Sanitising or celebrating the past? The Van Diemen's Land Memorial Folk Museum 1957-2007

In 1957 the Van Diemen's Land Memorial Folk Museum was opened in the Georgina townhouse of Narryna in Hobart, Tasmania. This was the first folk museum to be established in Australia. It spoke to the middle-class need to distance itself from the island's origins as a penal colony and to stress the contribution of the pioneer free settlers in forging a respectable society in the first half of the nineteenth century. This article describes how the rich colonial collection was exhibited and assesses visitor and museological reactions.