A SEARCH for about 130 items believed missing from Flagstaff Hill’s museum collection has been widened with a call to the community for help in tracking them down.
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Historic links with the region’s maritime history, including a brass bell from the 1892 Newfield wreck, have been identified as unaccounted for during an audit of the Warrnambool centre’s stock.
The bell was last seen about 2002 prior to renovations at the maritime village.
Most other missing items are of lesser renown and include documents, paintings, tickets, flags, maps and even a spanner.
Several lead ingots from the 1878 Loch Ard wreck are also unaccounted for, but are not on the list because most are believed to be below water in the rotted hull of the Rowitta display vessel which will be pulled apart in the next few months.
The issue surfaced during an extensive audit which started about six years ago to find, photograph and list items on a new computer database.
Some items marked on an older index of paper records could not be found in the checks. It was thrust into the public spotlight after a question at last month’s city council meeting about the ingots.
Flagstaff Hill manager Peter Abbott said 129 items officially listed as being “unlocated” were placed on the village’s website yesterday and it was hoped members of the public may know their whereabouts.
He defended the integrity of staff and teams of volunteers involved with researching and collating local history.
In an open letter to The Standard, Mr Abbott said it was not unusual for museums to have collection reviews which pinpointed items that had been misplaced or moved. Paper records show 872 ingots were loaned to Flagstaff Hill by the Commonwealth government in the early 1980s, but two checks in the past two years indicate a shortfall of between 66 and 220.
Six are on loan to the Port Fairy Historic Lifeboat committee, one to the Port Campbell tourist information centre and others are at various locations around the village.
“Not all the ingots are visible because a number are being used as ballast below decks in the Rowitta,” Mr Abbott said.
He said he instigated the audit shortly after starting work at Flagstaff Hill in 2008.
“There was no comprehensive official list and I don’t believe there had been a full collections audit before,” he said. “We’ve put 7815 items on our database and another 129 are on the unlocated list.
“We also found a lot of things we didn’t know we had.”
Mr Abbott said a loan agreement with the former Loch Ard museum in Port Campbell listed one ingot and one sheet of copper from the wreck plus a cannon from the Schomberg wreck.
