From filing cabinet to cultural centre: creating a community history centre in Wanneroo Western Australia.

• Author: Leigh, Carol
• Position: Community History Centre

Wanneroo's Community History Centre opened in 2009 as part of the new Wanneroo Library and Cultural Centre, a hybrid library/museum/archive/arts development, housing a library, museum, exhibition gallery and public venue spaces. It is an integral part of the Wanneroo Regional Museum and was started from scratch, which offered an opportunity to assess and adopt best practice standards for online photographs, the digitisation of oral histories, the preservation of newspapers and photographs and the arrangement of archival material. Edited paper presented at the conference A sense of place: local studies in Australia and New Zealand Sydney 5-6 May 2011.

**********

In August 2008 the position of community history librarian was created at the city of Wanneroo and I was fortunate enough to be offered the post. With it came the opportunity to establish a local history collection from scratch because the then collection, such as it was, only occupied a four drawer filing cabinet and a few compactus shelves at one of our branch libraries. I was presented with a clean slate and it was there for me to write on it--this was a daunting task in many respects, but an immensely exciting and fulfilling one too.

Wanneroo's history

Before relating some of the challenges that awaited me in the realms of collection management, it will be useful to provide some context by presenting a cameo of Wanneroo's history and the character of the community that has evolved over the past 176 years.

For over 50,000 years before the founding of Western Australia in 1829, the Nyungar people roamed Wanneroo's coastal sandplain. Water was their most important resource and so Wanneroo, with its rich system of linear and circular lakes, was most attractive because of the abundant food sources which were to be found on its lake shores.

Before 1840 the Wanneroo region was regarded as the end of the world--white settlers that did venture there were shepherds bringing flocks to graze in summer, or drovers lingering on the stock routes as they took their cattle northwards. It was not until 1852 that Wanneroo gained its first permanent settler. This was James Cockman who established the first dairy farm and built a rough limestone house. Known as Cockman House this historically significant building with authentic furnishings, has been restored by the city of Wanneroo and operates as a museum. By the 1870s Wanneroo had become a sleepy, rural and isolated hamlet in which a pastoral and farming community had taken hold with about 60 families living around the shores of the lakes and along the vital north/south route, known as the Wanneroo Road.

After world war one Wanneroo experienced a steady influx of migrants from Italy, Greece, Macedonia, Yugosalvia and Croatia. These were migrants who excelled in agriculture and it was not long before Wanneroo's wetlands became major production centres for the supply of fruit and vegetables for the Perth metropolitan areas. The 1920s ushered in a boom decade for the region. Italians pioneered the wine industry in Wanneroo with the planting of large scale vineyards, a limestone industry developed and mushroomed with the building boom of the 1930s. Timber was plentiful and sawmills sprang up. Wanneroo's development was slow for the next 40 years. In 1952 it could only boast a population of 1310 and in 1963 it was still designated as a rural sector of the Perth metropolitan area.

This was to change dramatically with the release in 1971 by the state government of the Corridor plan for Perth. The plan envisaged development strips called corridors radiating out from Perth. One of these, the north west corridor, fell within the shire of Wanneroo. The shire was identified in this important document as an area that could accommodate a huge population and swift expansion followed--the next five years were to see Wanneroo's population grow by over 111%. From 1976 to 1992 Wanneroo had the second highest growth rate of any municipal area in Australia and in 1993 it topped the list.

The corridor plan also identified a portion of Wanneroo west of Lake Joondalup as a suitable site for a subregional centre to be developed into a major regional community facility. 1977 saw the Joondalup Development Corporation adopt a development framework for this project and in 1979 the shire's new administration building opened in Joondalup. A hospital followed and then the foundations of a business park. In 1996 Wanneroo's population stood at 201,000 and the city was managing 785 square kms of land and a coastline of 48 kilometres. Moves were afoot to split Wanneroo and Joondalup into two separate local authorities and this came to pass on 1 July 1998 with the creation of the city of Joondalup and the shire of Wanneroo. Exactly a year later, Wanneroo attained city status again.

For the historic legacy of Wanneroo and the collections in its museum and local history library, the ramifications of this split have been, and still are, complex and far reaching. Although the two municipalities were made joint legal owners of the collections, it was decided that the material in the local history collection would be housed with Joondalup in the impressive new library that had been opened in the heart of Joondalup in 1997. The objects in the museum collections would remain with Wanneroo. The relocation of Wanneroo's local history heritage gathered over many years was deeply upsetting for many of Wanneroo's pioneers. This was particularly so as the most significant and interesting history has largely related to those areas that remained within the boundaries of the...