The tale of the Qantas founders is one of Australian ingenuity overcoming a harsh environment to produce something magnificent. Eighty years later, creating the Qantas Founders Outback Museum was a similar process. Working as Interpretive Solutions, the ToadShow team battled distance, dust, mud, and an airline collapse to create the museum.
The Qantas Founders Memorial Ltd wanted to create a museum that would be a tribute to the bravery of the people who started the Australian icon, combining volumes of information about Qantas with photographs and multimedia exhibits. ToadShow established a film crew that travelled around Australia interviewing key figures about their involvement in the early days of Qantas, using the oral history material to help bring the story to life in the form of a series of documentaries that play on monitors and interactive kiosks within the museum.
Some of the other methods ToadShow used to tell the Qantas founders' story include a series of 42 massive backlit panels which present a combination of text and historical photographs, a joystick-controlled model aeroplane which demonstrates the physics of flying, and scaled replicas of iconic aircraft. The effective combination of physical displays, interactives and the multimedia displays make the Qantas Founders Outback Museum like no other community museum in Australia.
