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Curator Alison Wishart, together with food historian Dr Adele Wessell, has enjoyed researching the life and contributions of one of Australia’s pioneering and political cookery educators and authors, Flora Pell.

Historian Adele Wessell uses cookbooks to draw conclusions about Australian political and social life at the turn of the century, examining British diet and food preferences that were maintained and transformed in colonial Australia.

Alison Wishart examines the challenges of displaying rare cookery books in museums. She focuses on Flora Pell’s Our Cookery Book, published in 1916, and suggests display methods to allow better visitor interaction.

Curator Charlotte Smith outlines the development of an exhibition at Museum Victoria based on urban archaeology. She discusses the challenges in interpreting the ‘rubbish’ and creating a snapshot of life in nineteenth-century Melbourne.

Historian Adele discusses cookbooks as historial resources, drawing on the National Museum’s collection in her time as a Visiting Fellow with the Museum’s Centre for Historical Research.

Curator Karen Schamberger tells the story of Guna Kinne’s Latvian national dress, assembled over a period of 20 years in Latvia, Germany and Australia, and now part of the National Museum’s National Historical Collection.

The lives of a group of young sisters growing up on Baden farm at Grong Grong in country New South Wales around 1912 are revealed in a collection of journals, examined by curator Susannah Helman.

The history of the Springfield collection, more than 2000 objects from a major rural property near Sydney, is outlined by registrar Carol Cooper. She explores the remarkable family who cared for it and the Museum’s work to make this collection available.