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Museum Of Perth
Perth got its first crowdfunded restaurant this year and now its residents have the chance to own a small piece of a new museum that tells the story of their city.
The team behind the Museum of Perth, which includes City of Perth councillor Reece Harley, arts patron Diana Warnock and Heritage Perth executive director Richard Offen, will launch a $100,000 crowdfunding campaign today to raise money for the museum fit-out.
They have hired an 80sqm exhibition space on Grand Lane, which runs between Murray and Wellington streets in the city, and got the keys this week.
Perth filmmaker and cafe owner Jimmy the Exploder has started fitting out the Henry Saw cafe, named after the man who first roasted coffee in Perth in 1852.
Plans for the museum include a permanent exhibition about Perth’s history, a micro-cinema where documentaries and short films will be shown and exhibition spaces that will tackle subjects of interest, such as the history of coffee, cycling and light rail.
Guest curators will be invited to put together the exhibitions and the public will be asked for feedback about what stories they want to be told.
Mr Harley said the not-for-profit Perth History Association’s board of directors, who will run the Museum of Perth, wanted it to be a one-stop shop for tourists and those who wanted to learn about the history of the city.
He said it was important not only that Perth was interesting for tourists but that locals had somewhere to go to learn more about where they lived and attended events. “We want to do it so it’s not sentimental and about sitting around going ‘how good was Perth in the 1940s’, so we are looking at current issues and we are putting them in an historic context,” Mr Harley said.
“We are thinking about exhibitions, for example, about light rail. We’ve been having this discussion about light rail for many years and it all seems a bit too hard, but people forget that Perth had an extensive tram network from about 1896 to the late 1950s and then we ripped it out.”