The Beaudesert Museum consists of a large collection of historical items from around the Beaudesert region, with indoor and outdoor displays.
At the front of the museum, there are three four buildings. The main part of the museum is in the middle, which is also the information centre for Beaudesert. To the right is a slab hut style pioneer cottage, and to the left are the historical house and tent house.
The main building when you first walk in has a large display of old photographs of the area and some household items. An old upright piano sits in one corner, fairly common in museums with local history. Less common is a folding organ, a first I have come across. Originating in America, the Estey folding organ came from the Canungra Uniting Church and used for services in the Pine Creek Hall from 1934.
At the back of the building is one of the feature collection items, a 1936 Dennis Fire Engine. It had 20 years of service with South Brisbane Fire Station before serving another 10 years in Beaudesert. Beaudesert Fire Brigade donated the fire engine to the museum.
The print industry is represented with some old printing presses and guillotine. A rare SuperFax 2300 electronic stencil cutting machine.
There are two outside areas each side of the main building. The outside collections are mainly of farming and road equipment, including tractors, hay baler, horse drawn equipment and carts, graders and rollers.
One of the rollers was a curious mix of equipment. The base has a plate for Barford & Perkins from Peterborough England. Above it is a plate for Smellie & Co Brisbane Machinery Merchants. On top, however, is an International Harvester Farmall tractor body, engine, gearbox and axle. The left axle drives the machine by a chain to the rear roller wheel. The right axle is bolted and chained to the chassis to make it stationary, so drive is forced through the differential to the left axle.
A small building contains information about queen bee farming from Rice’s Bee Farm. The business produced queen bees for export and local use. The “Aussie Bee”, once a Beaudesert big thing, sits within the building. Why is the Aussie Bee not on our Big Things list? Because it is inaccessible and not viewable without paying to enter the museum.
There is a small railway collection, split into two parts of the museum. Outside there is a pedal-powered railway trike. The trike is sitting on a small bit of rail with a railway line drill attached to it, a specially made drill for making holes through the side of the rail line. Behind the trike is a small carriage from the Beaudesert tramway.
On the other side of the museum is a tent house. Tent houses were designed as small detached
The tent house on display was donated by Queensland Rail and relocated from the interstate line at Kagaru, west of Jimboomba. The tent house contains photographs and historical information of the railway and tramway through Beaudesert.
The historic house near the tent house was the Beaudesert Shire office and the tramway station office. It contains artefacts from the area. The Stinson Room has a collection of early telephones and a small exchange in addition to photographs and information about the Stinson plane crash in Lamington National Park
Another room is dedicated to war with a collection of medals and badges, photographs, and other things. An old flag mounted to the wall dominates the room, something I haven’t seen before. Honour flags were given to districts reaching their quota to raise £40,000,000 pounds.
Beaudesert raised £51,890 in 1918 by 342 people, well above their £20,000 quota, and equivalent to over $4,586,000 in 2017 (using RBA inflation calculator). Beaudesert earned the right to fly the honour flag that flew where the war memorial now exists.
The slab hut pioneer cottage was built in 1875. The cottage was dismantled in 1961 and rebuilt in 1966 before being moved to the museum in 1979. The cottage is filled with pioneer era household items, including a collection of petrol irons and wood stove irons.