The way we were

The library's latest project is “The Wimmera in photographs – the way we were”. The Wimmera Regional Library is collecting copies of local photos to create an online photo album of our Region.

The library is searching for photographs of towns and rural communities of the Wimmera and Southern Mallee.

Image: The Donald Water Tower under construction in 1887. It was demolished in 1918 and the site became the ladies croquet green (Museum Victoria)

These images are a unique and highly significant historical resource, and provide insights into domestic and working life, education, recreation, travel, settlement and much more.

The project aims to visually record and document the history and culture of this region using photographs from family collections.

The criteria for selecting images is that they contain images of significant buildings, streetscapes or representative scenes – facilities which no longer exist eg.  flour mills, breweries & cordial factories.

Exclusions include current scenic pictures – which are more the province of Flickr, Instagram & Facebook. Family portraits lie outside the scope of the project.

 Image: Neighbours helping Tom Lynch's widow harvest a crop in the Warracknabeal district, c1915 (Museum Victoria)

To create the collection, library staff will copy each image and its details on a worksheet. The originals can either be returned to its owner, or donated to the library. 

All images in the collection will be digitised and searchable on the Library’s website — www.wrlc.org.au  The images will also be harvested by the National Library of Australia and will be searchable on their Trove site—trove.nla.gov.au

All images (unless otherwise stated) will be licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence. This licence allows others to download the image/s and share them with others as long as the credit you. The image cannot be changed in any way or used commercially.

 Image: The former St Michael's & St John's Catholic Church in Horsham. Built in 1913, the gothic style building was demolished in the 1990s (Heritage Victoria)

An idea of what we envisage for the project is our Pinterest account - http://www.pinterest.com/wrlcv/ - which is a collection of what already exists online, and we are looking at complementing that collection with “The Wimmera in photographs – the way we were”. (All images on this post are from our Pinterest account ).

The Launch of the project and its first Collection Day will be held at the Warracknabeal Library from 10am to 5pm on Wednesday 5th November. People wishing to have their prints, slides or negatives added to the "Wimmera in Photographs" Collection should book an appointment by visiting the Warracknabeal Library or phoning 5398 1270.

Image: a 1874 Beyer Peacock pattern "T" class locomotive, number 125 shunting at the flour mill siding in Natimuk, The loco was scrapped in 1918 (Winkieg)