How to make historic documents available to all, in this digital age, is one of the challenges faced by smaller communities throughout country NSW.

Yet it is a challenge that Stuart Town locals recently took up, with a group of committed residents recently starting an archival project to electronically record, store, and make available as much as possible from the close-knit community’s past.

“We’re called the ‘Stuart Town Preservation and History Society’, and we’ve got town archives that have been filed away for years,” organiser Mel Howard said. “We’re trying to raise money for a lap-top and other equipment to digitise what we have; we’re always looking for more material; from family histories, documents, and records,” she added.

Due to a fire a number of years ago at the court-house and police station, she explained, many local records have been lost, with the society now looking to bring back together everything they can get their hands on for the project.

“There was an old guard that kept a lot of it pretty much under lock and key,” Ms Howard revealed. “But now we want to collect as much of it as we can, for people to be able to access.”

She said that the isolated community located 40 minutes north of Orange — originally named Ironbark, from which AB 'Banjo' Patterson wrote one of his most famous poems — has always enjoyed a keen interest in local history.

“We previously published two histories, in 1988 as a Bicentennial project, the ‘Whispers of Iron Bark’, and a few years later, ‘Branches of Ironbark’,” Ms Howard revealed.

“The first one, the ‘Whispers’, was a history of the town, and the second one, ‘Branches’, was a family history.”

With the project only just launched, it’s early days for the group, she explained.

“We’re just a bunch of volunteers, we haven’t had any days yet, we’re just fundraising to buy equipment, working out of the old RTC (Rural Transaction Centre) building attached to the community hall.

“Local member Andrew Gee came out to our official opening on Saturday, January 24, so we haven’t been going that long.”

The aim, Ms Howard said, is to make everything available for anyone who wants to research the village or just has an interest in this quaint community.

“We want to be able to provide copies that people can come and see, we want to make it available for those who want copies of this stuff.

“There’ll be days when we will be open for not just the volunteers, but for those who want to come and get copies of documents,” Ms Howard said.

Part of the Stuart Town Advancement Association, the dozen or so volunteers in the meantime are keeping their hands in on other projects, as they fundraise for the archive initiative.

“We’re also in the process of organising ‘The Man From Ironbark Festival’ that, this year, is going to be back in the main street again over the first week of April at Easter,” Ms Howard said.

“We’ve got the photo-copier and scanner, and we just need a computer that we can integrate with as well as paper, stationary, that sort of thing,” she concluded.