By Mikayla van Loon
Yarra Ranges Regional Museum has been awarded for one of its most innovative and collaborative exhibitions steering it into a new realm of creative exploration.
‘Hard Place/Good Place: Yarra Ranges’ was named the winner of the 2023 Victorian Museums and Galleries Award for Small Project of the Year on Tuesday 10 October.
Museum program director Megan Sheehy said she and the team certainly weren’t expecting to walk away with the award given the incredible standard of work submitted.
“It was quite a surprise to be honest. The calibre of the projects we were up against in that category I thought was incredibly impressive and the project we were putting up is fairly non-traditional in the museum sector,” she said.
Forming part of a broader exhibition for The Big Anxiety festival, Hard Place/Good Place told the stories of seven young people after experiencing the June 2021 storm event.
Having identified a gap in how young people’s stories are told, if at all, the exhibition was set in motion to share the lived experiences of Willow Swaneveld, Harry Bruce-Tennant, Fionn, Jess Stewart, Claudia Tibbals, Kayla Delacoe and Damien Mauch.
Using augmented reality to immerse the viewer, Ms Sheehy said it was a medium and mechanism chosen to appeal to younger audiences but also add to the storytelling ability.
“Physically seeing the objects or spaces the young people had identified and hearing their voice telling that story really adds a level of immediacy and emotional depth, which other forms of storytelling can’t really get to,” she said.
The introduction of this kind of technology into the Museum, Ms Sheehy said, was just the beginning after seeing such success with Hard Place/Good Place.
“We are known as a history museum, and often museums tell stories about the past. So one of the shifts we’re really looking to make is to be able to tell stories of the present and possible futures as well,” Ms Sheehy said.
“So our role as a museum is a lot more relevant in our community and culturally relevant and helping to facilitate some of those conversations.”
Being such a collaborative exhibition, seeing the Museum partner with the University of NSW and departments within the Yarra Ranges Council, Ms Sheehy said it was those connections that made the exhibition possible.
“To be able to develop an augmented reality project as a small museum would have been well beyond our means and budgets so the partnership element was important.”
Not only is the recognition of an award a nice outcome for the Museum, Ms Sheehy said there have been some other unexpected benefits to come from the exhibition.
“Willow Swaneveld who was one of the participants ended up winning the Council’s young person of the year.
“Also she and one of the participants went on ABC radio with Virginia Trioli to talk about the impact of the storm on them, which really helped raise the profile of what happened when it had happened in such an isolated place.”
The stories of these young people will forever be accessible as well with each of the participants granting the Museum permission to archive their experiences.
“We have actually acquired the stories into the museum’s collection, so that they’re held in perpetuity.
“Museums often have oral history collections. So we do oral history, interviews of people to understand their stories and their life stories and different aspects of contributors but what’s really interesting in the shift here is we’re capturing the current with lived experience stories.
“[They can] then go on to really provide, 20 or 50 years down the track, a really strong research potential for people trying to understand what happened in that experience.”
If this story has brought up anything from the storm event of 2021, Lifeline is contactable on 13 11 14.
