Victorian Municipal Directory 1974 - Cranbourne Shire

Back in the olden days, well the late 1970s, when I did Librarianship at RMIT, we had to study various reference books so we knew where to look for information (this was long before the wonders of the Internet). One of these books was the Victorian Municipal Directory. The Directory lists each municipality and has a short paragraph on each town within the municipality. In 1974, there were over 130 Shires and around 60 Cities; many of these were amalgamated in the 1990s during the time of Local Government  reform (or Local Government destruction as some still view it).  Here are the pages from the 1974 Victorian Municipal Directory for the Cranbourne Shire. In the next post we will look at the entry for the City of Berwick.

A few things have changed - population of the entire Shire was only 18,000 and there were 5,440 dwellings. Cranbourne Shire is now divided between the City of Casey and the Cardinia Shire - the population combined (2011 Census) of Casey and Cardinia is around 350,000, so the geographic area of the old Shire of Cranbourne would currently have a population of around 200,000 - well above the 18,000 of 40 years ago! Click here for a Local Government timeline of the area. 

This list of staff is interesting as it was probably the entire 'indoor' staff  of the Cranboure Shire. Of the nearly 50 staff listed, 13 were the typists. The 'indoor' staff were the Office staff and the 'outdoor' staff worked in Parks and Gardens and at the Depot (road maintenance etc) 

You will notice in the list of towns that Clyde, Tooradin, Dalmore, Koo-Wee-Rup, Monomeith, Caldermead and Lang Lang still had  an operating Railway Station, part of the Great Southern Line. You will also notice that most of the towns still had  a Primary School - now Caldermeade, Catani, Dalmore, Heath Hill, Lyndhurst, Monomeith, Yallock and Yannathan have all lost their schools.

To see the entry for the City of Berwick in the 1974 Municipal Directory, click here.