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Ipswich in a new century: the Roberts Collection
Our 2024 Appeal aims to preserve and share more of our collections through digitisation. All donations over $2 are tax deductible and your donation will help save Queensland’s heritage for future generations.
At Queensland Museum Rail Workshops in Ipswich, the team is working on digitising the Roberts collection.
Albert Edwin Roberts (1878-1964) was a coachbuilder by trade but a true renaissance man at heart.
Known as Bert, he was born in Birmingham, England, in 1878. He and his parents migrated to Queensland on board the Dunbar Castle in 1880 and later settled in Ipswich, where his father ran a successful coachbuilding business on the corner of Gordon and Brisbane Streets.
When cars became popular, they moved from building horse-drawn vehicles to motorised vehicles. Bert started to build bus bodies and later became a Ford dealer, opening the Fiveways Garage in the late 1920s.
Bert had many interests including geology, music, Aboriginal cultures, nature and the new technologies of the early 20th century. A member of the Ipswich Photographic Society, his broad interests are reflected in his prolific photography. Bert had an eye for capturing all facets of life in a new century, from workers and machinery in the rapidly expanding Railway Workshops to picnics, street parades and social gatherings.
Queensland Museum holds over 1,000 glass plate negatives in the Roberts Collection.
“Bert Roberts’ images show Ipswich as a thriving and productive city embracing transport innovation and social change,” said Jennifer High, Senior Curator Transport and Energy at Queensland Museum Rail Workshops.
“In previous decades, museums would produce physical prints from their glass plate negatives but this can impact the fragile image layer on irreplaceable glass.”
“Digitisation is a detailed process. As well as scanning the material, researchers also create the metadata associated with it to enable users to find, sort and filter content. This is a large collection so we will begin by digitising a curated small selection first. These films serve as a visual link and connection to the history of the Darling Downs and regional Queensland.”
With your support, digital files could preserve the historical images and enable wider access for research and education in future, with minimal need for further handling of the original glass plate negatives.
Explore more extraordinary stories
Truth-telling and healing: digital archives
Kurilpa, Brisbane
We’re working on digitising materials in Queensland Museum’s Archives collection. This holds a century of correspondence (1860s-1980s), revealing historic social attitudes, collecting practices, and injustices impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These insights are pivotal for Queensland’s truth-telling and healing.
A Toowoomba story: the Bolton Film Collection
Cobb+Co, Toowoomba
William Bolton MBE (1905-1973) and his wife, Marion, left a remarkable legacy in the Toowoomba region. We’re working on digitising the Bolton Film collection—42 rare recordings capturing life in country Queensland, with unique highlights like the 1960 Toowoomba centenary celebrations.
Digitising a shipwreck: HMS Pandora
Tropics, Townsville
HMS Pandora, the Royal Navy ship sent to capture the HMS Bounty mutineers, sank on the Great Barrier Reef in 1791 and lay undiscovered until 1977. Queensland Museum Tropics houses the world’s largest collection of artefacts from the Pandora and we’re working on digitising this amazing shipwreck.
HMS Pandora, the Royal Navy ship sent to capture the HMS Bounty mutineers, sank on the Great Barrier Reef in 1791 and lay undiscovered until 1977. Queensland Museum Tropics houses the world’s largest collection of artefacts from the Pandora and we’re working on digitising this amazing shipwreck.
Save Queensland's Stories
Help us digitally preserve Queensland’s stories and enable access for everyone. With your support, we can make more of our unique collections available online.