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https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/may/08/australias-best-small-museums-celebrating-apples-bottles-country-music-dinosaurs>
"In the small country town of Tingha in northern New South Wales sits a
supermarket seemingly frozen in time: the Wing Hing Long and Company Store. Its
shelves are lined with old products – canned food from the 90s, shoes from
bygone eras, boxes of soap with retro graphics and bottles of spray-on starch.
“It’s almost like you’re stepping back in history,” says artist Simone
Rosenbauer. “It’s so amazing!”
None of the products are for sale: this supermarket, established by storekeeper
Ah Lin in 1881 to service the region’s tin-mining boom, is now a living museum
– conserved by the local council after it closed in 1998 after nearly 120 years
of business.
The Wing Hing Long and Company Store is one of 41 rural museums Rosenbauer
documented as part of her ambitious project
Small Museum, which took her
across every state and territory photographing community-run museums and
interviewing the people behind them.
From the Surf World Museum in the Victorian town of Torquay to the Telegraph
Station museum in Alice Springs, the project was a quest to highlight the
“significant stories and archives that often don’t make it into the big-city
museums,” says Rosenbauer. It was also a way to explore and highlight the
important intergenerational, social and cultural role these spaces play in
their communities."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
