LOOKING AFTER THE
Wing Hing Long Store

The Wing Hing Long Store in Tingha is a rare general store museum in NSW which still contains real groceries from its trading days. With its original fittings and intact fabric, the Wing Hing Long Store is a rare surviving example of an early 20th century Chinese-owned general store associated with a tin mining region. But what is the best way to conserve and interpret this unique place and its collection? Heritage Officer John Petersen reports on a recent workshop at Tingha.

The Wing Hing Long Store in the tin-mining town of Tingha on the northern tablelands of NSW is one of the last remaining old style Chinese general stores in NSW. Operated by the same Chinese family for over 80 years, the store was recently purchased by the Guyra Shire Council for the Tingha community as a living museum.

This humble wooden building with its original collection of groceries and stock provides an insight into the history of retailing in regional NSW and the lives of Chinese-Australians. Its stock books and invoices are a record of Tingha's history. The Minister for Urban Affairs and Planning recently listed the store as an item on the State Heritage Register in recognition of its heritage significance.

In March members of the Tingha community, representatives of the local shire and heritage staff met at Tingha to look at how the original collection might be managed and interpreted.

Ken Brooks, curator of the National Trust of Queensland's Brennan and Geraghty Store in Maryborough, was invited to share with the group his experience in managing and interpreting a retailing collection. The Brennan and Geraghty Store is widely regarded as the Australian exemplar of shop museums.

The workshop at Tingha was an opportunity to learn in detail about the Wing Hing Long Store and its place in the tin mining region - its rooms and spaces, work practices, shop-keeper's residence, fittings and collection of groceries.

During a training session on how to care for the collection, there were interesting discussions about acquiring and displaying items sold in the store over the years. Some of the group had concerns that the newly-acquired stock would become confused with the original stock remaining from the day of the store's closure. Others thought that there was enough original stock to look after anyway and that it was not a good idea to add "new" items to the time capsule. Others preferred a more conventional regional museum.

Local concerns that perhaps the store's groceries from the 1970s and 1980s were not as old or interesting as the early 20th century stock at Brennan and Geraghty's Store were put to rest when Mr Brooks explained that the Tingha store was the only one known in Australia with 1970s and 1980s stock. Grocery manufacturers don't retain samples of their products. So the original displays spruiking the wonders of pressure pak technology, the tins of vegies, and the complete range of Uncle Sam deodorant, shampoo and toothpaste are already rare. They tell us about shopping and retailing and the grocery baskets and kitchen tables of the people who lived and worked in the tin mining region.

Mr Brooks demonstrated that you do not need to empty all the tins, packets and bottles of the original collection. They will survive for decades, in some cases centuries, with regular monitoring and simple preventative maintenance. The poisons, however, will need careful handling and in many cases may need to be destroyed.

The day included a hands and gloves-on training exercise on how to reduce pressure build-up in the leaking cans of gummy hairspray, as well as a cataloguing and display session.

The Shire and Museums Committee for the Wing Hing Long Store has already been successful in securing both NSW Government and Federal Government grants. The store is a tourist attraction for the area, with 4,000 visitors in 1999 experiencing an authentic general store museum complete with real groceries. The sights, smells and stories of the era are remembered by many of us but perhaps are new to an e-commerce and supermarket generation.

The NSW Heritage Office and the Ministry for the Arts have funded a conservation and museum management plan for the Wing Hing Long Store. The Queensland National Trust's architect Jinx Miles, curator Ken Brooks and historian Dr Janis Wilton are preparing the plan with the Shire and Museums Committee to conserve and interpret the store and its collections.