Victorian artefacts

Victorian Collections is a central portal to the cultural treasures held by museums and galleries distributed across Victoria. Culture Victoria is its sister site.
It is also a free collections management system for Victoria’s cultural organisations and a tool for students, researchers and curious minds.

It has photo entries you can browse, if you hover over an image you get the text description. And we aren’t necessarily talking about promoting your entire collection, you could have some of your most interesting, unique items, enough to tantalise a browser to enquire further and contact you.

a sample page - St Arnaud

Calico flour bag from Bruntons Flour Mill, Rupanyup

Victorian Collections is free for collecting organisations within Victoria. It is designed for Public Organisations not Private Collections, and is a complete, industry-standard cataloguing tool for organisations of all shapes and sizes.


Organisations can bulk-load onto the VC database, and VC do not impose file size limits, and can support most file types, be they audio oral histories, videos or image files. 

Files are provided under Creative Commons licence for non-commercial use. The filea can also be harvested by Trove.

Reviving the Mechanics'

Victoria once had more than one thousand Mechanics' Institutes scattered across the state. In many cases Institute halls were the first public building in a town, and today they are often the last.

Great Western

To obtain a complete picture of the heritage these organisations provided, the Mechanics' Institutes of Victoria Incorporated has been digitising the local records held by halls & institutes.

Murtoa

Records are sometimes held by the halls themselves, or with the local council, historical society, or museum, even with private individuals and trustees.
The digitisation process is funded from both philanthropic and government grant money.

Rainbow

After MIVic have made digital copies, the originals are returned to the records owner or provider along with a digital CD of the records. Copyright remains with the records owner.
Locally, records which have already been digitised are:  Apsley, Corack, Donald, Edenhope, Laen, Langkoop, Poolaijelo, Rich Avon West, St Arnaud, and Stuart Mill.

If you have Mechanics Institute records just waiting for the opportunity to be digitised, contact the Scanning Project Coordinator Judith Dwyer at mirc@mivic.org.au

Wimmera...Way Back When milestone

This blog reached a milestone overnight, when it ticked over one hundred thousand visits.
From rather humble beginnings back in January 2011, there has now been 100,097 pageviews.
For a blog devoted to the history of the Wimmera, as expected most pageviews come from Australia (54,768), but hopefully the 2,297 Ukrainian, 926 Chinese and 505 Turkish visitors also got something from the posts too.
The most popular themes continue to be railways.
So thanks to you all.

Solving the Wonnangatta mystery

The Wonnangatta murders occurred in late 1917 and in 1918, in the remote Wonnangatta Valley in the High Country in Victoria. The victims were manager of the Wonnangatta station property Jim Barclay, and John Bamford, a cook and general hand on Wonnangatta. While Barclay was a well-respected and much liked bushman, Bamford was regarded with suspicion, and was known to be easily roused into violent tempers. The case has never been solved, but many stories abound.

Wonnangatta Valley

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Wonnangatta murders, Horsham Branch are running a Criminal Investigation session on 10th January 2018

Each participant will receive a copy of one of the five published books relating to Wonnangatta and the murders, and their own “Wonnangatta Casebook”. They then need to read the story, and formulate their theory or theories. Then write up their thoughts in their casebook, thinking about any relevant -

* Clues

* Suspects

* A timeline

* Motives

* Facts

To test their hypothesis, all participants will meet with other contributors in a round table discussion on 10th January at 18:00 hours (6pm) in the Squad Room at Horsham Library.

Places are limited. Bookings are essential and must be made in person at the library to collect your books.