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Echuca Historical Society Museum

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captain oddsocks
captain oddsocks
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Echuca Historical Society Museum

Echuca Historical Society Museum

The Museum of the Echuca Historical Society is appropriately housed in the historic building under the huge fig tree on the corner of Warren and Dickson streets, across from Hopwood Gardens, Bridge Hotel and Riverboat Dock. The building dates from the 1860s and was formerly the Echuca Police station.

The museum is open 7 days a week, from 11am to 3pm. Upon paying the modest $3 admittance, you’ll enter the first of the display rooms, with aboriginal history and artifacts including a brass breast-plate inscribed "Chief of Echuca" belonging to "Chief" Billy Tool. Apparently these breast plates were bestowed by early white settlers sometimes in the genuine spirit of recognition and sometimes as a cynical attempt to exploit the traditional owners of the land. The first room also contains handtools, photographs and newspaper articles from the sawmilling, paddlesteaming, pioneering years. Some of the more interesting articles talk about paddlesteamers that have caught fire or sunk, and eloquently illustrate the hardships of life in inland Australia in the 1800s. One poem talked about a flood that was;

"ten fathom deep from the bed t’ the crest,
at Echuca, she’s ninety mile wide.
She filled Riverina from east to the west
and then she poured over the side."

Framed photographs of Echuca’s local government and gold leaf honour rolls of various organizations (from an obviously more comfortable and civilized era) crowd the hallway, while the two end rooms are dedicated more to the life of ordinary people. In one there are simple but beautiful gowns and waistcoats in glass cases, antique sewing machines and framed sepias of unsmiling people in their best Sunday clothes. In the second there are all manner of kitchen implements; beaters, whisks, pasta-cutters and strange contraptions of wooden-handled cast-iron whose purpose I could only guess at.

Out in the backyard though, lies the real treasure of the Echuca Historical Society Museum. Imagine distant relatives of your grandparents’ age who’ve lived on a farm in the area all their lives and liked to collect things, and that’s what it’s like behind the museum. There are old washing machines with crank handles, cases full of hand-lettered tobacco tins, every piece of farm machinery that’s ever been pulled by a horse, a timber slab hut that was once used a medical clinic relocated from the floodplains west of Echuca, and the crowning glory-an outside toilet on a precarious lean that suggests it’s next visitor might be the last. And like all good Australian backyards, this one has sheds. Sheds full of horse-drawn wagons and buggies, steam engines, parts of steam engines, sawmillers’ circular blades as tall as a not-so-small child, and even the partially-burnt rudder from the P.S.Murrumbidgee, built at Echuca in 1865 and destroyed by fire in 1948.

Tourists flock to the Victorian goldfields to search for glistening nuggets, but when you’ve been through Echuca and this museum; you’ll know that treasure can also be covered in rust, dust and cracked enamel.

From journal Echuca; Australia's Paddlesteamer town

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