Community Museums Worldwide Series: Tarella Cottage, Wentworth Falls, Blue Mountains
Author: Tanya Evans, Professor of history at Macquarie University.
For the last couple of years, as part of an Australian Research-Council funded project on the ‘History and Heritage of a Deindustrialised Landscape,’ I have worked with a team of historians, archaeologists and heritage consultants in the beautiful Blue Mountains, 90 minutes west of Sydney in Australia. Recently, I have been examining what is understood as history and heritage in the mountains and if it is deemed important.
Using Laurajane Smith’s work I define heritage as “ a process of engagement, an act of communication and an act of making meaning in and for the present” (Smith, 2006). This is both a social and a cultural process that crystallizes the significance of the uses of the past in the present. Drawing on interviews, survey responses and focus groups with family, local and community historians, the material culture collections associated with local history in private collections, as well as the local history collections of Blue Mountains’ museums and libraries, I have examined these acts of making meaning.
As Smith suggests, our knowledge of heritage has long been dominated, mostly unreflexively, by a very specific Western discourse about heritage. This is the ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ (AHD) that normalizes our understandings of what heritage is. It privileges particular voices and approaches to the past in public, with a focus on the lives and the objects associated with the elite, not the poor; men rather than women; and white people rather than people of colour. These voices and approaches have profoundly shaped cultural heritage in diverse national contexts and remain powerful today. What other kinds of history and heritage work play out in regional, rather than metropolitan contexts?
As part of local historical societies, a small number of local women have worked hard to share their passion for the past and to challenge the historical invisibility of women and the regions since the Blue Mountains was settled by colonists. Passionate advocates working for local museums and historical organizations are continuing their work, ensuring their memories are not lost for present and future generations.
The Blue Mountains Historical Society has encouraged diverse historical engagement with the mountains’ past since its establishment in 1946. A historic house museum, Tarella Cottage, sits adjacent to the Blue Mountains Historical Society’s headquarters, library, and archives in Wentworth Falls. Open on the last Sunday of each month, it attracts around 30-40 visitors per month. Displays within the Cottage focus on the lives of the house’s owners, including the house’s original owner John McLaughlin, a Sydney solicitor and local politician who constructed the home as a holiday retreat for his family escaping Sydney’s hot summers. The reason the cottage survives today is due to the efforts of his daughter, Beryl, who grew up in Waverley, studied science at the University of Sydney, graduating in 1910. She never married, which some suggest was due to the death of a sweetheart and close friend of her brother, Geoffrey. Having survived Gallipoli, Geoffrey perished in the First World War as the result of a gas attack at Passchendaele on 4th November 1917. Their father suffered from heart disease, dying intestate in February 1918. His entire estate, valued at 4191 pounds, was granted to his eldest son, John. Beryl’s dastardly elder brother remained a cause celebre for much of his professional adult life. He was convicted of both fraud and larceny and declared bankruptcy several times. John took over his father’s estate following his death in 1918, selling all the family’s Sydney-based homes to cover his debts, forcing his mother and sisters, Beryl and Ida, to live in the family’s tiny weatherboard holiday home in the mountains. A later neighbour of Beryl’s recollected that her resentment towards her elder brother never waned (Blue Mountains Historical Society folder on Tarella).
Active members of their local communities, Beryl, and her elder sister became early patrons of the Blue Mountains Historical Society. Beryl cemented her association with the organisation in 1955 when the Society was ousted out of the local Council chambers for its meetings, and the sisters offered the back room of their home as a meeting space. In 1968, they established a museum from the Society on the land. Beryl, unmarried and childless, later bequeathed the cottage and its attached land to the Society on her death at the age of 100. As Ross Ingram (Treasurer of the Society) suggests, the continued survival of the house means that Beryl “will live on forever.”
Tarella is a small wooden cottage, with little rooms, containing a tiny second storey with two small bedrooms. The downstairs living rooms are filled with Beryl’s and bits of the family’s belongings. Current Vice President of the Society, Robyne Ridge, suggests that the house has focussed a little too much on the life-story of Beryl’s brother, Geoffrey, the war hero, largely neglecting Beryl’s legacy in the process. It is only in the last two years or so that Beryl’s life-story has been emphasised and highlighted (Focus Group 2023). In a detailed, excellent website detailing the history of Tarella and its residents, Beryl is placed at the bottom of a long list of McLaughlin family members, which is unfortunate considering the sole reason the cottage survives today is due to her efforts and bequest. As Robyne states, “We remember Beryl (and her sister Ida) because of this magnificent Mclaughlin donation that supports our history.”
Museums across the world transformed in the 1960s and 1970s. This was especially the case in metropolitan areas but less so in rural and regional parts of Australia. Nonetheless, a renewed interest in Australian history and increased passion for the past among ‘ordinary’ Australians allowed lots of smaller museums to flourish, as people working outside the structures of the state became enthused by projects of memorialisation. New museology sometimes confronted ‘traditional’ curatorial emphases, monumentality, National Trust versions of the past, and the regulatory functions of the museums set up in the service of the nation state. Local museums came to thrive as sites of community meaning making but were and are often managed by independent volunteers on shoestring budgets. Museums across NSW have predominantly been established by historical society members and are housed in heritage buildings like Tarella. They rely on enthusiastic and supportive local volunteers and benefactors to survive and thrive (Winkworth 2011). Regional museums in NSW are guided by the umbrella organisation Museums and Galleries NSW but resources are severely limited.
Regional museums thrive best when managed in partnership with community members. Family histories are often significant in the production and consumption of these sites and visitors’ readings and experiences of engagement with heritage and history can be transformative. This means that the political work of local and regional museum management of cultural heritage has the potential to be much more radical than that of naturally conservative national museums. After engaging with local museums across the Blue Mountains I want to suggest that there is much potential to build on the radical, imaginative, innovative and creative work being undertaken in the Blue Mountains Museum sector.
Tanya Evans is a Professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. She is an Executive Board Member of the Public History Weekly and current president of the IFPH. She is a public historian, specialising in family history, collaborative history, and oral history. She directs the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Bridging Editor (June 2, 2023). Community Museums Worldwide Series: Tarella Cottage, Wentworth Falls, Blue Mountains. IFPH-FIHP. Retrieved March 16, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/pvql