Croydon's historic machinery collection

Abstract

One response to the development of tourism in small inland Queensland towns has been to collect heritage machinery from the surrounding countryside and display it in town as an attraction for visitors. These sites range from open-air collections of miscellaneous items with no explanation of their use to both private and local government museums that are given varying levels of care and interpretation. The small north-western Queensland town of Croydon has a collection of heritage machinery in a number of sites, which range across this continuum. This article explores the potential of the collection to interpret the town’s history and the history of early gold mining, as a case study with application to other such collections.