Big personalities behind rural Australia's small museums

The Small Museum project includes photographs of 41 community museums in rural towns across the country and interviews with the people who help run them, from Tamworth, NSW to Toodyay, WA.

German artist Simone Rosenbauer, who now lives in Newcastle, first visited Australia in 2003.

At the end of an exchange semester in Melbourne, she embarked on a road trip and was struck by the charm of the country museums and heritage sites as she chanced through small towns.

"The small museums to me were something I wouldn't experience in Germany," Ms Rosenbauer said.

"In Germany, small museums would be much more polished and run by councils."

Ms Rosenbauer returned to Australia in 2007, and while reading Bill Bryson's travelogue Down Under, had the spark which became the Small Museum project.

The idea was to travel to every state and territory, and showcase the diversity of landscapes, people and stories that the bush had to offer.

"I looked at it like a puzzle," she said. "The small museum is sort of recreating an identity of the country."

Living in van with her partner, Ms Rosenbauer began her tour in earnest in 2008.

She spent a few days in each place, taking photographs of buildings and artefacts, and collecting interviews with local personalities.

The selection of museums had been carefully researched and and a route plotted out between them - and the caretakers behind each museum were given plenty of notice.

"Otherwise I would drive 500 kilometres and no one's there," Ms Rosenbauer said.

It took around a year to tick off most of the museums on the list, before making shorter, separate trips to Tasmania and Western Australia.

By the end of the trip she had visited a range of museums from the notable to the not so - the Man From Snowy River Museum, Corryong, Vic, a mine in Coober Pedy, SA, a dinosaur museum in Winton, Qld, Tamworth's Australian Country Music Hall of Fame and the National Road Transport Hall of Fame in Alice Springs, to name a few.

"The fascinating thing was that these places are run by a few individuals," Ms Rosenbauer said.

"They have no training - they use their passion and their love to set up a small museum. They use their own creativity, they come up with their own ideas about how the small museum should look, how things should be displayed.

"These places are full of stories and history and that really fascinated me."

The committed volunteers behind the museums are at the heart of the project, but Ms Rosenbauer said she was also interested in how they painted a picture of Australia's heritage.

"When you talk to them, they have so much to share and to show," she said.

"I was really interested where their ancestors came from, to talk about their multicultural backgrounds - people would come from Scotland, from England."

Australia's indigenous history also features in the project, such as a musuem built around a ration shed and children's dormitory in the indigenous community of Cherbourg, Qld.

Ms Rosenbauer said it was difficult to choose a favourite, but it was hard not to highlight her love for the Wing Hing Long & Co store in Tingha, NSW.

The former general store was run by a Chinese family, with many migrants heading to the town at the height of the tin industry.

"The store was closed in the 1970s with everything left inside. 20 years later they reopened the place and turned it into a small museum," Ms Rosenbauer said.

"It's like you're stepping back in time, you walk into the space and it's like it used to be. Nothing has changed, it's like a time capsule.

"When you walk into the store there's a flying fox system, there's a mix of Chinese culture embedded into the store - but then also the Kellogg's and cans and all the typical stuff you would have found back then produced in Australia."

While the project has previously had exposure overseas in New York and at the Paris Photo fair, it's being exhibited in Australia for the very first time.

Two years ago, the National Library of Australia acquired 120 images for its collection, but Ms Rosenbauer had put her chances of showing the project in Australia "on ice".

But when the Maitland Regional Art Gallery reached out in 2023, it felt as though her commitment to the project was paying off.

The project is now on display until the end of June, thanks to a Dobell Exhibition Grant to showcase works in regional Australia.

Ms Rosenbauer said she was "honoured" to finally show the exhibition in Australia.

"It's a historical document," she said. "The idea behind the project was also to document these places, because I believe in the future some of them will be gone.

"There's a huge concern about the younger generations if they will take care and look after the place.

"For me, I always wanted to give this back to my new home, Australia."