Gundagai Pen Museum is a quirky, but rich part of Gundagai’s Main Street, which hopes to see some more through its doors as the sun pops out.
Gundagai Pen Museum Curator Bruce Wicks told the Gundagai Times that the museum has become self-sustainable and now pays for itself.
“About six months after opening, I found it was paying for itself. That was always my intention,” he said.
Mr Wicks said that word of mouth has always been the biggest help.
“You have to depend on your reputation, and we get a lot of interstate visitors from all over, as far away as North Queensland down to Victoria and even Western Australia and Northern Territory,” he said.
“Visitors have gone away and said to others when you go to Gundagai or stop in on your way to Melbourne, you have to look at the Pen Museum. I always envisaged that it would become popular and important,” he said.
When asked what brings people through the door, he answered with its history.
“It’s the history and the documents. I’m still learning. You never stop learning. If you keep that attitude, you will keep your mind active and strong as well. I learn more history from visitors. I have stories that I tell and they are debunked by people that actually lived there,” he said.
“For example, an old pencil company, Columbia, Derwent and Lakeland are all made by a pencil company in Keswick (this is a silent letter) and that company is still making pencils. I’ve had people visit here that actually live in the village and they were able to teach me that, because otherwise I wouldn’t have known,” he said.
Mr Wicks said his motivation to start the museum began back in 2008, when he had his own collection at home and decided to gauge people’s interests in it by creating a separate museum in his shop.
“It turned out to be a resounding success and that went by word of mouth. I ended up with tourists from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and not one person walked out of here disappointed. It was only a relatively small room and I couldn’t fit a whole bus load of people in there. They came in to the shop and it helped my shop because I had a lot of different things that the bigger hardware stores didn’t have,” he said.
The Pen Museum has over 3,000 items, with one dating back 4,000 years, and includes documents over 450 years old. It is located in the old Assembly Hall, next to the Coffee Pedaler and opposite the Gundagai Theatre.
-Emily Flint
