What remains after the water recedes?

The legacies of flooding for regional museums

Catastrophes like flooding and bushfires most affect those who lack the resources to rebuild. Small, volunteer-run organisations can lose the work of decades in hours, and even slight damage can remain for years when staff and money are lacking. After visiting museums in Queensland that were hard hit by flooding, Dr Roland Leikauf explains how their work was affected and how they are trying to recover.

ENTERING LISMORE IN 2022 means beholding a city made of construction fences. Several roads are still damaged or impassable. A large sign saying ‘What’s open?’ offers a QR code system to help visitors find out which businesses and historical locations are still operating or standing.

This region of northern New South Wales is no stranger to flooding, and nor are the local institutions. Evacuating low-lying built-up areas is a regular necessity, like watching the news attentively for the usual warning signs. It is a game of probabilities in which extraordinary disasters are unlikely, but possible.

In 2022, probability struck. The city smashed the ‘100-year design flood level’, which lay far beyond what the usual protections could handle. The waters rose to an unprecedented 14.4 metres. Even the devastating floods of 1954 and 1974, which topped 12 metres, or those after Cyclone Debbie in 2017, paled in comparison. Defences that would have struggled at 10 metres were completely overwhelmed. Other cities in the area were also hit, but in Lismore, Leycester Creek and the Wilsons River created an especially devastating situation. Over 6,000 properties were destroyed or damaged.

In any catastrophe, rescuing people has priority, but museums and art galleries are responsible for fragile, often irreplaceable objects. The Lismore Museum is typical of a regional museum: a volunteer-run institution managed by the local Richmond River Historical Society and focusing on preserving the rich, complex history of the community. It is an award-winning institution that depends on engaged, interested volunteers creating much with few resources. The historical building housing it is an important meeting place for the community –and it is in the middle of the Lismore CBD. Together with the Lismore Regional Gallery, it was badly affected when the flood reached the inner city.

When I visit the museum in early 2023, the building is still closed – a well-restored outer shell with a hollow interior that was still drying out, waiting for more conservation and restoration work. What was once inside the building, accessible to the community and visitors, is a short drive away, in the eastern suburb of Goonellabah. There, at the corner of Lancaster Drive and Oliver Avenue, a few shipping containers huddle on a hill in an otherwise unremarkable area. This is the new, reduced Lismore Museum.

In 2022, Lismore smashed the ‘100-year design flood level’, which lay far beyond what the usual protections could handle

‘Museum in exile is a very apt description,’ Geoff Kerr, the museum’s director, tells me when I ask what I should call this arrangement. Together with three volunteers, we hide from the relentless sun under a temporary marquee. ‘The site occupied by the containers is earmarked for a future flood-free storage for the art gallery and museum,’ Geoff tells me, while the volunteers meticulously clean objects by hand from the remnants of the flood. They use brushes and small hand-held vacuums that hiss while they remove dust and grime. If a permanent offsite storage solution comes to pass, Geoff muses, it would improve flood safety immensely for Lismore’s cultural institutions. However, it won’t solve any of his current problems.

Geoff shows me some objects from the collection. A plate from the 1901 wreck of the SS Protector, the only part of the ship ever recovered. A simple yet effective bush refrigerator, which cools food through constant evaporation of water. A porthole from the steamship Cahors, which was wrecked at Evans Head in 1885. An elaborate child’s tricycle. Part of the collection is already well ordered, while the other shipping containers still hold objects as they were rescued: in heaps, quickly removed from the floodwaters and brought here.

While we browse the collection, volunteers Vivienne Sigley, Felicity Holmes and Silvie Vánèque continue to clean the flood-affected objects. We stop for a cup of tea, which is brewed on a small side table. The team hopes to have sorted the collection soon, but they need more help. We wash our teacups in a small bucket, their improvised sink. I say goodbye to the team and move on, to the next museum. Behind me, the volunteers return to rescuing a priceless collection of artefacts with what they have available.

Further north, the Queensland Maritime Museum hugs the Brisbane River close to the city’s South Bank. Having a world-renowned tourist destination as a neighbour can be advantageous, and many tourists pass by the buildings of the museum, some of which are remnants of pavilions from World Expo 1988. Like the Lismore Museum, the Queensland Maritime Museum is located close to the river – a necessity, as some of their ships are active vessels and the heart of the museum grounds holds a rare sight: a working historical dry dock. In it rests HMAS Diamantina, a River-class frigate built in the mid-1940s and named after a river in Queensland.

01

Manager Geoff Kerr and his ‘museum in exile’. Together with volunteers, he works tirelessly on organising the collection and conserving the objects.

02

Geoff Kerr and volunteers Vivienne Sigley, Felicity Holmes and Silvie Vánèque gather under a marquee for some extended conservation work. Images Roland Leikauf/ANMM

02

Three days of relentless rain filled the historic dry dock and put the museum grounds under water

Its riverside location means that this all-volunteer museum is another institution familiar with flooding. In the 2011 floods, the lightship Carpentaria was submerged and much of the museum grounds were affected. But as in Lismore, the 2022 flood was a singular event. The museum’s annual report calls it a ‘rain bomb’, and it caught staff by surprise. The museum’s Disaster Management Plan was triggered after three days of relentless rain filled the historic dry dock and put the museum grounds under water. However, much more devastating was that the historic pumphouse and engine room also quickly filled with water. The machines that operated the dry dock were irreplaceable artefacts that had been meticulously repaired and maintained by the volunteers. Now, the historical machinery and the rest of the museum were back to square one.

Even if volunteer-run organisations can execute their Disaster Management Plans perfectly, the aftermath is challenging. Long after the last catastrophe leaves the news, small organisations continue to struggle against odds that are heavily stacked against them. Few can afford conservators in permanent positions. Conservation is outsourced to contractors when high-priority objects require specific work. And when floods and other disasters hit, everyone needs help, money, support and expert advice. Volunteer-managed institutions are just a few victims among many and compete for resources when they are least able to.

Grants are the lifeline for many cultural institutions in this situation, but writing grant applications can be a timeconsuming process, without guaranteed results. Lismore Museum risked it and was successful: ‘We have been lucky to receive a grant from Create NSW,’ writes Geoff Kerr when I contact him six months after my visit. While protecting the objects is still foremost on his mind, a museum must have a presence in the public sphere. Geoff organised a temporary lease for a store in Lismore city. This ‘pop-up’ museum will then be their temporary face to the public, as well as their office, until the historic building can be fully restored. Geoff hopes it will be open for four weekdays and on Saturday mornings.

The archives and artefacts, however, still rest at the top of the hill in Goonellabah, where they are safe from the next flood but also out of reach to the public. Still, the volunteers are hopeful. Restoration work on the original museum building started after Christmas 2023, and maybe 12 months after that, Geoff muses, they can return to their original building. If there isn’t another flood in the meantime.

Dr Roland Leikauf is the museum’s Curator, Post-war Immigration. He travelled to Queensland as part of the Maritime Museums of Australia Project Support Scheme (MMAPSS), the Australian National Maritime Museum’s grant program for regional museums. For more information on MMAPSS, or to apply for a grant, please see our website.

‘New Hebrides – Native recruits on board Malakula ’ [1890].

By this time, South Sea Islanders were employed on vessels that transported ‘blackbirded’ Pacific labourers. Note the number of guns among the crew. Image State Library of Queensland