Milne Bay Military Museum remains in limbo as committee weighs up options

After being forced to close its doors in 2016, the museum’s committee is considering two options for their survival and the deadline is fast approaching.

The Milne Bay Military Museum has been left in limbo for almost five years, with the committee weighing up two options for the museum’s survival.

The committee of Milne Bay Military Museum have two options for their continued survival, and the countdown is on for their decision.

The museum was closed in November 2016 and after almost five years to the date the issue is slated to be resolved at an upcoming committee meeting.

President Marian Jones said their options boiled down to donating the collection to the Toowoomba RSL, or reopen the museum at a new location in the Darling Downs.

“There is an offer of land at the moment and the committee is looking into how we’d have a new museum drawn up,” she said.

“That’s one of two avenues we’re looking at and no decision will be made until the end of November.”

SUPPORTERS SIGN: Milne Bay Military Museum president Marian Jones with many signatures to save the museum in 2018.

Ms Jones laughed off suggestions the museum’s collection would be leaving the region, denying rumours the committee was in talks with a Tenterfield-based consortium to move the museum south of the border.

“That’s never been an option, and it’s the first I’ve heard of such a thing,” she said.

Toowoomba RSL sub branch president Scott May said he has approached the Milne Bay Military Museum with an offer of assistance.

Mr May said their plan proposed the museum collection be donated to RSL Queensland, which would then be handed back to the Toowoomba RSL sub branch.

“Through RSL Queensland we could then seek an appropriate facility and open a museum that could also be a rehabilitation centre for veterans, but it’s all just a proposal and we’re willing to work with the museum committee on that,” he said.

“RSL Queensland are willing to help and we have benefactors in Toowoomba that are willing to help with the finances, and I’ve spoken to state and federal MPs who are keen to assist where they could.

“The proposal is a working document and I have had a meeting with the committee, however I can’t progress things any further until I get a commitment from them.”

Toowoomba RSL Sub-Branch president Scott May.

Originally the closure of Milne Bay Military Museum was due to workplace health and safety issues and missing World War I and World War II firearms.

The six-week closure in November 2016 dragged on after the Department of Defence evicted them from their O’Quinn Street headquarters, the museum’s base since 1990, in 2018.

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” after a 2017 defence inquiry found “a number of discrepancies in the accounting, handling and storage of weapons”.