A museum that will showcase life in western Queensland and explain its qualities to visitors is at the heart of a new Australian Outback Museum at Charleville that has snagged the Murweh Shire Council nearly $8 million in federal funding.
Murweh mayor Shaun Radnedge described the $7.94 million Building Better Regions funding announced on Sunday by Maranoa MP David Littleproud as a game changer for the outback community.
"We cannot believe it; this is the lotto of grant funds in Australia and we are just absolutely pinching ourselves," Cr Radnedge said.
"Charleville and surrounds are already known as a fantastic destination and this project will cement Murweh as the great gateway to the outback.
"We will build a state-of-the-art Australian Outback Museum to compliment our famous Cosmos Centre and our history-making WW2 museum."
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Some $6m of the funding will go towards the new museum, while $1.5m will be spent on the second stage of the WWII Secret Airbase and Charleville Airport Museum, and another $440,000 is for the Smiley Museum at Augathella.
The 1957 movie Smiley, which received a Best British Screenplay nomination at the BAFTA awards, is based on a 1945 novel of the same name by Moore Raymond, which tells the story of a mischievous boy who lives in the small country town of Murrumbilla, based on Augathella.
In the short term, there is an expectation of 27 full-time jobs being created as a direct result of the funding.
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"The federal government knows we have done it tough for years and are turning negatives into positives, and this funding will go a long way for our community and add value to the entire region," Cr Radnedge said, highlighting the expected investment boom.
He acknowledged Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and federal MP David Littleproud for believing in the project, and said a partnership with Griffith University had been integral to its success.
The five-year partnership was responsible for the design for the WWII Secret Airbase precinct, and was the catalyst for the shire being able to move forward with its tourism plan, Cr Radnedge said.
According to Griffith Institute for Tourism's Associate Professor Brent Moyle, the latest developments were one part of an ambitious 20-year roadmap.
When he first arrived in Charleville he sensed the WWII relics at the edge of town from a top-secret US airbase could redefine tourism for the town.
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The Murweh Shire Council had developed a tour to showcase the military heritage but many of the relics, including an aircraft hangar, revetments, a building to house the top secret Norden bombsight, living quarters for soldiers and nurses, kitchens and ablution blocks, all built in secret during WWII, were crumbling away and at risk of being lost forever.
The shire invested $250,000 through an Advance Queensland Fellowship to green-light a three-year research project, which developed three immersive prototypes that included the use of 3D scanning to bring the stories of the people who lived on the top secret airbase to life in virtual reality.
Visitors to the recently opened WWII Secret Base centre can use iPads to scan an augmented reality table to show highly detailed scans orienting them to the layout of the base.
The experience takes visitors back to a point in time when the base was active, enlisting them in the US military and taking them through a training exercise to drop a bomb on a target.
Funded by the Queensland government's Outback Tourism Infrastructure Fund and the Murweh Shire Council, it highlights the shire's desire to educate as well as entertain visitors.
Cr Radnedge said the Outback Museum would focus on more modern history, after listening to what tourists were looking for when they travelled through the region.
"We've had some big disasters - droughts and floods - and have landscapes, industries and lifestyles that are unique," he said.
"Tourists want to know what's kept it sustainable out here.
"We want to let people know that we've moved with the times, we're not here to wreck everything.
"For example, the south west councils are carrying 90 per cent of the nation's carbon credits - we can educate the public on a lot of things."
The next steps are to develop the concept further and to get a steering committee set up, which Cr Radnedge said was now underway.
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