SFT Tour - Day 10 - Manildra

The Amusu Theatre

It was bitterly cold again this morning during the pack up in Orange. Sue did a lot of her work inside the van.

Heading west, we arrived at Manildra (meaning winding river)  mid morning and a date with Joan Stevenson of the Amusu Theatre, which was being opened just for us.

The theatre had its roots in the dreams of 21 year old Allan Tom, who took to the road in 1923 with his own travelling picture show, taking movies to small rural towns of the Central West. After years of bringing the movies to towns, he helped establish permanent theatres in Manildra, Cudal, Millthorpe, Tullamore and Peak Hill. The Amusu Theatre is the Manildra leg of those creations and it opened its doors to patrons in 1937 and it still screens movies to this day. Beside the theatre is what used to be Tom's Garage and where cars used to be rolled in for maintenance and repair, there is now a rather fullsome museum of everything you can imagine to do with movies. The museum got its start when Alan and Madeline Strahan donated their extensive collection which included an enormous number of movie posters.

Of course, the museum has grown and the strict definition of movie museum is tested by some of the contents but if you have a love of the history of film, this is the place to come.

A wall full of Bond

Central to all this is today's host Joan and her husband Alan and the committee, which includes Lyn Woodhart, the 93 year old daughter of creator Allan Tom.

Learning the museum and theatre was only open on weekends, we were disappointed that we would miss out but once again, Joan was to the fore. She simply asked us to phone ahead and she'd come down and open the doors.

You have to admire people's passion.

We took the short walk into town for a really nice coffee at Coffee on Keiwa. It's one of the things which has changed about touring and visiting small towns. Where once you'd be served up a Nescafe Special Blend with hot water, now even the most out of the way places has a coffee machine and passable barista.

Manildra's fame comes from its flour mill, which is the largest in the southern hemisphere and exports flour to the world. Not far behind it is the canola plant, also an international exporter. In all, they employ 400 people. The population of Manildra is just under 500. A few other notable buildings were the original post office and a couple of banks, now repurposed. The Royal Hotel is also a fine building. Burnt down in the 1920's, they just built a new one right beside the ashes.

Everywhere in the main street of what is a very small town, street scape signs have been erected explaining how the town looked and what the buildings were originally purposed for.

The last of the morning was taken up with the 50 odd kilometres remaining before we reached Parkes.

Click to see today's photos

Lovely  caravan park, with the back of our van a few metres from the long off boundary of Spicer Park. A short visit to the information centre in the afternoon was notable for the video presentation we watched on Sir Henry Parkes and the more viseral presentation of a magpie swooping on a mouse and tearing it apart for a feed.