ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame (ACMHOF) as a do-it-yourself (DIY) museum as determined by the volunteers who work for the organisation. The ACMHOF volunteers have been concerned about the conflict between official/top-down and unofficial/bottom-up heritage or with residual culture in relation to language or customs. Two influences on the particular way this DIY organisation has developed have been the genre of music, Australian country music (ACM), and the physical location of the organisation and museum in Tamworth, in rural New South Wales. Australian country music has its roots in two sources. The first was the traditional songs the migrants from various parts of the United Kingdom brought with them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To these were added local songs that focused on the new rather than the former homeland, the wide, brown land with gum trees rather than hedges and elms. The second source was the United States.
