Key Adelaide museum to close for essential works
As the nation’s immigration debate reaches fever pitch, a museum honouring SA’s migrant community is closing for conservation works to buildings with their own chequered past. SA’s History Festival starts today.
As the Migration Museum on Kintore Avenue prepares to close for “essential” conservation works to its 19th-century buildings, the History Trust of South Australia’s new CEO Justyna Jochym says migrants play an integral role in the state’s past and future.
Jochym’s comments come after a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment, with a recent poll from Fox & Hedgehog for conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, showing 58 per cent of respondents wanted “modest” or “significant” cuts to Australia’s immigration levels.
The Australian Liberal Party also recently introduced its own immigration plan, which it claimed would “lift the standards and reduce the numbers of Labor’s out of control migration by putting Australian values at the heart of immigration policy”.
“One of the great benefits of having the Migration Museum sit so close to our Centre of Democracy [museum at the State Library] is that we really get to paint that picture of how a multicultural society is integral to a democratic one,” Jochym, who moved from Poland to Adelaide in 2018, said.
“We really get to present to the public those histories and how integral migrants have been to the evolution of South Australia, but also, we get to honour the impacts that migration has had on the state.”
The Migration Museum first opened in 1986 with the mission of sharing South Australia’s migration history through research, collections, exhibitions, education programs and community and digital engagement.
Its building complex was originally the site of the Native School Establishment from 1845-1851, where Aboriginal children who had been removed from their families and Elders were housed and taught English.
From 1851-1917, it was Adelaide’s Destitute Asylum for aged, infirm, disabled or expectant mothers. It also included a hospital for poor girls, women and sex workers.
The museum will be closed from July 1 for one and a half to two years after the SA government committed $6.3 million in the 2024-25 State Budget for “essential compliance and structural works”.
Works to be overseen by Hosking Willis Architecture would primarily focus on addressing the heritage stonework of the former Destitute Asylum buildings.
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Jochym, who has been the History Trust’s CEO for the past eight months, said that during this time, there would be community engagement programs focusing on the museum’s future.
The History Trust’s other museums and services would remain operational during this period.
“We own several heritage buildings, and so this is part of the process of maintaining and preserving them so that they can be continuously loved by communities for decades to come,” Jochym said.
South Australia’s History Festival is running from May 1 to 31. This year’s theme is Connections, and the festival features more than 550 events spanning 16 SA regions.
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