and surpassed. This is one museum that I will revisit.

Tamara Lavrencic