Orange has a time warp.
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To find it simply roll aside the huge white doors inside the modern glass-walled tourism office in Byng Street and enter a world that time has forgotten – until now.
The long-awaited Orange Regional Museum will open its doors to the public at 10am on Saturday.
Exhibits cover the city’s past from a vintage car with a lifelong connection to Orange, a Cobb & Co mail coach, historic sporting items and the press that once printed the Central Western Daily newspaper.
The director of the Orange Regional Gallery and Museum Brad Hammond said the display will be regularly changed as new exhibitions are introduced.
“This is the first of our exhibitions. It’s called Journeys, People, Places and Stories. The over-arching thing is the journeys we have all made to this place.”
It covers the story of local Indigenous people, explorers, gold seekers, farmers and settlers.
“Then it moves to contemporary times with the Olympics and the Email and Electrolux factories.”
Key to the exhibition is the various forms of transport used to bring people to Orange and used around town.
The exhibition also has displays from Canowindra, Carcoar and Millthorpe.
There’s a fish fossil in rock, the old Canowindra railway station sign and a railway ganger’s trolley, unique convict bricks from Carcoar and a display from the Millthorpe mill.
Mr Hammond said: “It’s broader than Orange. It takes in the villages.”
Museum manager and Heritage co-ordinator Alison Russell said the museum was 14 years in the making but will be worth the wait.
She points to a vintage car called Emma, a 1926 Chevrolet delivery owned by the Hartley family who ran a confectionary shop in Summer Street East, to racing kayaks used by local Olympian John Southwood, and a portable shepherd’s box used at Gamboola as examples of the wide variety on show.
Emma is unique in that it is unrestored, still in its original condition. Its ancient tool kit sits alongside the display.
The owners presented it to the museum complete with an album of photos showing it at work delivering confectionary around Orange and when taken on holidays around NSW.
Mr Hammond said: “It’s a great example of how an object holds a story.”
Entry is free.