General News
27 November, 2025
Meet the new curator of Outback at Isa with big plans
Daria Gradusova arrives in Mount Isa with a storied history and plenty of experience in the museum space.
Daria Gradusova has worked at some of the world’s most prestigious museums. Now she is bringing her global experience to our very own Outback at Isa. But first, she asks what exactly is the mission of the information centre along Marian Street?
Tucked out of view at Outback at Isa is a locked area that staff call the "spider room".
It’s unclear how this storage space earned its ominous nickname – some claim there has never been an actual spider seen there, while others think there must have been at least a huntsman seen on the ceiling a long time ago.
Multiple sources confirmed that a snake was found there recently.
Nevertheless, the spider room looks like it could be crawling with spiders because, frankly, it is a bit of a mess.
Whenever residents have pulled into Outback at Isa with a boxful of donations they believe have some historical value, these items have been placed in the spider room.
Over the two decades Outback at Isa has operated, the shelves in the spider room have been stacked almost to the roof with a smorgasbord of donated bits and pieces.
But this flow of goodwill has created a problem – some of the items have been stored there for so long that no one is sure what they are, who donated them, or whether they would actually be useful to the centre’s displays and exhibitions.
A quick rummage through the spider room reveals that some of the items would be interesting to the general public.
There is a helmet said to be among the first used at Mount Isa Mines, along with old mine maps, instruction manuals and safety plans, and stacks of framed photographs of workers completing their shift underground across different decades.
But solving the mystery of who the workers are in the photos, or what year the helmet was first deployed, is a job unto itself.
That is where Daria Gradusova enters the story. The Russian-born museum curator and exhibition designer was hired by Outback at Isa last month.
The role advertised was for a ‘History Museum Curator’.
Among the tasks for her new position will include tackling the spider room to determine the history of the items in storage, cataloguing them by date and relevance and possibly developing exhibitions for future public viewing.
To take up her first full-time position in the Australian Outback, Daria spent three days driving from Melbourne to Mount Isa with her three cats in the passenger seats.
Like many newcomers to our city, Daria admitted she had to first find Mount Isa’s exact location on Google before she could agree to take up the position.
“It really is very, very, far,” she told North West Weekly.
“When I was coming into Mount Isa, I really was thinking to myself, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing?”
“But I am finding this city really has a lot to offer.”
Daria said she was quickly enchanted by the rough beauty of the looming MIM structure, especially at night, and she hunted for a unit to rent with a clear view of the mine site from her window.
“The sheer scale of the mine is something else,” she said.
“The mine has so many faces and they are all so very different depending on where you are in the city.
“I think these big industrial structures have a real appeal.”
By any measure, Daria brings a remarkable resume to her new role in Mount Isa.
She holds the unique distinction of having earned two doctorates, which technically means her official title is “Dr Dr Daria”.
Her first doctorate in cultural heritage analysis and management was earned at a university in central Italy.
More recently, she completed another doctorate in museum design at Swinburne University in Melbourne.
Daria’s globetrotting studies began in her Russian home of St Petersburg more than a decade ago, where she drew inspiration from the countless historic artworks, architecture and artefacts dotted across the canal city’s numerous galleries and museums, including the iconic Hermitage.
Originally studying book restoration, among her academic highlights was rehabilitating a tattered children’s picture book that was more than 150 years old.
After graduation, she relocated to Philadelphia to pursue a Master’s of Fine Arts in exhibition design.
Her stint in the USA included a six-month internship at the famed American Museum of Natural History in New York, which some readers might remember as the setting of the Ben Stiller movie Night at the Museum.
It was followed by another internship at the Museum of Russian Art in New Jersey.
She then relocated to Italy to commence her doctorate studies near Florence before undertaking academic research in London and Melbourne.
Daria jokes that the bureaucratic wrangling she has learnt while navigating the tough visa and scholarship processes across multiple continents will be extremely useful when applying for government arts and tourism grants in her new job.
Having found herself seated in her new office at the rear of Outback at Isa, Daria told North West Weekly she is grappling with a question that perhaps has never been considered before in any real depth – “What exactly is Outback at Isa?”
Daria said her first days in the job had been spent poring through the Outback at Isa records and archives to understand which processes exist – if any – that will explain the decision-making behind the current exhibitions and collection policies.
She said most people she had asked had been unable to define the purpose of Outback at Isa and instead had listed the muddle of attractions that overflow at the tourist site.
Amid the confusion, Daria said she has begun a re-examination of Outback at Isa's original mission statement and plans to search for opportunities to use her vast international experience to reinvigorate Mount Isa's biggest tourist centre.
But first, as she gets her feet firmly planted in the North West, Daria said she will continue her targeted market research with locals and colleagues.
“What I hear a lot is that Outback at Isa is a mishmash of things,” she explained.
“We have four key pillars that are about connection to land – mining history, local history, Riversleigh fossils and Indigenous art – but Outback at Isa is actually so much more than that.
“It is obviously a tourist centre, and we provide a lot of information to tourists about the whole region.
“It has the fossil collection and that is working very well.
“But it is also a gathering space for locals because one of the first things I noticed was how many people are going to the cafe.
“The facility also has showers that are used by tourists because this building originally was a basketball court, which is an unusual structure to build a museum and gallery around.
“People aren’t always sure why some things are placed in particular areas across the facility – there is not always a narrative coherence to the exhibition displays.
“I would like to set up the processes according to museum standards, such as a collection policy and an exhibition policy, so we have a framework for the type of exhibitions we hold in the future.
“I am using this mission statement as a starting point.”
Daria says she is also considering how the exhibitions could be tweaked to attract tourists during the peak season and locals during the off-season months.
And that might include releasing any buried treasure found inside the spider room.
“Outback at Isa is a gathering space for locals as well as tourists; finding a balance between these audiences is something I am really thinking about at the moment,” Daria said.
“There is a lot we could do to bring people together to dig up and celebrate the history of Mount Isa.
“If we find something unique in the spider room, it could be used to highlight some part of the city’s history.
“I don’t have answers for everything yet – there is such a lot to know, and I don’t want to impose my ideas because I want to work with the people in the city.
“It’s all a work in progress.”
