Jocelyn makes history

Andrew Mathieson
LISTENING to stories about Ned Kelly’s bushranger days, Jocelyn Grant couldn’t imagine being anywhere other than dark corners of museums to immortalise the past.
The Point Lonsdale resident has a real weakness for faded documents, rusting artefacts, anything more than a century old, really, but most of all a good, ripping yarn right out of the history books.
“I used to love listening to my grandmother tell me about stories living in Castlemaine,” Jocelyn recalls.
“She was talking about the 1870s, I suppose. She told me they had to stay home from school because Ned Kelly was on the run.”
Some 130 years on, Jocelyn delights in keeping local stories alive at Queenscliff Historical Museum.
The job is helped by her understanding of how 150 or so years of the borough’s history can be packed into one brick building.
“Australian history has been a passion of mine since I was seven- years-old,” Jocelyn says.
“At 11, I was going off to museums and galleries in the school holidays.”
Now school kids who visit the Queenscliff museum hang off Jocelyn’s every word.
She is quick to spot the same twinkle in their eyes.
“It might be because I see history as telling stories,” Jocelyn says.
“I had a passion for books and I used to write stories when I was quite young.
“When I’m talking to children I think I can see they become interested when it’s a story.”
Some kids are confused, still, and think the hundreds of guns, ballroom gowns, tea sets and remnants from shipwrecks all belong to Jocelyn, which makes her chuckle.
But it’s the old records – dates and places – she likes to piece together the most.
“It is very important that it doesn’t all stay in my head, though,” Jocelyn admits.
Most original records are copied, the photographs digitised on computer and negatives kept downstairs.
Devoting most days to the museum, Jocelyn is part archaeologist, sometimes anthropologist, but mostly diligent archivist.
“I can get terribly excited over a document written in 1842,” she warns.
About 9000 files are stored in what she calls “organised clutter”, dating back to 1840s newspapers on Queenscliff that had been found lining the bottom of some chest of drawers.
Prominent Queenscliff names are stacked away in folders: Buckley, Deakin and the Baillieus among them.
“We have a long-standing connection with the Baillieu family and it was James George Baillieu who was the original person who started it here,” Jocelyn says.
“His descendant, Darren Baillieu, came over here in the (borough’s) centenary celebration and said we should have a museum.”
Deakin – Alfred, Australia’s second prime minister – and his family still have a house in Queenscliff, Jocelyn remarks.
The Queenscliff Historical Society opened the museum in 1966.
“Within minutes it was too small,” Jocelyn grins.
The museum has since had two new wings added, with plans for more.
“It’s still chockers,” Jocelyn observes.
The borough’s original mayoral robes and a back of an old hearse are forced to sit downstairs in the eerie bowels of the museum.
Jocelyn accidentally came across the museum not long after moving from Melbourne nearly two decades ago.
“One day I was walking down the street and I put my head in here to have a look,” she says.
“I got talking to somebody about Queenscliff’s history and was asked whether I’d like to be on the committee. I thought ‘Well, I’m not very busy any more’.”
Jocelyn has been president since 2001 but comically describes herself as “curator-in-chief”.
The museum is more or less her second home, although she would never say so out loud.
“My children wouldn’t be too happy about that,” Jocelyn giggles.