Memories kept

Cpl Don Vogelsang in his museum in Darwin. Photo by Pte John Wellfare, Army Newspaper

By Pte John Wellfare

Somewhere in the dark recesses of a dingy storeroom, tucked behind a pile of dilapidated office furniture and laced together with cobwebs, some of Australia’s forgotten treasures lie discarded.

It could be any unit in the Army – that box of old unit records, the crate of strange uniforms, a crooked and broken radio harness tucked under a cupboard – all put away for safe keeping a couple of decades ago and forgotten.

This was the scene discovered by Cpl Don Vogelsang at 5/7RAR more than 10 years ago, when he was posted to the unit’s intelligence section. Since then Cpl Vogelsang has invested thousands of hours, not to mention his personal equipment and finances, into establishing a first-class museum to display 5/7RAR’s history.

“Back then the Int cell had a collection of bits and pieces of old stuff,” he says, shaking his head.

“There was no conservation or anything like that, it was just stuff laid out on tables and nailed to boards, about half the gear was badly damaged.”

Cpl Vogelsang began to establish a unit museum from the items he found and as time went on, more items of memorabilia flowed in from former members. Cpl Vogelsang took courses in conservation and curatorship and he began investing more of his time into researching and refurbishing the pieces he had.

When 5/7RAR moved to Darwin in 1998-99, Cpl Vogelsang was able to take the collection with him and move it into a purpose-built museum.

With glass cabinets for displaying items and a few principles of museum design, Cpl Vogelsang’s exhibition takes visitors down a corridor lined on one side by 5RAR and on the other by 7RAR memorabilia. The focus then shifts to the history of the amalgamated unit, chronicling events up to the battalion’s 2002-03 tour of East Timor.

Every piece displayed has a story behind it and Cpl Vogelsang knows most of them, he points out a nondescript bag in one of the 7RAR cabinets.

“This little vinyl bag, it had no tag on it, it was just thrown in a box. Then I found an old label that said this was ‘document bag carried by Nam Vu’. I go and look up the after-action reports ... the little bag, the significance of it, that had in it some of the most important documents captured in Vietnam.

“There is so much behind it all, but you can’t put everything in. A lot of stuff I don’t know the story for, like this Russian flag,” Cpl Vogelsang motions to a tattered parchment bearing the hammer and sickle, lining the back of a cabinet.

The two exhibits into which Cpl Vogelsang invested the most of his time sit facing each other at the end of the 5RAR and 7RAR corridor - the units’ Vietnam honour rolls.

“If I was getting paid $25 an hour for researching that and doing them up, those honour rolls would be worth over a hundred grand,” he says wryly.

“Starting off with [The Australian, 1988 list of Australian servicemen killed in Vietnam] and then you find something’s wrong, so you go through it, cross reference to the after-action reports, unit histories, people who were actually there.

“It was a monster that just grew, it got bigger and bigger and before I knew it I would be there working at night time on this thing.

“It’s emotionally draining as well, it’s still not completely finished but by the time I got it to a stage where I could put it on display I knew all of their faces, I knew all their names.”

Tightening of laws is making it harder and harder to bring memorabilia back from operations overseas and the Cabinet devoted to 5/7RAR’s second tour of East Timor is indicative of this sad fact. The museum will, however, no doubt continue to grow and judging by the piles of historic memorabilia in Cpl Vogelsang’s office/storeroom, there’s still a lot of work ahead.

Correspondence with the 5/7RAR museum can be sent to: 5/7RAR Historical Collection, Robertson Barracks Palmerston, NT, 0830. Or call Cpl Vogelsang on (08) 8935 3077