Victorian artefacts

Victorian Collections is a central portal to the cultural treasures held by museums and galleries distributed across Victoria. Culture Victoria is its sister site.
It is also a free collections management system for Victoria’s cultural organisations and a tool for students, researchers and curious minds.

It has photo entries you can browse, if you hover over an image you get the text description. And we aren’t necessarily talking about promoting your entire collection, you could have some of your most interesting, unique items, enough to tantalise a browser to enquire further and contact you.

a sample page - St Arnaud

Calico flour bag from Bruntons Flour Mill, Rupanyup

Victorian Collections is free for collecting organisations within Victoria. It is designed for Public Organisations not Private Collections, and is a complete, industry-standard cataloguing tool for organisations of all shapes and sizes.


Organisations can bulk-load onto the VC database, and VC do not impose file size limits, and can support most file types, be they audio oral histories, videos or image files. 

Files are provided under Creative Commons licence for non-commercial use. The filea can also be harvested by Trove.

The Dimboola Banner

Here is the third and final post on the Wimmera Stories from Culture Victoria - 'The Dimboola Banner, communicating history'.

The first issue of the Dimboola Banner newspaper rolled off the presses on 10th May in 1879. 
It was printed by Henry Barnes and edited by his brother William.
Many proprietors and editors have come and gone since. 
Now more than 130 years on, the Banner is still published weekly, and maintains an office in Dimboola, though the paper is now printed in Warracknabeal.

An Elliott Addressing Machine

The Banner building has been acquired by the Dimboola & District Historical Society, and transformed into a Newspaper & Letterpress Printing Museum. 
The museum owns and operates a diverse collection of vintage presses, all in working condition. 
It preserves a wealth of print relics, including a vast amount of loose type from the long-gone era of handset typography.

See the full story, archival photographs, and video at the Culture Victoria site.

Nhill Aeradio Station

Here is the second of the Wimmera Culture Victoria stories – 'Nhill Aeradio Station: navigating safely'.

The Nhill Aeradio Station building

In the largely flat, expansive landscape surrounding the town of Nhill in the Wimmera,the Aeradio beacon tower was a prominent landmark.

The Nhill Aeradio Station was a part of a vital national network established in 1938 to provide critical communications and navigation support for an increasing amount of civil aircraft. Situated at the half-way point of a direct air-route between Adelaide and Melbourne, Nhill was an ideal location for an aeradio station and was one of seventeen such facilities originally built across Australia and New Guinea by Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd (AWA) under contract from the Commonwealth Government.

After the station became operational in 1938, planes flying between Adelaide and Melbourne were frequently diverted to land at Nhill in the event of bad weather at one of the capital city airports, and grounded aircraft also stopped for refueling immediately adjacent to the Aeradio Station.

The Station was equipped with state-of-the-art communications equipment, much of which was designed and built in Australia by AWA. Transmitters and receivers worked on the high-frequency range, and operators communicated with airline pilots via microphone or, when atmospheric conditions created high levels of interference,via morse-key. Nhill’s identification was “NH Nhill”.

The Nhill station had a separate Power House for its generators, designed and built to a standard specification.
The Lorenz Beacon was the centre-piece of the navigation system at the station. Originally, the beacon was mounted on top of a steel tower, but this created problems with electric static and the steel tower was soon replaced with a wooden structure.

The Lorenz RadioRange aural beacon was replaced in 1952 with a VAR Visual Aural Range beacon.
When a new VHF communication network at Mt William in the Grampians rendered it obsolete, the Nhill station was decommissioned.

The new radio navigation beacon from the station verandah

Today,the station building is the Nhill Apex Clubrooms on the western boundary of the Aerodrome. The adoption of the building by the Apex Club was critical in preventing its likely demolition after the closure of the Aeradio facility in 1971.

The building survives today in remarkably original condition, and current work is being undertaken by the Nhill Aviation Heritage Centre group to restore the Aeradio Building and interpret its story as part of a local aviation museum.

 See the full story, archival photographs, and video at the Culture Victoria site.

The Wimmera's Stick Shed

The first of the 'Wimmera stories' on the Culture Victoria site - the Murtoa Stick Shed: enduring ingenuity.

In 1941, the outbreak of the Second World War and a worldwide glut of wheat necessitated the construction of large bulk grain stores in various parts of regional Victoria. The “Murtoa Stick Shed” was commissioned by the Grain Elevators Board, and Green Bros contractors undertook construction of what was officially known as Marmalake/Murtoa Grain Store No.1. An elevator at one end took wheat up to then ridge level where it was distributed by conveyor along the length of the shed,creating a huge single mound of grain.

A shortage of steel meant that the shed was built largely from timber readily available at the time, most notably some 560 (56 rows of 10) bush-cut mountain ash poles erected straight into the ground. Some of the poles were 19-20 metres high. Concrete panels were then poured around the poles. The roof and walls of the Murtoa Stick are made of corrugated iron painted ferric red. Much of the building was done with little mechanical aid, and most of the workforce was away fighting overseas.

Constructing the Stick Shed

The “Murtoa Stick Shed” demonstrates Australian ingenuity during a time of hardship, it was constructed over a period of only four or five months, commencing in September 1941.

The side conveyor

Bulk deliveries of grain were distributed through the Stick Shed via a system of mechanical elevators and conveyors, including a central conveyor running high along the centre of the shed.

Elevators transported wheat from delivery hoppers up to ridge level where it was distributed by conveyor along the length of the shed, creating a huge single mound of grain. Braced internal timber bulkheads on either side of the shed took the lateral thrust of the wheat, and a conveyor at ground level outside the south bulkhead took wheat back to the elevator for transport elsewhere. The roof angle was sloped to reflect the same angle a pile of wheat forms naturally.

The shed is 280m long (the length of five Olympic swimming pools), 60m wide and 19m high at the ridge, and had capacity to store 95,000 tonnes (or 3.4 million bushels) of grain.

Deliveries of bulk wheat commenced in January 1942, and by June of that year the grain store was at full capacity.

The Marmalake/Murtoa Grain Store is the earliest and only remaining of three large sheds of an unusually grand scale of the Australian rural vernacular corrugated-iron tradition built in Victoria during the early 1940s.

Use of the No.1 shed and the larger No.2 shed, erected in 1942/43, continued for many years. (Original plans also included a No.3 Shed at Murtoa, but this was never completed.) The No.2 shed was demolished in 1975. The No. 1 shed was also becoming increasingly expensive to maintain, and its use was phased out by 1989.

 

The 560 unmilled tree trunks supporting the roofing timbers and iron of the Stick Shed might be viewed as a peculiar, symmetrically arranged “interior forest”. With its vast, gabled interior and long rows of poles the interior space has been likened to the nave of a cathedral.

When the Stick Shed ceased to be used for grain storage after 1989, plans were made for its demolition. However an Interim Preservation Order was served by Historic Buildings Council (HBC) in December 1989 and by December 1990 the shed had been added to the Historic Buildings Register. Debate continued over subsequent years, with frequent calls for the demolition of the building from some sources and persistent arguments for its preservation from others.

Netting over the ferric red roof

Ultimately, the Heritage Council of Victoria undertook a large-scale program of work to stabilise and repair the Stick Shed, including the repair of damaged poles and installation of galvanised wire “netting” to cover the entire roof area. Work is being undertaken to provide permanent public access to the Shed, separated from the activity of the surrounding grain receival complex. Application has also been made to have the Stick Shed added to the Commonwealth Heritage Register.
See the complete story with photos and video at the Culture Victoria site.

Wimmera stories launch

Eleanor & Paula admire the displays

Three stories relating to the Wimmera region were launched at an event in Murtoa on Saturday.

The launch was part of the Murtoa Lions Club's Afternoon Tea function - a high tea to celebrate the beauty of years gone by, where guests were invited to come dressed in the vintage theme.

There were also lessons on correct dinner-table etiquette, antique appraisals and displays of object d'art, family handicrafts and heirlooms.

A cooperative venture with Culture Victoria, Heritage Victoria and the Library, the stories are now live on the Culture Victoria site.

Culture Victoria is an organisation dedicated to digitising and making available our cultural assets. The Culture Victoria site provides access to Victorian cultural collections through stories that showcase the richness and diversity of Victoria, and via a collections search facility across the websites and databases of Victorian acquisitive organisations and collections.

Malcolm editing the story images

Documentary film-maker Malcolm McKinnon, has been working with the local organisations involved with each story, creating a number of still photographs and short video, to be coupled with historic images to produce social histories on the local environment.

More on each story in the following posts.