Shire of Cranbourne Bi-Centenary Parade March 1988

These photos are of the Shire of Cranbourne Bi-Centenary Parade, along High Street in Cranbourne, held March 1988. Groups from all around the Shire had a float. The Bi-Centenary was held to commemorate the 200 years of European settlement in Australia with the arrival of Governor Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet at Botany Bay in January 1788. In 1988,  Cranbourne was not quite the country town that it once was, but less populated and busy than it is today - certainly you could hardly imagine that they would shut down High Street today for a parade. Here's a look at Cranbourne's population* over the past 40 years -  in 1976 it was just over 5,000; 1986 the population was around 14,000; 1996 around 24, 000; 2006 around 37, 000 and 2016  around 67,000 - so you can see that in 1988 it was relatively small community.  I was given these photos and the person who gave them to me can't remember who took them, so if they are yours let me know -  and we can credit you as the photographer. 

This is Cr Bill Thwaites, presiding over the official part of the day

Taken outside McEwans (remember them?) at Cranbourne Park Shopping Centre which opened in 1979.

A Highland band

Another Highland Band

Cranbourne Municipal - can't read the rest of the sign - perhaps the Municipal bicycle band!

A bullock team

Melbourne  Hunt Club

Marching girls

More Marching girls

Koo-Wee-Rup Swamp Historical Society float

Girl Guides

Boy Scouts

Cranbourne Rotaract Club

Pony Club

Vehicles of all types - cars

Vehicles of all types - decorated caravan

Vehicles of  all types - horse and carriage

Vehicles of all types - motor cars

Vehicles of all types - New Holland Harvesters - built right here in Cranbourne at 

the Sperry New Holland plant

Vehicles of all types - the Muffin Truck man, and again, below - just to show some of  the shop fronts.

Vehicles of all types - Fire engines

Vehicles of all types - this is labelled 'Jack Rogers' 

  

 *These figures include all of Cranbourne including what is called today Cranbourne North, Cranbourne East and Cranbourne South. The population figures (apart form the 2016 population) come from Victorian Places.

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Technical Schools in the Casey Cardinia Region

This is a short history of Technical Schools in the Casey Cardinia Region

At first local students in this region, who wanted a Technical education, had to go to either Dandenong or Warragul. This paralled the early High School years where Dandenong High or Warragul High were the only choices in this region for higher education, until Koo-Wee-Rup High opened in 1957 and then a raft of schools in the 1960s and 1970s (click here for more information)

Dandenong Technical School was established in  1954 with an initial enrolment of 272 boys. The first classes were held in the Scout Hall on the Princes Highway until the school was built  in Cleeland Street. It was a more rural location than it is today as according to Vision and Realisation  'frequently, cattle being driven to the sale yards broke into the grounds and were rounded up by drovers and their dogs'  In 1964 the total enrolment of all students including day students, evening class students etc  was 2,000.  In 1974, the TAFE system (Technical and Further Education) was established and by 1973 Dandenong Technical school was a TAFE college and it is now part of Chisholm. However a new Dandenong Technical School was established in 1981 at 136 Cleeland Street according to Technical Education Victoria*

Here's an interesting account from Bill Carlson about his time at Dandenong Technical School.   Bill was interviewed by the Dandenong Journal in 2013  http://dandenong.starcommunity.com.au/uncategorized/2013-05-10/dandenong-tech-high-jinks-from-class-of-54/

If you lived at the eastern end (such as Bunyip) or southern end  (such as Lang Lang) of the region and wanted a Technical education then you could have gone to Warragul Technical School.
Warragul Technical School was established in 1956 according to Technical Education Victoria. However Vision and Realisation says that technical classes were instituted at Warragul High in 1953 and they separated into two buildings on the same site 1959. The 1959 enrolment was 290 students from Form 1 to Form 4 and 100 other students including senior students, apprentices and evening class students. In  1969 the total school population was 919.

In July 1971, the Bunyip and Garfield Express paper reported that the Garfield Progress Association advocated for a Technical School to be built in the town as they said that everyday 100 students catch the train to either Drouin or Warragul to further their education and there were 700 children travelling to secondary schools at this end of the Shire.   A Technical school was never established in Garfield but there was a report in February 1972 about Warragul Technical School going co-ed – there were 610 boys and 10 girls (all the girls specialised in art) The paper reported that the girls had settled into the school ‘in true women’s liberation fashion’ and ‘the order of the day is smart uniforms which contrasts pleasantly to the boys dress’ The Technical School and the High School combined in 1994 to form the Warragul Regional College.

This is the Bunyip Railway Station in the 1970s and shows the number of students travelling by train to school, as mentioned above. The train would have taken students to Drouin High, Warragul Tech and two Catholic Schools at Warragul- Marist Brothers and Our Lady of Sion, which combined in 1975 to become Marist Sion.  I put this photo on Facebook and one of the comments said that Marist Sion students were in the last carriage and the 'Tech kids' travelled in the next 2 carriages. Photo is from Call of the Bunyip: History of Bunyip, Iona and Tonimbuk by Denise Nest (Bunyip History Committee, 1990)

It is no surprise that with the establishment of the 'Big three' industries at Dandenong in the 1950s - International Harvestor, Heinz and General Motors Holden and the associated  businesses established in the area to supply parts, services and transport to these industries and thus the huge increase in population in Doveton, Hallam and Cranbourne North  that the other  Technical Schools in this region were centred at the western end.

The earliest of these was Doveton Technical School, established in  1963. Initially housed at Dandenong Tech it moved to it's permanent location in Box Street in 1964. Vision and Realisation reports that enrolments from 1963 to 1968 included students from Doveton, the area east of the Frankston-Dandenong Road, Narre Warren North, Beaconsfield, Pakenham East,  Koo-Wee-Rup, Korumburra, Lang Lang and Cranbourne.  Apart from the Doveton students they came by train to the Dandenong Railway Station and then caught a bus to the school. In 1967 the school began enrolling girls at Form One level.   Doveton Technical School later became Doveton Secondary College and it merged with Dandenong High School in 2008.

The site of Doveton North Technical College in 1968, the year before it opened.

Doveton  North Technical School opened in 1969.   Vision and Realisation  says that the school 'opened  with background sounds from croaking frogs and mooing cows, a vista of green paddocks and stately pines'! Initial enrolment was 37 (or 45 depending on sources). From 1974 it was called Endeavour Hills Technical School, then from 1990 Endeavour Hills Secondary College, then from 1993 Eumemmerring College Endeavour Hills campus, then in 2008 it changed back to Endeavour Hills Secondary College.   The school closed December 2012. You can read more about the school and see some more photos, here.

The last Technical School to open in the region was Cranbourne Meadows in 1981, this was a co-ed school however Technical Education Victoria, published in 1981, said that in 1983 the predicted enrolment would be 450 students, of which 100 would be girls, so clearly techical school education was still seen as something more boys than girls were interested in. The 1987 enrolment was 844. The school became Lyndhurst Secondary College, sometime in the 1990s.

*Technical Education Victoria 1983, published by TAFE Publications Unit, 1982.

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Year Book Australia

Past editions of the Year Book Australia are now on-line from 1908 to 2009. You can access them here on the Australia Bureau of Statistics website. The 'Official Year book of the Commonwealth of Australia' as they were called at one time were produced by the Commonwealth Statistician and they have statistics on all aspects of Australian life.  You may be thinking that you can't  see the relevance of this to your local or family history research, but they have a huge rang of interesting facts that you could add to your stories about your family or local area. So here's my story with some facts from the Year Books.

I was born in 1959, one of 226, 976 babies born that year. Of these babies there just over 5,100 were twin and 66 were triplets. I was one of the 110, 735 girls born and there were just over 116, 000 boys (including three of my cousins). The Year Book also tells us that of all these babies 10, 562 were born 'ex-nuptial' or out of wedlock. These days, of course, most people are not at all concerned about whether the parents of babies are married or not, but people thought differently then. It wasn't all good news however, as sadly the same year there were 3,231 still births and 4, 489 babies died under the age of one.

In 1959 the average number of 'nuptial confinements per marriage' was 2.93 i.e the average family had 3 children. I was the second child but by mid 1960 my younger sister was born - so that made the 3! The Year Book also tells us about the age of the parents of the children born - around 68,000 were aged between 20 and 24 and 67,000 between 25 and 29 - my mother was 24 (22 when she had my elder sister and 25 when my younger sister was born. She was what was considered then a rather ancient 29 when my brother was born in 1964!)  This was about standard as most women at the time had their second child when they were aged between 25 and 29. As a matter of interest, 489 women had their 10th (or more child) in 1959 - 200 of these mothers were aged between 35 and 44 but 32 were over 45! One woman was aged between 20 and 24 when she had her 10th child!

1959 births - one of these babies was me! Female and a single birth.

Year Book Australia 1961

Fathers on the other hand tended to be  a bit older, but generally most women aged between 20 and 29 who gave birth in 1959 had a husband not older than 29. In 1959, two thirds of women who were having their first child had been married less than 2 years - my aunty was one of these when she gave birth to her first child and my own parents were married just on a year when my sister had been born.

So let's now look at 1956 the year my parents were married. There were 71,780 people married that year of which around 29,000 of the men and 31, 000 of the women were aged between 20 and 24, which includes my parents. People did tend to marry at a much earlier age than today  - over 17, 000 women under 20 were married in 1956 and 2,700 men.  The Year Book also lists 'Marriages in each denomination'  12.66% of all marriages took place in the Presbyterian Church, including my parents; around 13% were Methodist weddings, 24% Catholic and just under 30% were Church of England or Anglican. Various other Christian religions had 8% of the total and 'Hebrew' or Jewish weddings were .38%.  No real surprises there given the make-up of the population at the time. The rest of the marriages or 11.28% were 'Civil Offices' - most likely at the Registry Office, the first 'civil celebrant' as we know them today was not appointed until 1973.

1956 marriages - my parents made up part of the 12.66% of Presbyterian marriages.

Year Book Australia 1958

What else can the Year Books tell you? The average weekly  wage for males and females,  number of  private cars and how many were registered in that year;  number of houses built and of what material; what sort of dwellings people lived in (private house - the definition of which also included sheds and huts - flats, licensed hotels); how many schools there were, number of people enrolled at University; agricultural production; countries were people were born, agricultural production - the list is amazing.

Have a look at  the Year Books and see what interesting information you can find about significant years in the life of your family or your local town.  You just need to remember that if you want specific statistics for  a certain year then you will may need to look in later years, for instance it was the 1961 Year Book that contained the 1959 birth statistics.   Click here for access to the on-line Year Books.

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Hallam Hotel

William and Mary Hallam purchased the 50 acres (20 hectares) of land  in 1856 on the corner of the Gippsland Road (Princes Highway) and Hallam Road. They established a store and a Post Office and the store was 'the genesis of the hotel' as Jean Uhl says in her book  Call back Yesterday: Eumemmerring Parish. I do not know when the Hallams were granted the licence but there is an article in the South Bourke and Mornington Journal of May 21, 1879  when Mr W. Hallam of Eumemmerring was charged in the Dandenong Police Court with 'not having a light outside his licenced house' (you can read the article here) so it was clearly operating as a hotel then. The Hallam Hotel website says it started in 1872 and this seems to be the general consensus from newspapers articles published on the history of the hotel in 1970s and 1980s, and I am not saying that this date is incorrect, but I can't find any evidence to support it.

The Hallams sold their land to Edmund Uren, in 1885.  This is confirmed by the following two articles in the South Bourke and Mornington Journal of March 11, 1885.

South Bourke and Mornington Journal   March 11, 1885

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page6745638

Deborah Stephan, in her booklet, Hallam 1830-1930, wrote this about Edmund Uren, who had purchased Hallam's property for 2,100 pounds - Uren was a Cornishman who arrived in Australia in 1856 and went into copper mining on the Buninyong district (Ballarat). He served three years on the Borough Council, one year as Mayor of Buninyong and three years as a member of the Ballarat Mining Board. On November 24 1886 Uren applied for a certificate authorising the issue of a victuallar's licence for premises situate at Eumemmerring, 'containing six rooms exclusive of those required for the use of my family and servants'. In June 1892 he described himself as the licensed victualler of Hallam's Hotel, Hallam Road near Dandenong, when conveying the property to his wife Elizabeth.

I don't know why  he had to apply for a victuallers licence as he already had one, but I suspect that he might have rebuilt the building as by 1886 the original premises would have been close to 30 years old.  You can see in the newspaper report, above, that the hotel was referred to as the Eumemmerring Hotel - Jean Uhl says that the hotel had  a variety of names including Hallam's Eumemmerring Hotel, Uren's Hallam Hotel, Uren's Hotel Eumemmerring and Hallam's Road Hotel.

Edmund Uren died in July 1892 and his wife, Elizabeth,  took over the licence. Elizabeth operated the hotel until June 1898 when  'Miss Clarkson was installed there' as the South Bourke and Mornington Journal said.  Ada Jane Clarkson owned the Hotel until March 1913. It then  had a succession of licensees including Eliza Bonnell, Sarah Wright and Mary Thomas who took over in 1921.

Hallam Hotel, before the 1930s remodelling

The Hotel started it's life as a one storey building and The Age reported on October 28, 1930 that existing building was to be modernised and extended.

The Age October 28 1930

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article202242862

The new hotel was opened in March the next year as the the Dandenong Journal of March 12, 1931 reported The new hotel has been completed; a handsome two story building, which has taken the place of the old hostel of the overlanding days.

Dandenong Journal March 12, 1931 

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article201082945

The Hallam Hotel in 1986

References: 

Hallam 1830-1930 by Deborah Stephan  (City of Casey Historical Pamphlet 2)

Call back yesterday: Eumemmering Parish by Jean Uhl  (Lowden Publishing 1972).

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