The biannual LGNSW Museum Manager’s meeting took place on Thursday the 28th of November; the meeting was one of the largest held to date with 20 local government employed museum managers attending from as far as Albury, Cobar and Tamworth. With so many museum managers in attendance, this was an excellent chance discuss ideas and strategies for a whole range of issues that directly impact museums around the state. We were also fortunate to be joined by the Museum Advisors for the first half of the day and having their input was incredibly valuable.

A variety of presentations were included in the meeting’s program, starting with Allison Campbell and Kate Gahan discussing the development of a new exhibition at Orange Regional Museum. In particular, they addressed the issues of curating a long-term exhibition with loan items and wanting to break away from traditional, linear exhibitions formats.

Following this, Kay Stingemore presented on the Great Cobar Heritage Centre redevelopment, discussing the history of the building, the repair work required and the plans for the future of the museum. The final presentation for the day was from Julie Baird and Bree Rooney discussing a recent training day for primary and secondary educators on how to teach Aboriginal content. The training day was created by Newcastle Museum, working with the CSIRO and the Wollotuka Institute, and run by external Aboriginal educators.

Discussions that followed on covered a large range of topics including museum responses to climate change, de-accessioning objects and the use of digital media for promotion.

As always, the meeting was highly valuable and insightful; thank you to everyone who attended and we are looking forward to the next one, which will be held in June 2020.

In the afternoon, the Museum Advisors regrouped in a separate room to discuss projects that they have been involved with and issues arising. Recruiting new volunteers and how to develop meaningful interpretation for Indigenous material in community museum collections were two of the key topics for conversation.