THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the work of volunteers at the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame (ACMHF), an enthusiast-run archive and museum located in the regional city of Tamworth, Australia's self-proclaimed ‘Country Music Capital’. The ACMHF is one of a number of do-it-yourself (DIY) institutions of popular music heritage in Australia which operate in unor under-funded parallel to Australia's national institutions, and which are generally staffed by volunteers who are not trained in heritage management (see Baker, 2016). By offering a case study of one DIY institution, the chapter highlights how participatory heritage practice is as much about personal and community enrichment as it is about the collection and preservation of artefacts from the recent past. Recognizing and valuing the cultural, social and affective dimensions of community approaches to archiving will be important if networks between community archives and the mainstream heritage sector are to be productively strengthened.

The purpose of ACMHF is clearly articulated in the mission statement of the Australian Country Music Foundation (ACMF), the body behind the archive and museum:

This mission manifests itself in the archival and curatorial activities of the handful of core volunteers who run the ACMHF, with the archive acknowledged to hold an important national collection of country music artefacts (Brennan, 2015). Its collection includes many recordings (in all kinds of audio and visual formats), as well as costumes, posters, photographs, instruments and other ephemera related to country songs and singers. The focus of the collection is the people associated with Australia's country music, and the volunteers take a non-linear approach to country music history, curating exhibits which focus less on an overarching ‘story’ about Australian country music, its foundation and its development, and instead drawing attention to particular artists, using ephemera to evoke their personalities, presence and careers in country music.

Study background

The ACMHF came to my attention during research for an Australian Research Council-funded project which set out to explore the ways in which localized popular music heritage is produced and placed within public narratives of popular music's history.