Last year in the capacity of the museum collection manager I had the pleasure of working along side Paul Mc Gregor and Junita Kwok from Our Chinese Past Inc. The non for profit organisation is a group of historians and genealogists who conduct projects to identify, document, preserve, research and promote the rich diversity of Chinese Australian history and heritage.
Last year in the capacity of the museum collection manager I had the pleasure of working along side Paul Mc Gregor and Junita Kwok from Our Chinese Past Inc. The non for profit organisation is a group of historians and genealogists who conduct projects to identify, document, preserve, research and promote the rich diversity of Chinese Australian history and heritage.
The focus of the research was to explore and catalogue the nationally significant ornamental collection of Chinese artefacts on display, or archived, that were originally purchased by the Uralla Historical Society (UHS) in 1983. Michael van Leeuwen initially curated the exhibition titled “New Gold Mountain – Chinese at Rocky River” in 1982 and the space was recently expanded to showcase more of the objects retrieved from storage.
The project team has now brought together all their research and summarised what has been discovered about the temple material at McCrossin’s Mill and the information placed on the Our Chinese Past website which include object images, descriptions and translations. They are still conducting more in-depth research and will add new information to the website when it comes to light.
McGregor describes that they are “certain a number of items on display at McCrossin’s Mill were from the temple which opened in Howell’s Rd, Tingha in 1883 and that anything whose colour scheme is predominantly red and/or black is likely to have been from the temple at Rocky River which opened in 1866”.
He also confirms that “other important pieces originally from the Rocky Joss House are in the Wing Hing Long museum at Tingha and Inverell Pioneer Village”. He encourages all who are interested in the objects would benefit greatly to “view related items from the particular temples at each of the museums”.
More information on how these objects ended up in different towns and in different museums can be found in their post “Temple histories”. McGregor’s opinion is “that the objects that are in each museum should stay at those museums”.
With an ongoing commitment to collection, preservation, display and interpretation, the UHS will continue to work with Chinese Temples Project team in the future.
Please visit the website below to discover more about the objects in our significant collection.
https://ourchinesepast.org.au/objects-mccrossins-mill/ or https://ourchinesepast.org.au/mccrossins-mill/
By Melissah Norris
Collection Manager
