Open a drawer in the local museum where gold was first discovered in Victoria and you'll find a treasure trove of long-forgotten stories.
Copies of more than 10,000 newspapers from the 1850s to 1940s are stored on hundreds of rolls of microfilm.
In digitising the Clunes Museum microfilm collection, new insights into the town's history have been uncovered.
Newspaper articles paint the picture of a pub on every corner, with at least 30 licensed hotels and an estimated 10 to 15 sly grog houses in the height of the gold rush in the 1870s, when the town's population swelled to 6,200.
Miners came to find their fortune, spending their days doing dangerous work at the gold mine and their nights drinking, or at one of the town's brothels.
The articles tell the stories of frequent fights and multiple murders, including one man killing another with a fire poker during a drunken dispute.
Digging deeper
Clunes Museum secretary Peter Spark is researching the history of the 88 pubs that have operated in Clunes.
He says accessing newspaper records on PDF after they are digitised, instead of the current slow and tedious microfilm process, will be a dream.
"There's a lot of papers to go through to find a specific article, so with a PDF file, we will be able to go straight to it and find it, which is amazing," he says.
The volunteer-run organisation has received a $2,500 grant from Hepburn Shire Council to start the process, but another $7,000 will be needed to digitise all 160 microfilm rolls of newspapers.
Mr Spark says microfilm technology will soon become obsolete and the museum's microfilm reader already has issues that are expensive to repair, so digitising is an important step to secure the long-term future of the records.
"It's information that you wouldn't get anywhere else other than from the newspaper," he says.
The museum frequently receives requests from members of the public to help find information about where their ancestors lived and worked in Clunes.
Family connections
Mr Spark has researched his own ancestors, who have lived in Clunes since 1852.
He says one of his ancestors left town and joined the war after he was fined multiple times for being drunk and disorderly in the town in the 1910s.
There were frequent reports of pubs in the courts for breaching licensing conditions and one publican was punished for serving alcohol to Mr Spark's ancestor, who was ordered not to drink.
One newspaper report tells the story of a woman pub owner who was fined for serving alcohol on a Sunday, despite her excuse that she was getting clothes out of the back room for her daughter and there was alcohol on the bench at the time.
Mr Spark says his research shows hotels were smelly and dirty, and many were closed once licensing laws tightened up after the 1880s due to the dilapidated state of the buildings.
By the 1890s, gold in Clunes was running out, leading to significant decreases in population and wealth.
Many of the miners followed the gold rush to Western Australia, leaving behind their wives and children in Clunes.
Some buildings were left unfinished, including the church near Mr Spark's home which was reportedly planned to be as big as the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Bendigo.
Mr Spark says new shops and the opening of a knitting mill in the early 1900s kept the town going.
Today, Clunes has one operating pub and a population of about 1,800 people.
The streetscape remains largely unchanged, making it an attractive film set for big-name films like Mad Max (1979) and Ned Kelly in (2013).
A big task ahead
Newspapers are just one part of the Clunes Museum collection volunteers are in the process of digitising.
For other items in the collection, volunteers take them out of storage to photograph and then upload each image to a database with descriptions and information.
They are currently about one-third of the way through the entire collection.
Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA) Victoria executive director Ashley Robertson says digitisation is uncovering thousands of items and stories in local volunteer-held collections across Victoria.
"Through digitisation, we're starting to have an understanding of what is actually out there and the number of objects these volunteer community organisations hold," she says.
"There are roughly 10 million objects out there in distributed collections."
Many online collections are free for members of the public to access, which Dr Robertson says has democratised access.
"You have these local stories that we really didn't get to hear about as much … that don't necessarily get the big stage … and now we're able to shine the spotlight on them," she says.
Dr Robertson says digitisation is a big task for small organisations that are run by volunteers with little resourcing.
AMaGA supports them with training and free collection management systems, but she says Victoria is lucky to have dedicated volunteers doing the work to preserve local history that could otherwise be lost forever.
For Clunes volunteers, fundraising will be key to completing the entire digitisation of their colonial history.
LoadingClunes Museum uncovers new stories while digitising historic local newspaper collection - ABC News
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