Published 29 July 2024
Bringing history to the forefront, the History's Mysteries Young Writers Competition challenges students to imagine the history behind a selection of significant museum artefacts and tell it in a short story.
Throughout Term 2 Bunbury Museum and Heritage Centre toured a small collection of museum artefacts to local schools which were also on display in the museum over the school holidays.
This year’s artefacts related to Bunbury’s history as a whaling port in the nineteenth century. This fascinating industry was important to the early economic development of the town. Its history is surprising, with crews being uncharacteristically ethnically diverse for the time, and women traveling aboard, which was unheard of on working vessels. Most of the ships wrecked in Koombana Bay were whalers whose timber skeletons still lie beneath the waves and sand.
History's Mysteries invited Bunbury’s young authors to imagine some of the whaling stories lost to time by writing a short story featuring a chosen museum artefact.
We will be celebrating those stories and the students with an Awards Night at the museum. This event is open to the whole community to attend.