Our intern Jessie Tudor tells us about her time at the Gold Museum
I recently spent an exciting two weeks completing a curatorial internship at Sovereign Hill’s Gold Museum. Under the guidance of Curator Snjez Cosic, I gained an insight into the dynamic and varied role of a curator in a regional museum.
Snjez gave me the opportunity to experience a range of curatorial tasks, including handling and researching items in the collection, cataloguing objects, cleaning and preparing items for display, and writing and researching a new exhibition.
I supported Snjez in the development of an exhibition about rare trades. I researched and compiled information on a number of businesses and people in Ballarat, including Brown’s Confectionary, tailors Thomas W. White and Charles W. Harrison, and inventor and businesswoman Eady Hart.
Eady Hart
(Gold Museum collection, 06.0577)
Investigating Eady Hart was one of many highlights during my experience. An experimenter and expert in native Australian plants, Eady developed a new method of extracting vibrant natural dyes from the plants. Her scrapbooks have samples of her dyes, from brilliant golds and fluorescent pinks, to sea blues and olive greens. The Gold Museum’s collection includes her letters and patent applications, which provide a rich insight into Easy’s dye-making process, her personality, struggles and life experiences which I used to create exhibition labels which would inform and engage visitors.
My experience at the Gold Museum was a valuable insight into the workings of a dynamic regional museum. Snjez’s generous advice was highly appreciated, as was the instruction and guidance of the rest of the collections team.
The internship has been supported by Victorian Collections and Deakin University’s Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies Program