A capsule in time for a pandemic past
The National Museum wants Australians to record their stories during the coronavirus pandemic to become part of the museum’s collection.
It will become a national time capsule of the coronavirus pandemic, and it started with a fridge.
On Monday, the National Museum of Australia is launching an innovative social media initiative allowing Australians to record their stories of “what they’re going through’’ during the coronavirus pandemic, and these personal stories will become part of the Canberra museum’s collection.
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The uploaded stories, videos and images will also potentially be included in a pandemic exhibition the museum is planning to mount after the health crisis ends. NMA director Mat Trinca said: “None of us can quite believe the time that we’re living through, and we (museum staff) need to record it. The intention will be to hold this content (of pandemic stories) as a digital object that represents this moment which has overwhelmed us all, and which clearly is going to be something that resounds in our history for a long time.’’
The new platform is a Facebook group called Bridging the Distance — Sharing Our COVID-19 Pandemic Experiences, and the NMA is encouraging all Australians to join it.
Dr Trinca said the endeavour was inspired by a fridge that was stocked with cold drinks for firefighters on a roadside in Bungendore, outside Canberra, during the recent bushfire crisis. The fridge was soon covered in messages of support and became a symbol of community gratitude for the firefighters’ lifesaving efforts.
It is now part of the museum’s collection, and was delivered to the NMA by a convoy of rural fire service and other emergency vehicles in February.
The fridge prompted the launch of a museum Facebook group page called Fridge Door Fire Stories, which has attracted almost 300 members. Among these stories is dramatic footage of a fire truck driving through a burning landscape under a red sky and a moving image of the “wall of safe” at the Quaama Bushfire Relief Centre in southern NSW, a hard-hit area that lost about 70 properties. At the height of the crisis, with phone lines down, residents used yellow post-it notes stuck to the “safe’’ wall to let their worried loved ones and friends know they were “okay’’.
Dr Trinca said community response to the museum’s Fridge Door Fire Stories initiative had been “very strong’’. It was hoped the Bridging the Distance Facebook page would generate a similar response and uncover “material objects’’ that could be used in a COVID-19 exhibition the museum was planning.
He told The Australian this exhibition would potentially open in 2021.
The NMA, which was last month forced to close its doors because of the pandemic, is also planning an exhibition on the bushfire crisis. “Places like this can play a role when people need some sense of stability and an opportunity to express what they’re going through,’’ the NMA director said.
As The Australian reported on Saturday, in late April, the Canberra museum will launch an enhanced online version of its trailblazing exhibition telling the story of Captain James Cook’s 1770 voyage along the east coast of Australia, from indigenous and non-indigenous perspectives. The physical exhibition, called Endeavour Voyage: The Untold Stories of Cook and the First Australians, was due to open this week, but its opening has been indefinitely postponed, due to the pandemic.