Summary

The exhibition is based on the story of the Irish Fenians transported to Fremantle Prison in 1868 as the last of the convicts to Western Australia. A year later their leader, John Boyle O’Reilly escaped on a whale ship to America where he and Clan na Gael members organised the rescue of the remaining Fenians in 1876 on board the American whaler Catalpa.

Media

This CD makes full use of Flash as a multimedia tool. The media provided to GMG included

• scans of rare documents
• photographs of people involved in the escape
• translations of text
• newspaper clippings

Technology

Books Alive! and Flip the Folios are designed for widescreen touch screens with a fixed resolution of 1360 x 768. They are designed using the software Macromedia Flash Version 8. Two GB of RAM and a reasonable graphics card with up to date drivers are needed to launch the programs. The programs are copied to the hard drive – they can not run off a CD. Basic speakers were required in order to be able to hear the audio components. The programs are designed for a specific set of hardware to be part of the exhibition, they are not designed for the internet or as a general distribution piece.

Escape! Fremantle to Freedom - in the museum’s own words

Dr Kate Gregory
Exhibition Project Coordinator
Fremantle Prison

The exhibition Escape! Fremantle to Freedom opened at Fremantle Prison in September 2006 and is touring Australia throughout 2007 and 2008 with Visions of Australia Federal Government funding. The exhibition tells the extraordinary story of the escape of six Irish Fenian prisoners from Fremantle Prison in 1876 on the American whaler the Catalpa. It is one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of artefacts, documents and artworks associated with the e

scape of the Fenians, and includes rare items that have never been publicly displayed.

Two multimedia interactive touch screens were specially designed as integral components to the interpretation strategies of the exhibition. Titled Books Alive! and Flip the Folios, they provide an in-depth opportunity to look at many of the fascinating paper records of the story that are too fragile to exhibit, some of which are 130 years old. Visitors ‘turn’ the digital pages of documents; magnify the page by running their finger over it; read transcriptions of handwritten documents; and have complete independence in their navigation of the material by using a simple navigational scroll bar and information tabs.

Books Alive! displays precise digital copies of six rare manuscripts sourced from collections around the world including the National Library of Ireland and the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, USA. None of the manuscripts had been displayed before and all are too fragile to tour, yet they are vital to the exhibition. The touch screens give unprecedented access to this important cultural material. Handwritten diaries written by Fenian convicts while being transported to Australia on the convict ship called the Hougoumont, the Wild Goose papers – a series of handwritten newsletters produced by the Fenians to entertain themselves on the Hougoumont, and a rare book

of poetry written by Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly just prior to his escape from Western Australia are highlights of the exhibition which visitors can read using the touch screens.

Flip the Folios displays Fenian records and reminiscences, secret correspondence, newspaper cuttings of the time and convict records. This material is kept within a number of folios that are arranged so that they appear to be on the desk of a researcher. Visitors leaf through these files and magnify the pages to uncover Fenian secrets and more. The documents enhance the exhibition by providing another layer of primary information which visitors can access as much or as little of as they wish. As with Books Alive! some documents are transcribed word for word, and include the peculiarities of spelling and grammar in the original text.

The curator, Sandra Murray, was inspired by the software Turning the Pages that was developed by the British Library, realising it would allow greater access to exhibition material. GMG Multimedia (Tim Murray and Paul Glasson) were contracted by Fremantle Prison to design the software Books Alive! and Flip the Folios for Escape! Fremantle to Freedom. The touch screen cases were designed by Fremantle Prison to compliment the exhibition showcases.

The touch screens are proving to be a highlight of the exhibition. Visitor feedback suggests that they are one of the most popular exhibition components, being easy to use, highly informative, and visually appealing. Our feedback suggests that visitors enjoy the interactivity of the touch screens and that this element enhances their experience of the exhibition and understanding of the cultural material being exhibited. We believe that these touch screen programs are brilliant examples of ‘new generation’ interactive multimedia within museums and exhibitions – they are simple, effective and beautifully designed. They highlight the original manuscripts and documents and emulate the tactile and sensory experience of reading the original items.

Design

The two presentations were designed to load the document scans only when absolutely necessary - preloading a whole book proved to blow Flash memory limits. Books Alive! came to a total of 195 megabytes of compressed Flash files; Flipping the Folios was a mere 105 megabytes by comparison. We had to account for the page turning patterns of the visitor so that we could preload a minimum amount of pages so that the animation went smoothly, though!

We delivered over 500 pages of high resolution scans in two interactive touchscreen presentations, allowing visitors to flip through digital versions of these old and delicate documents. The multimedia also included a unique liquid zoom: when people touch a page, a glowing pool of magnified material trails under their finger as they drag it around the screen.