ESSAYS ON BASS COAST LOCAL HISTORY

Taking the waters

14/10/2020

Postcard from the collection of the Inverloch Historical Society

By Eulalie Brewster

ONE hundred years ago, the townsfolk of Inverloch decided to build themselves a bathing enclosure for safer swimming in case of sharks in Anderson’s Inlet.

They held several working bees. Working at low tide, they made blocks of concrete. Then they set timber piles in the blocks with angled stay poles at the outer corners of the enclosure. During other low tides, they bolted two parallel rows of flat pieces of timber to the inner and outer sides of the piles, one at the top and one lower down. Finally they inserted upright lengths of milled timber between the two horizontal rows.

Thus the townsfolk had a safe bathing place.

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The inside track

1/10/2020

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A 1957 Holden FE on 24 per cent Test Hill at the Holden Proving Ground the year it opened. Photo with acknowledgement to Harold Ingamells and the Holden Retirees Club

By Hugh Videion

I’D BEEN an engineer at Holden for 24 years when I was appointed manager of the Proving Ground at Lang Lang. It proved to be one of the best jobs I ever had in my 43-year career with Holden!

Every new Holden since the 48/215 model was subjected to a rigorous and extensive testing program before its release to the public. In the early 1950s, General Motors - Holden recognised that using public roads to test vehicles under controlled conditions was unsustainable in the long term, and that a purpose built test facility was essential for the development of its future models.

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Weekends at Remo

14/9/2020

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Kevin Chambers, Bonwicks Beach, 1986

By Kevin Chambers

FOR nigh on 70 years, Western Port – and especially San Remo – has been an integral and lasting part of my life. It started in 1952 when my parents, Ernie and Florence ‘Fofo’ Chambers, bought an old shack from “the wilds” of Thomastown, put it on a low loader and plonked it down in Edgar Road, San Remo.

I remember that day, cos Mum took five-year-old me to a nearby park and, because the swings were not properly anchored, I promptly came a cropper. This building and the subsequent extension, was the genesis of our families 60 years of owning holiday houses in ‘Remo’.

My parents and the guests they entertained were a sociable lot, resulting in the unofficial house name of ‘Hangover House’. By dint of the fact that Ernie was a very good pub pianist, this situation extended to either the bottom or the middle pubs. Some unkind soul may have suggested that our place at Edgar Road was the top pub.

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The first encounter

2/9/2020

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The diary of Captain Pierre-Bernard Milius gives us a rare window into the world of the Bunurong people in Bass Coast before European settlement.

By Pat Macwhirter

IN 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte sent two ships out to Australia as part of the Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, led by Nicolas Baudin. In April, a party of explorers from one of the ships, Le Naturaliste, surveyed Western Port.

Four years earlier George Bass and his crew had seen fires burning on the cliffs on the eastern side of the bay. Now the French explorers finally met with Bunurong people, close to what is now Settlement Point at Corinella.

The following extract, taken from my thesis, is based on diaries of the expedition.

‘Toolumn’s people, who were connected with the Bonkoolawal (Bass River) clan, may have seen the pale men in George Bass’ whale boat sail into Warn-mor-in. Bass named it ‘Western Port’, ‘from its relative situation to every known harbour on the coast.’ ‘Bass River’ was the name given to the stream the Bonkoolawal called ‘Yallock Weardon’ and the island ‘Corriong’ became ‘Phillip Island’ after the white peoples’ Governor.

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“Stand clear – here comes Mrs Gilmour!”

21/8/2020

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Annie Gilmour, photographed at Cape Paterson, where Gilmour Track was recently named in her honour.

By Catherine Watson

ANNIE Gilmour, as usual, hadn’t noticed the car she’d just run off the road and onto the nature strip, so naturally she had no idea that it was a police car. So she was confused when she got out of her car at the Cape Paterson car park and saw a policeman waving his arms and shouting at her.

And that’s when the campers got involved. They didn’t know the policeman but they did know Mrs Gilmour. She was the one who taught their kids to swim in the shallows of the bay, and fired up the boilers at the surf club so they could have a hot shower after their swim. Five pence a shower, with the funds going into the club’s coffers. Annie Gilmour was a legend at Cape.

As the policeman pulled out his notebook and pen, the campers started booing and hissing. More campers arrived to see what it was about and joined in. “Oh, forget it!” the copper said, and stormed away.

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In search of Truginini

13/8/2020

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Truginini, photographed in 1866. Photo: Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office

By Ian Hayward Robinson

CASSANDRA Pybus's new book about Truginini, a Nuenonne woman from Bruny Island, off the south-east coast of Tasmania, is of special relevance to Bass Coast residents, as one of the most fateful episodes of her life occurred right here, near the mouth of the Powlett River, when she and her four indigenous companions were responsible for the deaths of two white whalers, an action for which the two males in her party were subsequently hanged.

Truganini survived and became famous in her later years as “the last Tasmanian Aborigine”. That she was the “last” was of course wishful thinking on the part of the Tasmanian white population. According to the ABS, there are currently about 20,000 people of Aboriginal descent living in Tasmania. Truginini’s celebrity presence in Hobart lasted until her death in 1876, and, as we shall see, for many years beyond.

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Ciconte Close

28/7/2020

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The renaming of Ciconte Close honours Domenico and Fiorina Ciconte and their love of Wonthaggi.

By Carolyn Landon

CHANGING the name of a street in Wonthaggi – or anywhere – is quite a process. On February 6 2020, the Bass Coast Shire Place Naming Committee met to consider road naming, specifically re-naming the short southern section of Loch Street, in Wonthaggi.

Submissions for a new name had been called for a year earlier, in February 2019. In March Irene Williams, secretary of the Wonthaggi & District Historical Society, wrote a letter on behalf of the society requesting that the street be renamed either Ciconte Close or Lane or Place.

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Hospital clock ticks again

11/6/2020

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Michael Jones (left) and Mike Linsell with Wonthaggi Hospital's
old staff time clock

By Brad Lester

FOR decades, an old time staff clock sat in a Wonthaggi Hospital workshop after being used possibly 100 years ago.

Just last week, the clock ticked again thanks to the magic of Bass Coast Health maintenance man Mike Linsell.

Mike fashioned a new part to replace a broken bit, enabling the pendulum to swing once again and the hands to move.

“We were pretty excited when we got the clock going again,” Mike said.

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All stand for the Magistrate!

28/5/2020

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Bachelors' Camp Wonthaggi, 1915. Postcard: State Library of Victoria.
The camp was home to several thousand single men.

By Carolyn Landon

IN 1911 Wonthaggi was trying hard to become a respectable town. Early in that year it became a borough, which meant that the Progress Association gave way to the Borough Council in making decisions about the goings on in the town. The council took responsibility for: supporting Dr Lancelot Sleeman in administering vaccinations to all children on the first Monday in the month from 2 to 4 pm, under the Victorian Vaccination Act; setting fees for collection of ‘pans’; making regulations about stray dogs; distributing licences for men’s clubs; supporting new businesses and making demands of the state government to supply the town with an adequate number of police, among other things.

The need for more police was apparent on New Year’s Eve 30 December 1910. Wonthaggi was a town of just over 4000 people. Most were single men, many married but with wives nowhere in sight. On this particular New Year’s Eve, according to The Sentinel Times, groups of ‘Sports’ gathered together and indulged in carol singing. They sang “We won’t go home until morning” at top volume and it was reported “a few didn’t reach home until afternoon, but no bones were broken”.

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History in the making

2/4/2020

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The Influenza Epidemic, Melbourne. Wood engraving by George Ashton. Published by David Syme & Co, 1890. Courtesy of State Library of Victoria

By Libby Skidmore

WE ARE living through interesting times. I hope that we are recording events and impressions of these times.

Here at the Bass Valley Historical Society, our most valuable archives are those first-hand accounts of events as they happen. We have an ear witness account of the explosion of Krakatoa volcano by Harold Hughes in 1883 when he was in Derby as a surveyor. We have the daily accounts and letters of the 1826 settlement at Corinella. We even have the more recent accounts of efforts to save the Corinella Jetty.

Photos and cuttings, artefacts and ephemera – all are valuable and worth collecting and recording.

Imagine in 50 years’ time someone finding our archive and exclaiming at our efforts to protect our community during the COVID-19 epidemic!

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The deadliest epidemic

2/4/2020

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An Australian soldier returning from the battlefields of World War 1 in early 1919 is welcomed home by relatives who are taking no chances.

By Carolyn Landon

“SPANISH Flu” or “La Grippe”, the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, was a global disaster that killed more people than the Great War, and more people in a single year than four years of the Black Plague 300 years earlier.*

It erupted in the world just as the First World War was ending and soldiers were being de-mobbed en masse from Europe back to their home countries. Of course, towns like Wonthaggi were preparing for welcoming celebrations of each returned soldier. A few such celebrations were reported in late 1918 as the first soldiers began to trickle back home.

On November 29 1918, the Sentinel reported that Private George Wall, who had been gone since 1914, returned home to Wonthaggi on the morning train:

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Here's to the old Tech

23/1/2020

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By Carolyn Landon

NEXT week the students and teachers of Wonthaggi Secondary College move to a sparkling new school. Not quite a century earlier, 110 eager pupils assembled for the opening of Wonthaggi’s first post-primary school

Wonthaggi Technical School, a weatherboard building on Watt Street, first opened its doors to students on Monday February 6 1922. The Powlett Express called the opening “successful” with an attendance of about 110 eager pupils who were “assembled and arranged according to grade”.

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Wonthaggi's first business

6/11/2019

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This fragment of memories was found among the papers of Jim Glover, a founder of the Wonthaggi & District Historical Society. It is written in the vernacular of the day and gives us a sense of actually being in the past, listening to a man tell a story.

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‘A simple happening so natural yet so remarkable’

25/10/2019

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Summerland beach where the largest numbers of penguins come in at night, 1920s. All photos from the Phillip Island & District Historical Society collection.

Visiting a remote Phillip Island beach in 1926 in search of nautilus shells, Raymond Grayden could not have imagined that one day this beach would draw thousands of tourists each evening to view the little penguins.

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Wonthaggi's book of dreams

11/10/2019

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Unless specified, all quotes come from Wonthaggi and District Post-War Reconstruction Plan written by Wonthaggi District Trades and Labor Council, published as WWII ended.

By Carolyn Landon

THE years between the wars – 1919 to 1939 – were hard years for the working man in Australia. After the First World War, the British Government sent Otto Niemeyer, a London banker, to tell Australia how to get out of debt. His advice was to slash government funding and wages by 30 per cent.

“The State Coal Mine began sacking many miners and cut wages,” Lyn Chambers wrote in a history of the Wonthaggi Miner’s Union Women’s Auxiliary. “It wasn’t long before they stopped improving safety in spite of thirteen miners being killed between 1930 and 1933. The Union called a strike in 1934 that lasted for five months.”

During that time, the miners and the community rallied together to keep their families’ heads above water. They created a committee that oversaw sub-committees for Relief (wood, clothing, food, fuel), Propaganda (speakers to explain conditions and raise funds), Entertainment (raising funds for food and alleviating stress), and Distribution (sharing food to each according to family size).

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Cemetery historian in good company

27/9/2019

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FORMER Bass Coast mayor Pamela Rothfield’s history of the Phillip Island cemetery has been shortlisted for the Victorian Community History Awards.

Ms Rothfield, who is secretary of the cemetery trust, has researched and documented the first 73 occupants of the Phillip Island cemetery.

In an article published in the Post earlier this year, she relates that her interest in her own family history expanded into an interest in other pioneer families and the stories held by their descendants.

“I led a few walking tours of some of the graves and found there was great interest in these walks and a desire to know more about our pioneers and the lives they had led.

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Before the State Coal Mine

31/8/2019

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Wonthaggi's first settlers, the Davies-Griffiths Family

By Bronwen Davies-Griffith

IN DECEMBER 1878 just months after his arrival in Australia, Welshman Llewellyn Rhun Davies-Griffith applied for allotment 20 in the Parish of Wonthaggi. It consisted of more than 318 acres and he received his Crown grant for it in September 1889. He also applied for the 19 acres in nearby allotment 32a. He received his Crown grant for this place in May 1898.

He and Georgina Hull were married at All Saints Church, St Kilda, in 1880 and made their home on allotment 32a half a mile from Clump Tree Hill in the Parish of Wonthaggi. Six of their seven sons were born while they lived there. Llewellyn and Georgina's Wonthaggi home was a six-roomed weatherboard and plastered house with an iron roof and front verandah. They had four acres of cultivated orchard and gardens, stockyards, sheds, hut and fencing and two waterholes.

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The Criterion cartoonist

2/8/2019

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THE Criterion was Wonthaggi’s short-lived first newspaper. These front-page editorial cartoons by Cyril Dobbs were published during 1910.

Little is known about Dobbs. According to a citation on Design and Art Australia Online, he contributed to the Bullletin and drew cartoons for a publication called the Gadfly in 1907 when, aged 17, he was living in Melbourne.

If the dates are correct, it means that he was just 20 when he did these cartoons for The Criterion. His connection to Wonthaggi is unknown, but he was clearly pro-union, pro-Labor and pro-miner and anti-capitalist.

This essay was first published in The Plod, the newsletter of the Wonthaggi & District Historical Society.

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A walk on the wild side

5/7/2019

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The Gurdies Conservation Reserve. Photo: Dick Wettenhall

Mr Bonney's friends jokingly called it The Wilderness but this settler made a wise choice when he selected scrub-covered land at The Gurdies in the 1880s.

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Guaranteed to cure

18/6/2019

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By Carolyn Landon

THERE are more people in Wonthaggi this winter coughing and sneezing and blowing and generally taking to their beds than I can remember anywhere. They say it’s been a bad year for the flu: the hospitals and care centres have been declared off-limits to visitors and people have been going around wearing masks or staying home and not going around at all.

Maybe this small selection of advertisements from the local papers of early Wonthaggi will make us all – including me – feel better.

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An Inverloch holiday in grand style

15/6/2019

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Guests at afternoon tea on the lawn of Pine Lodge, 1930s

By John Hutchinson and Ray Burtt

IF PINE Lodge still existed, it would be the prime historic building in Inverloch, yet its fame would go wider. The story of Pine Lodge and the visionary who built it during the Great Depression are legendary.

Sitting on seven acres at the comer of Ramsey Parade and Scarborough Street, it cost a reputed $40,000 to build in 1930. It was built on what was known as Graham’s Pine Paddock by Calvert Wyeth, better known as Cal Wyeth. Wyeth had trained as a pilot in World War One but the Great War finished before he could challenge the enemy with his new flying skills.

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That’s what Wonthaggi people are like!

30/5/2019

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Rod Churchill became absorbed by the intricacies of pigeon racing

Racing pigeons was considered a working class pastime, just right for the working men of Wonthaggi.

By Rod Churchill

I’LL TELL a little story. I was born on a farm at Kilcunda. We had pigeons on the farm and so I brought a few of them into Wonthaggi when my parents sold the farm. I started playing cricket with the Workmen’s Club. There were a number of people in the team who raced pigeons.

It took me a while to become interested in pigeons because I was really into cars, racing cars. Back in those days, I had the fastest car around. If you had a fast car, blokes used to come from other towns to see if they could beat you. We used to go out to the Korumburra Road, which was straight and flat and a quarter mile. One Saturday night I was dragging this fellow from Traralgon. There would be cars on either side of the road and we would be dragging down the middle of the road. Well, I finished in front and when I got to the end of the run there were these blue lights flashing. All of a sudden I was pulled over. And who got out of the car but Terry Weir and Billy Studham, two Wonthaggi Policemen. I played cricket with them. And I knew they raced pigeons.

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A young man and his truck

2/4/2019

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Fred Webb in his shed, now used by Wonthaggi Secondary College.

By Carolyn Landon

This is the story of a man whose cleverness and energy helped to shape Wonthaggi. Fred Webb hasn’t been around since 1985, but his presence is felt every day when the mine whistle blows in the middle of town to signal midday, or whenever anyone passes “Webb’s Shed” in McKenzie Street.

This essay is based on a speech Fred gave about his life in Wonthaggi called “A Young Man and his Truck”, plus additional information taken from an essay, Red Wonthaggi, by Carol Cox (Bass Coast Post, November 1, 2014), and Kit Sleeman's explanation of red stone in his PLOD essay Drains (June 6, 2016).

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Reminiscences of The Gurdies

8/3/2019

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The Gurdies by Ethel Pike, 1970s

By Florence Guilfoyle

I WAS born at the Gurdies in 1897. My father, Henry Edwards Cole, a surveyor who later worked on the Wonthaggi line, had a property which backed on to the Hurdy Gurdy creek. I had four brothers, twins born in 1893 and two younger brothers.

My grandfather William Henry Cole from Harrow in England was a pioneer of the Hurdy Gurdy and went there in 1885. He lived in a wattle and daub hut on the bank of the creek. Over his hut he planted a grape vine which bore luscious purple grapes for many years.

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At home on the hill

21/2/2019

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Phillip Island Cemetery. Photo: Geoff Ellis

Pamela Rothfield’s meticulous history of the first 73 occupants of the Phillip Island cemetery provides a moving snapshot of this fledgling society: the vulnerability of babies, children and pregnant women, the prevalence of depression, the high rate of death by accident.

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