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The Gunning Town Treasure Hunt

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Photo from Mardi Lees' post in Gunning Community Announcements and Events Facebook group.

The Gunning Community Announcements and Events Facebook group is a great forum for all sorts of discussions, notifications and requests.  With over 760 members, there is always something of interest being posted and enthusiastic engagement by the community.

On 10 February, Mardi Lees posted two photos of a trophy found by "local fossicking fanatic Michael Brown".  The inscription on the trophy said:

G.D.S.A.A.A.
Champ Girl Under 6
J. Lees

Mardi asked for clues to the age of the trophy and who J. Lees might be (not her sister, Jennifer).

Responses to the thread soon focused on the meaning of G.D.S.A.A.A.; the consensus being Gunning District Schools Annual Athletics Association.  A further post suggested that it was from 1952 or 1953 (a remarkably accurate estimate as it turns out).

After a couple of days, the urge to research this got the better of me and I spent a hot Sunday afternoon locked indoors digging through Trove.  The first search (Gunning District Schools Annual Athletics Association) returned over 12000 newspaper articles - 3300 in NSW.  This included a number of references to the NSW Amateur Athletics Association and, eventually, some articles on Goulburn District Public Schools Amateur Athletic Association from 1898-1902.  I chased this thread for a while without getting any further so changed the focus back to Gunning and to J. Lees (gunning school athletic lees).

Once again, the search returned well over 3000 newspaper articles from NSW.  Scanning through the results eventually revealed an article from the Goulburn Evening Post, 2 November 1954, titled Gunning District Schools Sports - a report on the "seventh annual athletic meeting of Gunning District Schools".  The scanned image quality wasn't great and the transcript required a lot of correcting.  Early in the article, I found mention of "J.Lees" in the girls under 6 championship race. This was encouraging - if this was the same J. Lees, I was in the right area. As I continued to correct the transcript I found various other references to Lees:
  • J. Lees, 2nd, boys under 12 championship race
  • J. Lees, 1st, girls under 6 championship race
  • J. Lees, 1st, girls under 12 championship race
  • E. Lees, 1st, girls over 14 championship race
  • B. Lees, 2nd, boys under 12 championship broad jump
  • J. Lees, 1st, girls under 12 championship broad jump
  • J. Lees, 3rd, boys under 12 championship high jump
  • J. Lees, 1st, girls under 12 championship high jump
  • B. Lees, 2nd, boys under 12 hop, step and jump
  • J. Lees, 2nd, girls under 12 75 yds shire championships
  • E. Lees, 2nd, girls under 16 100 yds shire championships
Clearly, the Lees were an athletic clan.

About 2/3 through the article, the champions were listed, including "Girls, under 6, Joy Lees (Gundaroo) [...] under 12, Jewell Lees (Gundaroo P.S.)" and, in Records Broken or Equalled, "girls under 12 broad jump, Jewell Lees (Gundaroo), 13' 6";"  (I hope the Gundaroo Lees had a big trophy cabinet!).  This certainly matched the inscription on the trophy.

I replied to Mardi's post with details of the article and the responses came through quickly. Sadly, the feedback from Mardi was that Joy Beeton (nee Lees) had passed away last year.

While we haven't confirmed that Joy Beeton is the recipient of the trophy that Michael found, we were able to demonstrate the power of two significant research resources and two powerful tools available to everyone.  First, the substantial recorded records available in our libraries and other collections.  Over 1/2 billion of these have been digitised and indexed and are available on Trove to anyone with a browser and an Internet connection.  I scanned about 300 search results and read through about 25 articles from my laptop, at home, to find the Goulburn Evening Post article.

What an amazing asset we have in Trove!

Combine this with the accumulated unrecorded history and knowledge available in villages like Gunning.  Modern tools like Facebook provide a mechanism for accessing this information.  The Gunning Community Announcements and Events Facebook page works because of the Gunning community.  Through this group, a request was posted and local information collected until enough detail was available for a search of the recorded records.  Even then, it still needed to go back to the community to fill in the gaps.  All this in less than 3 days - could this have happened in Sydney or Melbourne?

Mardi's post generated 36 responses from 14 people over 3 days - great community engagement.  I think Peta Luck's post summed it up nicely:

"I'm loving watching this thread :) The Gunning Town Treasure Hunt."

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Location: Gunning NSW 2581, Australia

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