A new display about Florence Casson, a nurse in WWII who perished with the sinking of the vessel Vyner Brooke in 1942, is a great addition to the Mallee Women displays at the museum. Florence spent some of her nursing career in Pinnaroo and her story effectively links local with international history. The museum commissioned a museum designer to produce the display panels and had a reproduction WWII nurses uniform made so that it can stay on display indefinitely.
The museum has also been hard at work in the last few years working with an historian and designer to produce a touch-screen interactive through which visitors can access information about printing processes and printing equipment housed at the museum. Much of the content is audio snippets from oral history interviews done with museum icon Rob Wilson, a printer by trade who continues to operate some of the equipment at the museum (the museum prints some of its own promotional materials). Through the interactive visitors can hear the recollections of Rob and others about their experiences of the printing trade and also the sound of operational printing machinery – recorded from equipment at the museum.
A second interactive has been installed with the Wurfel Grain Collection display. This uses images and voice over to provide historical context for the collection, which is widely recognised as an extraordinary collection of grain samples and data about grain production in South Australia.
As well as the Mallee Women display, the Wurfel grain Collection and the Printing Museum collection, the MTHC includes an interpretive exhibition about Pinnaroo’s history as a dryland farming area and a sizeable collection of agricultural equipment and stationary engines. There’s something for everyone!