Kununurra Historical Society
(KHS) - Incorporated
Volunteer Run Not-for-Profit
Archive, Gallery Library,
Museum & Research
@ Kununurra Museum 72 Coolibah Drive (Goes to Map :^)
_________________________ General Meetings
Next KHS Meeting?
(Suspended during CV Pandemic - Usually)
1st Tuesday of the Month 6pm
(New time from Sept 2018)
at the
Kununurra Museum
All Welcome!
452days since Kununurra Museum Closed - At 12pm on Monday March 23rd 2020 Kununurra Museum closed doors to the public due to the Corona Virus social distancing requirements - Work goes on behind the scenes - At present scanning a collection of over 1,000 slides.
This exhibition opened at the Kununurra Museum on May 5th 2018.
2018 marked the centenary of the end of World War I and
these exhibitions were initially researched and devised locally, then,
with thanks to further research by the Royal WA Historical Society, the
panels were professionally designed with collaboration between each
Society (Kununurra & Wyndham) and staff of the WA Museum and Museums
& Galleries Australia WA. There is also a museum quality showcase
for each of the Kununurra and Wyndham Museums.
The Remembering Them project that has been in progress since 2014 (to
2018) to commemorate the 1914-1918 WWI centenary) has been generously
funded by Lottery West and the WA Government. Thanks go to the Army
Museum (Fremantle) WA for temporary display objects of the 10th Light
Horse (for Kununurra Museum), as well as the WA State Records Office for
images of the 'cancelled public plans' and the State Library of Western
Australia who supplied photographs (& plans) for use on the history
exhibition panels.
455days since Wirraway-Challenge Day 2020 -"Wirraway Challenge Day" (March 20th) at the Kununurra Museum. In 2017 it was 75 Years since March 20th 1942, which was the date of the forced landing of RAAF 12 Squadron CAC Wirraway A20-62 on coastline near the WA-NT border. Broome and Derby suffered air raids on the same day, March 20th 1942.
1942
"Wirraway Challenge Day"
at
Kununurra Museum
March 20th 2020
RAAF 12 Sqn. CAC Wirraway A20-62
On March 20th 2017 it was...
75 Years...
...since the forced landing of RAAF 12 Squadron CAC Wirraway A20-62, on coastal saltmarsh, just inside the WA/NT border, by Pilots Lew Dwyer and Warwick Carmody. Watch the Digital Videos (DVs) from the KHS - "A Story of Survival & Rescue in the far north-east Kimberley"
Read & see more from the KHS "Wirraway - Challenge"Research Page (has links to all 8 parts of the DVs on the "Kununurra Museum" YouTube Channel OR See the permanent display at the Kununurra Museum.
1944
1944 (Dry Season)
75 Years Ago in 2019
Experimental Irrigation continues at Carlton Reach
Ord River Experimental Station
On March 31st 1941 Kim Durack published his paper, 'Developing the North - Proposed Research Station for the Kimberleys', and before the end of that year the
"Ord River Experimental Station," was established at
Carlton Reach using the waters of the Ord for irrigation. In 1942 agricultural experiments began with the first irrigation in June that year. 75 years ago in 1944 experimentation continued and widened, as shown in regular reports by Kimberley Michael Durack that we have in the archive. The station would operate on the Carlton Reach Site for five years and all would be moved to the Kimberley Research Station site in 1946.
More
information is available about the 36 HP Petters "Atomic" diesel pump
engine (Now at front of Kununurra Museum), used to raise the water for these first major experimental
attempts at irrigation, at the twenty acre farm site. available from the Carlton Reach Pump Engine (On this site)
In
April 2013 the 36 HP "Petters Atomic Diesel Engine" was donated to the
Kununurra Historical Society by the Department of Agriculture and Food
WA - Frank Wise Institute of Tropical Agriculture (formerly the
Kimberley Research Station, where the engine was also in use until the
1950s), KHS now has the original pump engine by the entrance
gate of the Kununurra Museum.
50 Years Ago - 1969
What was happening 50 Years Ago in Kununurra during 1969?
At the end of 1968 the contracts were awarded for the construction of the Ord River Dam (to Dam). The village was constructed and work began in 1969 - See KHS Archive collections on Flickr for photographs of the time.
744days since KHS Inauguration Day - June 5th - Inaugural Meeting that resulted in the formation of the Kununurra Historical Society Inc. (KHS - Us! ;^) on June 5th 1986. In 2016 we commemorated 30 Years as a Society.
Events in 2016
Wyndham and Hall's Creek (aka "Kimberley") were established.
1886
130 Years Ago (In 2016)
WA-NT Border Determinations
It will be.. 100 Years
...in 2021 Since the WA and SA Government Astronomers came to the Kimberley in 1921 to determine the position of the WA/NT Border on the ground by using the new technology of the day (in 1921), of radio time signals. (Yes!, the pips you used to hear before the news! :^) This expedition in 1921 would determine the border position from time signals girdling the earth, from Greenwich UK, Annapolis USA, Applecross WA, SA Observatory & Lyons France - as in how many hours minutes and seconds east of Greenwich they were.
1927 - 100 Years ago in 2027
A WA Survey crew would come back in 1927 to build the Kimberley Obelisk, which still determines the border on the ground today. Read More about the 1921 WA/NT Border Determinations
To commemorate 50 years of the Kununurra Amateur Race Club, in August 2017 a new collection has been placed online, the "K.A.R.C. Scrapbook" (1967-1976), which is part of a larger collection donated to KHS by Ross Barrett in 2002. This collection was uploaded in stages from 1976 back to the final inaugural year, 1967 which now completes this online collection. You can view all from here as a slide-show. Use the '4 cornered' gadget at bottom right to go full screen and from there you can use 'Show Info' to toggle information for each image. It has been found that the Slideshow does not work with Firefox but will with Internet Explorer, so if you see a blank space below, try viewing with Internet Explorer. Enjoy! Read on below for more Kununurra Museum News.
It has been a very busy few months, with numbers of past residents returning, and other interesting people enjoying their time at the Museum, where time is spent finding information for former residents and getting down their family information and contact details, often resulting in new collections, as well as enjoying the extensive histories, artefacts, displays of objects and the multi-screen date-sorted slideshows at the Kununurra Museum.
In June an amazing new addition to collections was brought into the Kununurra Museum after the discovery last year by a grader operator while he was out grading a fenceline on part of Carlton Hill Station (formerly Ningbing Station), when in bush adjacent to the fence-line he came across the remains of the tail-plane from ('our') CAC 12 Squadron Wirraway A20-62.
A photograph taken of the remains of tail-plane from WWII RAAF 12 Squadron CAC Wirraway A20-62 as found in the bush at Ningbing station, East Kimberley (about 20km from the WA-NT border) in 2016.KHS Archive No. KHS-2017-59-a-P-BD
Wonder if anyone out there might recall other details about the Wirraway tail-plane or other remains, which would be most welcome.
It would appear that the remains of the tail-plane must have been removed from the site of the March 20th 1942 forced landing on coastal saltmarsh just five kilometres inside WA from the WA-NT border, at least as far back as the 1980s, as it is not in photographs of the site in the mid to late 1980s. Undoubtedly the salvage by persons unknown, back some time between 1942 and the 1980s, then subsequent abandonment in the bush has saved the tail-plane remnants from the ravages of the coastal saltmarsh.
Embedded below is the 8 Part DV about Wirraway A20-62 for those interested to know more.
[Unfortunately no resize so you will need to view on YouTube to go full screen]
A post to social media (fb) on June 16th on an interview with Vanessa Mills of ABC Kimberley, about Operation Ord Noah and the Henry Hall collection, had a link to the web page that ABC made using some of the Operation Ord Noah photographs which linked back to the collections (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-16/wildlife-rescue-photos-from-lake-argyle-ord-river-dam-emerge/8621802), was automatically shared to other social media. Several retweets and shares later gave us our largest ever one day tally for KHS collection photo views on the Flickr platform, with 66,145 views which took us over 2.25 million views and tripled the previous one day total, set the month before on May 15th 2017 with 21,099 image view, a boost after the same Ord Noah Henry Hall collection was first placed online. We normally average around 1000 views per day of KHS photographs on Flickr, so this is many times more than normal.
The great thing is that this collection came about by actively collecting, triggered after Bert Lee visited the Kununurra Museum in 2013 (Operation Ord Noah - Bert Lee collection KHS online). By then making contact with Henry Hall, who Bert talked of as the leader of Ord Noah, Henry posted up his album with good documentation, which was digitised and documented as a new collection. It was a great pleasure meeting Henry and his family when returning the album on a visit to Perth. A collection of local, State and National significance to the history of the National Development of the Ord River Irrigation Project, which is now accessible to all, from anywhere in the world! (as proved by the link at end of this KHS News post :^)
...and here’s the link to the audio of the Ord Noah ABC Kimberley interview (edited - not full interview)
The Ord Noah publicity led a journalist writing it up for the Daily Mail UK and posting the following article online, which makes use (with permissions) of quite a number of the photographs.
