Community & Business
23 March, 2026
Clifton's Archivist: Joy King
Whether she’s in her office at home or down at the Clifton Museum, Joy King has spent much of her life recording, compiling and archiving histories. We take at a look at Joy, her historical work and why she does what she does.
Ida Joy King is 95, yet she still manages to get to The Clifton Museum four days a week.
She has two sons and four grandkids.
For 22 years she has been archiving The Clifton Courier’s ‘Peeps into the Past’ excerpts from its 124 year history.
Joy copies, cuts out and glues them into folders.
Her records of these go all the way back to 1908.
She keeps a copy for herself and delivers one to the Clifton Museum.
She’s become somewhat of a living memory for Clifton.
Largely because it’s what she loves doing.
“It keeps me and my brain going, putting together information.”
She has compiled histories of Imbil and Spring Creek into books, the latter being largely the history of her late husband Alton’s family, the Kings.
Originally from a sheep station at Muckadilla, near Roma, Joy trained as a teacher, working in kindergarten, primary and secondary in places like Clifton, Allora, Imbil, Tamworth, and Tara.
Joy’s first book ‘Imbil: Jewel of the Mary Valley’ was published in 2001.
The beginnings were largely taken from eight years of teaching a local area study.
That, and her work in compiling the Imbil School Centenary book in 1997, after retiring in 1991, set Joy on the next step of her life: Archiving and writing history.
Her next book was the compilation of the much closer, Spring Creek.
Having originally moved to Clifton in 1952, Joy returned after her and Alton’s time in Imbil.
Her late-mother-in-law Enid King, was a Caskey; one of the pioneer families of the area.
Inspired by all the photos, memorabilia and the memories shared by Enid and her friends, in 2009, Joy decided to write her next book.
In 2010 she published ‘Spring Creek: A look at Yesteryear on the Downs’.
Now, Joy mainly archives, but not just for herself.
Having compiled histories of multiple families around the area, she is somewhat of an historical sleuth.
“Very rarely someone will come and ask and we can’t ind something.” Joy said
Finding something is in fact one of the joys for Joy in what she does.
A family treasure, or some unknown detail that makes the family go “Wow!”.
In 2010 Joy was awarded an Australia Day Award for Cultural Achievement.
She was awarded Citizen of the Year in 2023 and is a life member of the Clifton Museum where she still volunteers.
Watching Joy at work, you see how meticulous she is.
There’s no rushing or hurrying, everything is done in its own time, and put back into its particular place.
At the museum, Joy is in her element - an unimposing, unassuming, part of the museum machine.
But Joy is an invaluable one.
Because as she tells it, when she first started working at the museum in 1952, “We didn’t even have a filing cabinet.”
Joy has since developed and maintained an extensive archive of Clifton’s history.
An archive which now covers the walls of the room in which she and the other museum volunteers work.
Shelves, cabinets and cupboards, contain meticulously compiled archives of everything Clifton.
Karen Finney, one of the volunteers describes Joy as the “Font of all knowledge”.
Describing how Joy “Knows everything in these books and cupboards, better than a computer.”
Barrie Jones, is another life member at the Clifton Museum who has worked Joy as long as he’s been at the museum.
Barrie initially found it difficult to describe Joy and what she means to the museum community.
“Where do you start...always a caring person, a wealth of knowledge,” he Said.
“People come in specifically to see Joy.”
Joy knows the archive because she largely put it together - if someone comes in with a name, Joy will likely find it.
Everything is cross-referenced in hard copy and pasted into a folder, listed by year, easy to find.
This and whatever comes of it, is because of Joy.
But when you ask Joy why she keeps coming back to the museum, as she does four days a week for four hours a day, she’ll tell you: “The old friends from 1952, the families my husband and I knew.”
She does it because this is her community, because she loves it, and because it brings Joy joy, to see the excitement on people’s faces when they discover something they didn’t know about their family’s history.
