Want to Guess Where

Pisces and I spent Wednesday afternoon? Nah. Of course you don't - but I'll tell you anyway. We went to Mt Flora Regional Museum in North Beach with a group of friends we meet with every month. We've been catching up like this for most of our adult lives. Many of us have been friends since we were at school or university and when we started to marry the loose group of twenty somethings changed into a more family oriented group. Now with our children grown we still carry on taking turns in finding somewhere to go. This can be as simple as a picnic or movie or something entirely different. So when Pisces and I stumbled on this museum by accident we thought the group might find it interesting.

And Mt Flora Regional Museum - which is run by the City of Stirling - certainly was interesting and so was the talk by the museum curator on the region and the kinds of things the City would like to add to their collection. Four of the group had grown up in the area and we were able to add a lot of details of what life was like back in the day. Turns out oral history we didn't even know was worth recording is valuable. The curator ended the session saying she felt she'd learned more from us than she had been able to tell us. Not true, of course. I've lived in the region since I was five and there was a lot that I had no idea about.

The museum is full of artefacts the City has collected or had donated to them. It's located in an old water tank which was decommissioned in the early 1970s and works very well in its new role. Along with tools, furniture, household equipment, maps and many photos reflecting the progression of the area from farming, market gardens and, very early on, even whaling, there are displays set up as rooms from back in the early part of the 1900s. Fascinating stuff especially for those like me who remember seeing some of the items in use in old relatives' homes when I was a child.

If you're in Perth and find such things interesting  - and I've just received an email from one of our group describing it as a hidden gem so I'm not the only one who enjoyed it - why not go along and have a look. It's open every Wednesday afternoon and on the first Sunday of the month. As an added bonus, you can climb up to the roof where you can, I'm told, see along the coast as far as Fremantle to the south and Yanchep to the north as well as out to Rottnest Island. Didn't do that bit myself I confess. I waited down below with the others of the dodgy knee brigade.