Up with The Times

A great Christmas present for the local community.
After anticipating this milestone for a couple of years, the time has finally come -
The Horsham Times newspaper is now on the historic Australian Digitised Newspapers site.
More than six million historical Australian newspaper pages have been digitised, indexed and are now fully searchable on the National Library of Australia's TROVE site.
The aim of the Australian Newspaper Digitisation Program is to provide a range of metropolitan and regional newspapers from across Australia. The newspapers have to have been microfilmed, as it is the film which is digitised, and to have been originally published prior to 1955 (copyright provisions still exist for material published from 1955 onwards).

The 'Ararat Advertiser' undergoing quality assurance

The process uses a master copy of the microfilm which is scanned by a contracting firm. Each newspaper page image is then quality assured by real humans (a time consuming and repetitive operation) and then sent to an OCR Optical Character Recognition contractor, this is the action which makes the image content searchable, and truly useful.

Major newspapers have been available for some time, and checking The Argus has found a whole range of local information which made the national news, but now with The Times so much more is available. The digitised copies cover the period from  Tuesday 17th January 1882 to Wednesday 30th December 1953.

The first digitised issue - Tuesday 17 January 1882

The front page on Friday 13th in 1950 has the library article - "Free Library To Open Soon The City Council hopes to be able to open the Horsham Free Library soon. At the council meeting on Tuesday night, Cr. T. Conroy reported that good progress was being made with the work at the library. It was hoped to have the library open soon. When asked by the Mayor (Cr. Bennett) for an opening date, Cr. Conroy said that he was unable to set a date." 
This relates when the City Council took over the existing subscription library (free being the costs were to be financed from rate revenue and all residents could use the library), and closed the Mechanics Institute building for extensions and renovations.
This new resource is going to be a great boon to both family researchers and local historians. The Horsham Times section is at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/title/225 
Check it out for yourself

Front page, Friday 13 October 1950

A lesson in teaching

Have been collating information on the local schools, chiefly from "Vision & Realisation" (the history of state education in Victoria), and have come across all sorts of snippets of information and have found a new appreciation of the trials and tribulations for the children and teachers in some of those rural schools.

from Victorian Government Gazette 15 May 1885

The best one so far concerns the Boyeo school -

Boyeo School No. 2577 (formerly Tarranginnie North became Boyeo in 1888) opened in February 1884 in a temporary building with an iron roof, timber floor, 2 doors & 1 window built by selectors, on Patterson’s selection. A 2 acre site was gazetted 15.5.1885, near the southeast corner of a block largely taken up by a large swamp. In 1885 the Department erected a timber building with an attached four-room residence. An underground tank was provided in 1887. In 1898 permission was given to construct an underground room to combat the excessive heat. By 1910 in an unusually wetter year, the school was completely surrounded by water. Children arrived in boats or waded knee-deep (the school closed from September until January). It finally closed in February 1944. 

This is essentially the published article submitted by Joan Pickering. Fortunately the Library also has her book "Tarranginnie Schools" which has a section devoted to the Boyeo school.

The swamp - interesting to park a school near it - in 1909 the teacher Janet McVicar found "the school is almost surrounded by a swamp and the flies and other insects are often so troublesome that the children have to work in a state of torment", she was requesting a wire door & wire windows.

The flood of August 1910 led to the school becoming an island, some parents refused to send their children till the water receded. A month later the school closed when the water rose to cover the schoolhouse floor, entered the outlet pipe of the underground tank, polluting it. The water fell at the end of the year, but rose again with February rains. There were several attempts to shift the school but with no agreement, it remained perched on the edge of the swamp.

The Boyeo Swamp with the school site circled

At the other extreme - The underground room was requested by the teacher Thomas Posser as his wife and child had found the heat so intense he had been obliged to send them away to Western Port. He proposed to excavate 8' square by 6' deep with wooden steps leading down, a roof of iron with hessian beneath, with a draught pipe, and whitewashed walls. The Department did not object, provided he filled the hole in should he cease teaching at the school.

Boyeo School in the late 1880s

Like many other small schools Boyeo suffered from bouts of measles, whooping cough and scarletina. The children (with assistance) tended a school garden and trees for Arbor Days (they won the prize for best garden). And finally like most rural schools it succumbed to declining attendance and closed in 1944, and the school building was sold at auction in Kaniva.