Collecting the past and present
PTE John Wellfare takes a tour of the RAAF Museum with its director,
David Gardner, to find out what it has to offer and what it will become in the future.

A Macchi stands over many of Australia’s other famous training aircraft in the RAAF Museum’s internal hangar space at RAAF Base Williams, Point Cook.

Photos by PTE John Wellfare

One of the displays demonstrates the role of women in supporting roles, such as mechanics, during early wars.

RAAF Museum Director David Gardner inspects items in the museum’s extensive collection.

‘WE’VE got no competition in Australia,” RAAF Museum Director David Gardner says.

“We’re talking total museum operation from collection management, through to display, through to restoration, to flying – it’s complete.”

Visitors to the RAAF Museum are not limited to wandering quietly through a cold hangar surrounded by vintage aeroplanes – the central path through the museum takes guests on a tour through the development of the Air Force, its involvement in major 20th-century conflicts and the basics of life in the Service before they even get close to a full-scale aircraft.

“It’s not just machines – there’s men and women and that’s what we’ve got to try and get across; the human side,” he says.

“I was a techo in the Air Force so I’m not anti-aircraft, but I’m not anti the human side either,” he says about his 30-year career. “It’s the whole story we’ve got to cover and that’s what we try to achieve here.”

Mr Gardner doesn’t describe a display so much as introduce the characters of Air Force history, from the obvious major players such as Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, the “father” of the Air Force, through to “Slim” Yarra, who, while serving in with No. 453 Squadron during World War II, had written a letter to be sent to his parents in the event of his death.

Both he and his brother served and died in 453SQN and the letter features in the museum’s World War II display.

The display section of the museum feels more like a step back in time than a quiet walk along a row of cabinets.

Period music plays faintly as visitors wander through the World War I section, inspecting period flight suits, reading stories of the Australian First Half Flight and looking at artefacts of the infamous Baron Manfred von Richthofen – the Red Baron, buried by Australians from No. 3 Squadron after he was fatally shot down on April 21, 1918.

On to World War II and the soundscape morphs into a patchy radio rendition of The White Cliffs of Dover, interspersed with transmissions in Morse code and a few famous words from Winston Churchill.

By the time visitors reach the Vietnam display, it’s Don McLean and the Rolling Stones that feature in the background, accompanied by Harold Holt’s “all the way with LBJ” speech.

“When you’re walking around and listening, you hear the music in the background and you hear Winston Churchill making these very famous speeches or the aircraft flying around – it just gives it that extra touch; it’s not dead, still and sterile,” he says.

“We will upgrade this section in the [upcoming] refresh and probably put some more modern stuff for the current-day Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq displays. But the Second World War had its own music.”

The museum’s interior decorating is colourful and warm, but still has an underlying military structure and feel. A lot of the displays, such as the walk-in Hercules interior, are about experiencing the Air Force rather than looking and reading about it.

“You’ve got to have due reverence when you put things on display,” he says. “People have fought and died for this sort of thing; you don’t just turn around and make a display that’s commercial, so to speak. That’s why we did it this way – it still has a military feel and I think that’s the thing we don’t want to lose.”

As the display section finishes telling the Air Force story, glass doors open on to an expansive hangar, showcasing most of the major flight training aircraft of the past 90 years.

A Maurice Farman biplane, Tigermoth and Winjeel are among the meticulously restored aircraft that make up the floor display.

Many of the people who do the time-intensive restoration work and ongoing upkeep are not on the museum’s payroll.

“We’ve got a very strong corps of volunteers,” Mr Gardner says. “The people we’ve got working here are very keen.

“We have people here who are professionally trained – we’ve got an idea of what we’re doing so we can protect it for future generations. It’s a balance between displaying it to the public and making it last.

“There are little things that people look at, but you’ve got to think that these fellows treasured these things when they were given them – they must have because here we are 60 years down the track with these things on loan to us or presented to us.”

Which brings us to the next of the museum’s buildings, the one that holds the collection – all the items that the museum has accumulated over the years through purchases and donations, kept in protective storage to await rotation into the display.

The extent of the collection is staggering.

This part of the museum, not open to the public, could be mistaken for the back storeroom of a military surplus store if it weren’t for the meticulous care with which every item has been catalogued and preserved.

“We have about 400,000 items in the collection,” he says.

“We’ve about 16,000 technical publications, we’ve got three million ground negatives in the collection, over a million photographs and items coming in all the time. We have an acquisition policy ... because otherwise we’d be inundated with items that we don’t need.”

Some of the items are purchased by the museum, but most are donated, such as the flag that flew at the Australian Flying Corps Headquarters in England during WWI, bearing the signatures of many of Australia’s early airmen.

“Like all good things in military museums, if there weren’t people souveniring items, we wouldn’t have a museum would we?,” he says.

But many military museums have found the supply of “souvenired” items from more recent operations drying up under regulations that restrict what can and can’t be brought home from a deployment. Some curators are unhappy with the policy.

“We’re bound by those rules, [but] it’s not a restrictive Defence instruction. We don’t want cultural things from a country, but if it’s military or personal items that tell a story – we’re able to get items from the Middle East, for example – but we’ve got to respect that country.

You don’t go into the temples and rip objects off just for the sake of it, which happened years ago. But [the policy] is not as restrictive as people make out – you can still get the personal items.”

The final steps in the tour are one of the museum’s best and most unique features, which is to be given a facelift in the next redevelopment – the restoration workshop. This is where visitors can watch the museum staff at work, rebuilding, repairing and maintaining the aircraft and equipment for display.

One project underway is a World War II Mosquito – one of the era’s few operational aircraft types with a wooden body. This is the only remaining PR-16 Mosquito aircraft in the world with operational experience.

It takes a lot of work, extensive curatorial skills and plenty of patience to properly maintain an establishment with as many facets as the RAAF Museum. “You’ve got to have a bit of a passion for it,” he says.

“And you’ve got to be able to put up with the heartache ... If you’re told to build a museum, you get a standard-issue Air Force building and you’ve got to try and make it work. Well, we’ve got a standard-issue building and we’re making it work.”

 

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