The Cowpastures, GLAM and schools

Young visitors to the Camden Museum love the model of the HMS Sirius, in the ground floor display area. HMS Sirius was the flagship of the First Fleet in 1788 under its commanding officer Captain John Hunter. He was later promoted to NSW Governor and in 1795 he visited the local area in search of the wild cattle and named the area the Cow Pastures Plains.

 

The story of the Cowpastures is one of the many told in the displays at the volunteer-run Camden Museum and the Wollondilly Heritage Centre, all part of the Macarthur region’s GLAM sector.

So what is the GLAM sector? For the uninitiated it is Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. The acronym GLAM appeared at the 2003 annual conference of the Australian Society of Archivists.

Organisations that make up the GLAM sector are cultural institutions which have access to knowledge as their main purpose and care for collections of any kind.

One of the key roles of GLAM sector organisations is to allow their visitors to learn things, in both formal (aka classroom) and informal settings. For the visitor this can come in a vast array of experiences, contexts and situations.

The Macarthur region has a number of galleries, museums and libraries. They are mostly small organisations, some with paid staff, others volunteer-run.

 

The local GLAM scene

There is the volunteer-run Camden Museum a social history museum. While out at The Oaks is the pioneer village setting of the Wollondilly Heritage Centre and at Campbelltown the Glenalvon house museum.

 

Local council galleries and libraries have the advantage of paid staff. The Alan Baker Art Gallery is located in the Camden historic town house Macaria. At Campbelltown there is the innovative Campbelltown Arts Centre and its futuristic styling.

The local council libraries and their collections fulfil a number of roles and provide a range of services to their communities.

On a larger scale the state government-run historic Belgenny Farm is Australia’s oldest intact set of colonial farm buildings in the Cowpastures established by John and Elizabeth Macarthur.  A number of other colonial properties are also available for inspection.

 

Doing more with less

Doing more with less is the mantra of volunteer-run organisations. They all have collections of objects, artefacts, archives, paintings, books and other things. Collections of knowledge.

Collections are generally static and a bit stiff. There is a distance between the visitor and the collection. Visitor immersion in these knowledge collections is generally through storytelling of one sort or another.

 

The more dynamic the immersion the more memorable the visitor experience. An immersive experience will be informative, exciting and enjoyable.

This is certainly the aim of school visits. Teachers aim to immerse their school students in these collections in a variety of ways through storytelling. Hopefully making the student visit educational, memorable and enjoyable.

 

The learning framework

Local schools connect with local stories through the New South Wales History K-10 Syllabus. A rather formal bureaucratic beast with complex concepts and contexts. Local schools vary in their approach to the units of work within the syllabus.

 

NSW History K-10 Syllabus

Topics

Early Stage 1      Personal and Family Historians

Stage 1                The Past in the Present.

Stage 2                 Australian History: Community and Remembrance. First Contacts.

Stage 3                 Australian History: Colonial and National.

Stage 4                 World History: Ancient, Medieval and Modern.

Stage 5                 Global History: The Modern World and Australia.

 

Field trip

One of the types of engagement recommended by the History Syllabus are field trips through site studies. These can come in all shapes and sizes.

One type of field trip can include taking in local museums and galleries.

 

One approach

Stage 2 History -Topic: From Colonisation to Now

Mrs Kathryn Pesic from Macarthur Anglican School visited the Camden Museum with her Year 4 students.

Mrs Pesic said, ‘The students visit was integral in engaging the students and directing them to an area of interest’.

The school teachers posed a number of Key Inquiry Questions throughout the unit of work.  The museum visit, according to Mrs Pesic, was the final part of the unit that started with a broad study of Sydney and narrowed to Camden. The students then had a ‘project’ to complete back at school.

Mrs Pesic reported that the teachers felt that they ‘had achieved the outcomes that they had set for their museum visit’.

 

 

Another approach

Another local school Stage 2 group recently visited the museum, the gallery and had a walk around the Camden town centre. They too addressed the same unit of work from the History Syllabus.

 

Storytelling – the past in the present

The integration of local studies and inquiry-based learning by school students calls for imagination and creativity. What results is an opportunity to tell the Camden story through a narrative that gives a perspective on the past in the present.

There have been generations of story tellers in the Cowpastures and Camden district since the Dreamtime. Young people can have meaningful engagement with these folk through local GLAM organisations, ‘that cannot always be obtained in the classroom’, says Mrs Pesic.

 

The cows and more. So what do they offer?

All this activity takes place in the former Cowpastures named by Governor Hunter in 1795. This country was formerly Benkennie of the Dharawal people. The Cowpastures is one of Australia’s most important colonial sites.

Under European dispossession the Cowpastures became part of the Macarthur family’s Camden Park Estate from which the family carved out the private township of Camden with streets named after its founders – Macarthur, Elizabeth, John, Edward.

 

The English-style Camden town centre has evolved and illustrates a number of historical architectural styles since 1840 – Victorian, Edwardian, Inter-war, Mid-20^th century Modernism.

The Camden district (1840-1973) tells stories of hope and loss around farming and mining in the hamlets and villages across the region. New arrivals hoped for new beginnings in a settler society while the loss of the Burragorang Valley, the Camden Railway and a landscape aesthetic created sorrow for some.

The Macarthur region (1973 +) named after the famous family and the infamous Macarthur growth centre. The area is on Sydney’s rural-urban fringe and made up of Camden, Campbelltown and Wollondilly Local Government Areas.

 

The more things change the more they stay the same

The Cowpastures and Camden districts, now the Macarthur region, are some of the fastest changing landscapes in Australia. There is a need by the community to understand how the past created the present and today’s urban growth.

 

There is a need for creative and innovative solutions and ways to deliver the Camden and Macarthur stories. These are only limited by our imagination.