April 27 2023

Last Thursday, 9 of us visited the Police Museum at Hume (after a pizza lunch kindly organised by Lino – thanks Lino).  The visit was organised by Alan Castle.  Terry Browne from the museum gave an excellent talk on the origins and history of policing in the ACT.  Another highlight of the visit was an opportunity to see various models of police cars and vehicles, including the last V8 Commodore for the police to come off the production line.  The vehicles were housed in large plastic bubbles for climate control and to keep sticky fingers off the merchandise !!  And there was a beautifully restored Kawasaki 1100 bike that one of our members (who shall remain anonymous) wanted to take for a spin. 

Author: Warren Jones

If our ability to get into the Museum is any way to guage how hard it would be to get into a police station, then we can conclude that they are as safe as houses. The usual ‘defences’ confronted us when we arrived and included: 3m high fencing, cameras all over the place and finally having to sign our lives away before we could put foot inside the door. From here our guide (Mr Brown) went through the history of the AFP from its inception to today. This proved vey informative and had all intent . That is to say that not person drifted off during this presentation. From there we went through 3 different areas whch contained a kings ransom of ‘toys’ from the police archives.

All of us decided that the Z1000 bike was the thing that we all wanted to take home. Secondly was the different cars and trucks that they have used over the decades. We all had our different idea of what we wanted to take away. The concept of how they keep them in pristine condition was also interesting – imagine huge blow up bags with pumps that switch out air every so often. Finally we were shown the different ‘keepsakes’ that the police keep to show both the public and new officers when they are in Canberra. Unfortunately we were not able to include photos – a big no-no! We were surprised to find that the visit had taken 1.5 hours. Our guide would have gone on for some more but some members had to get back to undertake chores. We thanked our guide and departd, vowing that we would make time to come back.

Thank you goes to Alan Castle for setting up this tour and we hope to go again in the future.

Author: Tony Burns