"The Crossing" Premiere

The film will be shown on a giant outdoor screen on dusk.
Come along to relive history, learn a little and you won’t see the ending coming! It will be great night to see the film on a huge screen.
Ref: Scott Richadson  scott@visiontv.com.au

Australiam Charities and Not-for-profits Commission

Charities have a duty to notify the ACNC of changes to their details, including responsible people and governing documents. Once you are aware of the change, you must notify the ACNC of changes as soon as you reasonably can.

Ref: Australiam Charities and Not-for-profits Commission

If this applies, a good place to start is here.

Eskbank House

Eskbank House

Dear friends of Eskbank,

What an exciting month we have ahead of us.

Our next exhibition is Primary By Design – Cullen Bullen Public School where Eskbank and the school have partnered up to bring you an exhibition of the student’s photographs and their reinterpretation in a variety of mediums. The opening is 11am Friday 4 September 2015 and you are all invited to come and meet the artists and celebrate this exhibition with them. The exhibition will run from 3 – 20 September 2015.

Following this we will have our first “We All Stand on Sacred Ground” NAIDOC Art Exhibition organised by Mingaan Wiradjuri Aboriginal Corporation.  Mingaan is currently inviting the community to enter a work of art on the theme of “We All Stand On Sacred Ground”. This exhibition aims to promote learning and sharing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture within the community. Your art work may be 2D or 3D, traditional or contemporary so long as it relates to the theme. Please include a story for your art work to help share culture. Entry forms are on the website at http://eskbank.lithgow.com/events/we-all-stand-on-sacred-ground-naidoc-art-exhbition/  The exhibition will run from 24 September - 11 October 2015. With an official opening on Sunday 27 September2015 to which you are all invited.

And our 2015 LITHGOW HALLOWEEN FESTIVAL PROGRAM kicks of this month.

Vampire Scarecrow Workshop: 10am Thursday, 24 September, 2015. Primary school children are invited to join Ludwina Roebuck in the gardens at Eskbank House to create sizzling vampire scarecrows for the 2015 Lithgow Halloween Festival.  With fangs, decorations and flowing capes, the scarecrows will feature in the decorations on Main Street on 31 October 2015.  This is a free workshop, but places are limited. Booking forms on the website at http://eskbank.lithgow.com/events/vampire-scarecrow-workshops/

Create a Vampire Workshop: 9am – 4pm Thursday, 1 October, 2015. For ages 12 – 25, at this workshop you will create a cape and learn vampire make up, cat walk and drama skills. You will then model in our Halloween Fashion Show on Friday 23 October and perform at the Lithgow Halloween Festival on Saturday 31 October 2015. This is a free project but we only have ten places so get in quickly.  Booking forms are on the website at http://eskbank.lithgow.com/events/create-a-vampire-workshop

Never dull here at Eskbank House! If you need any more information please visit our website at http://eskbank.lithgow.com/ 

Cheers

from the Eskbank Team and Wendy
 
Wendy Hawkes | Cultural Development Officer
Community & Culture | LITHGOW CITY COUNCIL
PH (02) 6354 9999 | FAX (02) 6351 4259

Virtual reality

See the New Post on British Museum blog below.

Could you do something like this at your Museum?

 

Much simpler would  be a Virtual Tour of your Museum with a series of slides plus text and/or voice description of what can be seen.

A Virtual Excursion to the Capertee Valley can be taken at any time by clicking here. 

It's  the Monday after the Samsung Digital Discovery Centre’s (SDDC) virtual reality weekend and we’re reflecting on the process of developing a virtual reality experience, which puts 3D scans of British Museum objects from our Bronze Age collection into the context of a virtual Bronze Age roundhouse. It’s been a really exciting project to work on, and lots of people have contributed – so we want to share the process behind making it happen.

The SDDC at the British Museum was created in 2009 in partnership with Samsung to provide a state-of-the-art technological hub for children and young people to learn about and interact with the Museum’s collection through school and family sessions. The Museum’s work with Samsung ensures that it remains at the forefront of digital learning, and when Samsung launched its Gear VR headsets we were eager to explore how virtual reality technologies could be used to engage a new generation with British Museum objects. When you put on a Samsung Gear VR headset you feel like you are in a virtual world. When you look up with the headset on, within the virtual world you also look up. You can also ‘walk’ forward and backwards, using a touch pad on the side of the headset. It is a mesmerising experience.

To explore the potential of virtual reality we decided to develop a bespoke experience of a Bronze Age roundhouse, which could be included across the SDDC’s programme for families and schools. We identified the Bronze Age for our virtual reality experience, because it presented a number of opportunities. Firstly, the Museum already has 3D scans available of some of our Bronze Age collection, created by the MicroPasts project. MicroPasts is a groundbreaking project that creates open data sources of scanned objects, and crowd sources ‘photo-masking’ to create 3D versions of them. Second, prehistory is a statutory requirement as part of the National Curriculum for primary schools, but we know that teachers sometimes find this subject difficult to teach. The difficultly experienced by teachers is mirrored by families too. We spoke with Dr Neil Wilkin, Curator of the Bronze Age Collection at the Museum, and together defined the potential values of virtual environments for exploring this period with our schools and families audience.

Virtual environments present an opportunity to address misconceptions about prehistory head on, and this period is particularly difficult to grasp for our younger visitors. For example, a virtual Bronze Age experience allows you to convey in a visual way that at this time people had developed complex settlement practices, that they advanced technologies for their purposes, like developing methods to manufacture bronze, and that they had talented craftspeople who created beautiful jewellery. Virtual environments also allow you to present the mysteries and multiple interpretations of objects in a visual way. Questions around the function, purpose and possible ritual practices associated with Bronze Age objects can be presented to the visitor in context, close up and in 3D. Across our SDDC learning programme we try to convey that interpretations of objects are never fixed – they develop and change as new research is undertaken. We often show that multiple interpretations and varied significances for one object can exist at the same time, but 3D virtual environments make conveying this much easier.

To create our virtual reality roundhouse, we recruited Soluis Group Limited, who are experts in creating virtual environments. We chose three fascinating objects from those that had been scanned in the MicroPasts project to be interpreted in our virtual Bronze Age roundhouse – the Woolaston gold (possibly a child's bracelet), a Sussex loop bracelet and a large dirk (a short dagger). The three objects are linked by the mystery that they share – there is no certain interpretation of how each was used, or if it had ritual significance.

Developing the experience was a collaborative process. The Museum worked closely with the virtual reality developers to ensure that the Bronze Age roundhouse depicted in our virtual reality experience was based on the latest curatorial research in this area. For this process, two students, Lydia Woolway and Emily Glynn-Farrell, assisted Neil in compiling a research document about Bronze Age settlements and roundhouses. This document included the fact that many roundhouses across Britain have been found with doorways facing in the same direction, seemingly in line with the sun’s path through the sky. Archaeologist Mike Parker-Pearson in particular has suggested that light and dark, and the alignment of roundhouses, had ritual significance to Bronze Age Britons. We were keen to incorporate this into our virtual reality roundhouse. The experience also contains audio content, which Neil recorded in the SDDC – turning it into a sound recording studio for an afternoon and using our green screen as a backdrop to get the best sound quality possible. We were delighted with the experience that was created, and the virtual reality weekend was testament to its success.

Today, we’re looking at visitor feedback from the event and considering how we can integrate their comments into our digital learning programme. But having been in the Great Court all weekend, talking to visitors and seeing their excitement at engaging with this experience, we’re delighted with what we’ve created, and how much our visitors have enjoyed it!

Thanks are due to everyone who has been involved in this project, and our amazing team of SDDC facilitators and volunteers who helped out over the weekend.

Molong Historical Society celebrate 50 years