Four-and-a-half year limbo for Milne Bay Military Museum as committee searches for land

After four-and-a-half years in limbo, the Milne Bay Military Museum committee has issued a final plea for help.

Milne Bay Military Museum president Marian Jones in 2015. Photo Bev Lacey / The Chronicle

The Milne Bay Military Museum has issued a final plea to the community for the donation of land to use as a new home for the historical collection.

The museum has been closed for four and a half years, of which two the museum has spent homeless after the Department of Defence evicted them from their O’Quinn Street headquarters, the museum’s base since 1990.

President Marian Jones originally took on her role in 2013 thinking it would be a one-year term – but eight years on she’s still trying to secure the museum’s future.

And with the average age of the committee now pushing into the mid-70s, Mrs Jones has put out a final call for help.

“If there’s anyone out there who can help with some land – off a main highway – if we got the land then we could apply to the Federal Government for a grant to build a new museum,” she said.

The land would be held in trust for a permanent museum for the people of Toowoomba, Ms Jones said.

“We need 4000sq m if possible – that’s for the museum and the parking area.

“If we can’t get land, the museum will fold up.”

If the museum were to fold, its collection would most likely be transferred to the Public Trustee.

In 2018, the museum organised a petition of 18,000 signatures calling on then Defence Minister Marise Payne to donate the O’Quinn St land to Toowoomba Regional Council.

In February 2019, the Department rejected that request because the land was not surplus to requirements.

The museum’s items remain in secure council storage, with some larger objects being held by Barry O’Sullivan Junior.

“We’re getting tired and old and everybody’s going to help – but nothing happens,” she said.

Anyone who wishes to assist the museum can get in touch with Ms Jones on 0407 113 870.

How the museum ended up homeless

It was in November 2016 that the Milne Bay Military Museum was closed.

Originally, the committee was told the museum was being closed for six weeks over workplace health and safety issues and missing World War I and World War II firearms.

But that six-week closure became indefinite after the department reportedly told the committee it wanted its land back, as the museum was a public organisation, not a defence museum.

A May 2017 defence inquiry identified “a number of discrepancies in the accounting, handling and storage of weapons, including 75 weapons or weapons parts belonging to the Milne Bay Military Museum which cannot be accounted for based on previous records, including some weapons that were potentially functional”.

A spokesman for then-Minister for Defence Marise Payne in 2018 said: “It is the view of Defence that the ongoing presence of the Milne Bay Military Museum at its current site poses an unacceptable risk to Defence personnel, volunteers and visiting members of the public”.

Museum president Marian Jones has always disputed the findings of the defence inquiry, saying the matters raised by Defence were “historic issues” dating back nearly a decade, and that many involved had since passed on.

“Whenever Defence asked us to do something, we’ve always done it,” she said in 2018.

The museum was given its marching orders by Defence in July 2018, and it vacated its O’Quinn Street premises later that year.