The Creswick Campus Historical Collection contains an estimated 12,000 objects, documents and photographs relating to the more than one hundred years of forestry education at the University of Melbourne's Creswick Campus. The collection records the evolution of forestry education in Victoria through the collected specimens, objects and documents as well as telling some of the stories of those who have studied, worked and lived at the forestry school. Notable items include numerous examples of staff and student work, photographs, and several natural history collections. A substantial school herbarium contains specimens collected by former staff and students as well as esteemed scientists including Baron Ferdinand von Mueller.
For display purposes, we have broken down the collection into sub collections:
VSF Museum and Archives - includes manuscripts, objects, ephemera, images and equipment from the original VSF museum.
VSF Herbarium - inlcudes plant and fungi samples from the VSF herbarium. The Herbarium collection is now stored and curated at the University of Melbourne Herbarium.
VSF Forestry Lantern Glass Slide collection - 947 images related to forestry and forests from 1904 to the 1950s.
H.E. Dadswell glass plate negatives collection - over 7000 glass plate negatives of microscopic cross sections of timbers from the H.E. Dadswell wood collection. These were all produced by Dadswell during his time at the CSIRO.
AFS Lantern Glass Slide collection - 487 images from the Australian Forestry School that were then housed at the ANU. The images come from the US Forestry Department, the Australian Forestry School and the Victorian School of Forestry
Our catalogue is online at Victorian Collections.
You can contact the Collection manager via: cchc@lists.unimelb.edu.au
You can read more about the collection in "The Creswick Campus Historical Collection: an Introduction" by Anne Faithfull in University of Melbourne Collections, Issue 15 December 2014.