Mourilyan and Silkwood

I had been looking forward to seeing Mourilyan and Silkwood, for some unfathomable reason. Both featured strongly in Sugar Heaven by Jean Devanny, and one of them had a museum of the sugar industry. I was expecting things. Not sure what, but things.

I was expecting to be able to buy morning tea in Silkwood. As things stand, that's not really a possibility. Silkwood is one of those Australian towns that haven't quite worked out they're dead yet. People are still living in Silkwood, but they don't actually have any amenities beyond a pub, a butcher and a corner-store-cum-post-office. That's true of many towns in regional Australia, but most of them have fewer buildings that appear to have been gutted by fire. I was expecting some serious damage as a result of the cyclone, but a lot of those places looked like they were lost years ago.

As for Mourilyan? The town has a sugar museum. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I went to that museum I'd learn more about the sugar industry. You know, things like the history of sugar production in the region, different ways sugar has been harvested, the stories of the people involved... that sort of thing.

Instead, I was treated to a 15 minute long advertisement for Canegrowers Australia (which put me right off watching the other two tapes that were on rotation), saw a smattering of machinery that seemed to largely be there for the heck of it and learnt a little bit about the Kanakas. I say "learnt", because if I had known nothing about the history of South Sea Islanders in the sugar industry I would have learnt something. As it stood, the display basically told me a range of things I already knew.

I had come wanting to know more about planting, growing and cutting cane. Specifically, what it was like as a cane cutter - the life they lead, the way they worked, the mix of races from all over the world (after all, I knew that cane cutters were made up of Islanders, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Spanish, Asians, Croations, Britishers and all sorts - even some Indigenous peoples, I think, although they were mostly "employed" in the cattle industry). I got nothing of that. I left that museum with nothing. Literally nothing. I never do that. At least, not in a "real" museum.

There are, essentially, two types of "local" museums in the world. There's the kind that could be described as your grandmother's attic - it's basically just a couple of rooms full of stuff. Some of it is labelled, some of it is themed, but essentially it's a room full of stuff. This is the kind of local museum you get in most small towns - and they are a pleasant way to spend half-an-hour or so, but they don't have any pretensions and you don't usually pay to see them (you just put a few coins in the donations box to help them pay their bills). Most of the time these operate out of an old shop-front (that has been relegated to housing the museum after it's no longer likely to get a "proper" shop in there).

Then there are the museums of something-or-other. These are meant to tell you something. They convey to you something about the history and context of a place, a time, an industry. These are meant to be full of stories, not stuff. The stuff is there to tell you the stories. As you look at the stuff, the design, layout and interpretation of it all leaves you having learnt something about the something-or-other that the museum is for. These usually have "real" buildings that were built (or at least purposefully set aside) specifically for the museum. They have people who are employed to man the front counter. They charge you a fee - and that's okay because you are being entertained. You're paying your money to see the stories.

The sugar museum at Mourilyan was meant to be a "museum of something or other" (and charged like it was) but it was more like a grand-mother's attic with hardly any stuff. It was as though they thought all of the big pieces of machinery around was enough to justify the existence of the place. I don't mind big machinery, as long as the interpretive signs give me a sense of the time and place in which it was used and the people who used it. In this place? Not so much. And they really only bothered to put effort into telling the one story (that of the Kanakas), and in a way that was depressing. They didn't even have any of the good stuff about what the South Sea Islanders went on to achieve in this country.

You can do better, Canegrowers Australia. And you can start by changing that stupid video you "recommend" everyone watch before being bored to tears by your museum. I don't need to waste 15 minutes of my life hearing about how wonderful the cane industry is. I want to know where it's come from and how it got here. I paid $8 (so generously reduced from $10 while you have displays supposedly in the middle of changing - don't think I didn't notice the dust on the areas set aside for the new displays) to go to a sugar museum. I didn't pay that money for the privilege of watching an ad and seeing a small handfull of bits-and-bobs.

So, yeah, Silkwood and Mourilyan were a bit disappointing. So was South Johnstone, but for reasons I'll go into in a different post.

Mena Creek will also be discussed in a later post.

Whether you like it or not.