Future of history groups a concern

THE announcement of the closure of the Eaglehawk Heritage Society has other volunteer historians worried the same fate awaits their groups.

Huntly and District Historical Society secretary Anne Peters said the group currently has eight members regularly turning up twice a week, however hardly anyone is coming through the door to use its resources.

“We don’t get the people coming in as we used to,” she said. “A lot of this is associated with so much being available on the internet these days.

“As an off chance they turn up and we often have that little snippet of information they haven’t been able to find anywhere.”

The Huntly and District Historical Society was formed in 1976 when the decision was made to move the Huntly Shire offices.

It covers an area from Epsom to Raywood, Elmore and Fosterville and is located in the former Shire building on the Midland Highway.

Ms Peters said with so much information available on the internet, all historical societies have seen smaller numbers of visitors paying fees to access family records and community documents.

“They pay an annual subscription and do their research that way,” she said. “This is where the historical societies are losing out.”

Ms Peters said she’s worried about potentially having to track down donors to return their historical items should the society close, which is what her Borough counterparts are going through.

A solution, according to Ms Peters, would be to have a Bendigo museum established.

“We have been trying to get the council to have a museum,” she said. “I can remember as a child back in the 1950s talking about a museum for Bendigo and they still have not got a museum in Bendigo.

“We’ve got the Chinese museum, the tram museum, the mine museum, and the RSL but we don’t have a museum on general, everyday life of the people of Bendigo.

“There’s going to be a lot lost when we have to close down, nobody’s going to know how some of these suburbs started.

“The ideal [situation] would be for every historical society to go to one building and have the museum in one place and everybody work from there.”