Winner

North Stradbroke Island Museum on Minjerribah

Getting Equal: Australia’s First Successful Aboriginal Wages Case

The North Stradbroke Island Museum on Minjerribah is a not-for-profit community-run museum which is on unceded Quandamooka Lands.

A highly original project, the exhibition Getting Equal: Australia’s First Successful Aboriginal Wages Case was presented by the Museum from July 2021 to July 2022. It shares the significant story of the Aboriginal Gang of the Dunwich Benevolent Asylum and their fight for equal wages. The campaign began with a strike in 1918 and continued with 25 years of industrial, community and political action.

It tells of Aboriginal people working at the Asylum successfully campaigning to be the first Aboriginal workers in Australia to be paid the same as white workers doing the same work. This remarkable achievement, in 1944, happened 22 years before the granting of equal pay in the pastoral industry and more than two decades before the 1967 Referendum.

The exhibition also marked the 75th anniversary of the closure of the Dunwich Benevolent Asylum in 1946. Getting Equal was conceived as a community exhibition, involving the families of those who were part of the wages campaign in the planning, content and presentation of the exhibition and its events. Photographs, memories and stories, documents and artefacts were provided by community members and were augmented by oral histories from the Museum’s collection. The Museum undertook two years of community engagement and research to bring the project together and to achieve community consensus for the story which was then publicly shared for the first time. This included documents that showed that award wages were extended to Aboriginal women workers as well as men.

The most important community aspect of this exhibition was the film ‘Banding Together’, an 18-minute film and audio compilation of the stories of today’s community members.