Now & Then

"Now and Then" is a photography project - with a twist - an old photograph is held up in front of a modern scene at the same place and a new photo of it is taken, to tell a story of past moments and how times have changed.

The top end of Firebrace Street

Inspired by the Flickr group "Looking into the Past", "Now and Then" uses a photography technique that has become popular around the world.

Maitland in the 1955 flood & in 2010, from Flickr's "Looking into the past"

In association with the Horsham Historical Society and the Horsham Library, Larissa Romensky is conducting a workshop for those who want to be part of "Now and Then". The workshop will be at the Horsham Historical Society in Pynsent Street, Horsham, on Sunday 4th March from 2:30pm to 5:00pm. For bookings call 5381 5341 or email abcopen.wimmera@abc.net.au

Horsham Post Office

"Now and Then" images contributed to ABC Open are seen nationally and internationally, and could even end up on ABC TV. The challenge is to create a window into the past by photographing an old photo in its current setting, and some people have been truly creative in this aspect!

A favourite Frank Hurley image was taken at this location, &  remixed - one from the same location, with one of Frank Hurley's, from Flickr Looking into the Past

Serviceton now 125

The Serviceton community are celebrating the town's 125th anniversary this weekend (25th and 26th February).
Over the weekend there will be a number of celebrations, including the Annual Bowls Tournament, the cutting of a Celebrations Cake on Saturday evening, tours of the historic Railway Station building, the official opening of the refurbished Community Clubrooms, an ecumenical Church service, and a shared basket luncheon on Sunday.
Serviceton is a small township in the far west. In its heyday it was a major border crossing and customs post  for Victoria and South Australia in the disputed territory (when a surveying error recorded the border at Serviceton, nearly 4 kms east of the present border). The town spawned a post office, school, general stores, chemist, bricklayer, butcher, hairdresser and a plumber (only the store remains). 

The Railway Station remains the town's main attraction. The Victorian and South Australian railways joined in 1887, while the station opened in 1889. The huge three-storey building was constructed with Horsham-made brick on a grand Victorian scale, and the 15 rooms included a kitchen, large refreshment room, dining area, booking rooms for Victoria and South Australia, general waiting areas and a customs office. Below in the basement are large storage cellars, guard rooms, a mortuary and dungeon for prisoners being transported interstate.

The Serviceton railway station closed in March 1986, while trains still pass it on the main Melbourne to Adelaide line. 

Eye of the storm at Horsham

Headline from 'The Argus' newspaper 22.11.1897

The 1897 storm followed a week of moist, oppressive heat, that day the storm was preceded by a hot north wind and dust, then a huge fall in the barometer and an 'ominous appearance in the heavens'. The wind increased in velocity and force, heavy rain fell simultaneously and the atmosphere was charged with dust. For Horsham, the storm hit at 5:20pm with 5 minutes of activity, then about 10 minutes lull, then a second blow.  Murky darkness struggled with a fierce unnatural light.
The Horsham Times said there was scarcely a shop or house that had not been damaged; a wrecked coal shed at the gas works; demolished grandstands at the showgrounds & racecourse; the Union mill in Wilson St wrecked apart from the machinery room & smoke stack; Gillies' Wimmera mill suffered £500 loss; all the White Hart Hotel's balcony & railings and part of the roof were torn away; Delaney's coach works in Firebrace St wrecked; the butter factory was blown a few feet out of plumb, a stained glass window and altar crucifix at the Catholic Church were smashed and an oil painting torn to tatters; the Town Hall also had broken windows; a timber beam hurled through the roof of the Mechanics Institute and onto the stage; £150 damage to the botanical gardens, and £200 to headstones & monuments in the cemetery.

George Abbott's 'Horsham Pottery' was destroyed in the storm

Peoples’ stories – John Murray a railway clerk & telegraph operator was concussed and badly bruised when he fell while chasing 2 railway trucks blown along the tracks by the wind; Dr Ritchie, his groom, horse & buggy were thrown into the gutter, righted by another gust, and blown back into the gutter again; a student at Longerenong College was blown into a barb-wire fence partially stunning him; James Glenister was hit on the side of his head by bricks falling from a chimney; A lady & girl driving across the Common were blown out of their buggy and over a high fence; Mrs Fincham of the National Bank had a huge window (frame & glass) precipitated upon her.

St John's Lutheran Church in Darlot St was rebuilt after being destroyed in the November 1897 cyclone (it had only been built 9 years previous & wasn't fully paid for). The half-hour storm brought damaging hail, 200km per hour winds and 17mm of rain, causing extensive damage across Horsham.

Nhill and the 1897 cyclone

"Friday November 19th 1897 will live in the memory of every Nhill resident till the longest day of his life by reason of an event unprecedented and almost unparalleled in the district, aye, and even the Colony."
Before the Storm, for several days intense heat had prevailed averaging over 100 degrees in the shade. Friday opened quietly, though early in the morning the wind began to rise, and, increasing in violence as the day advanced, raged at hurricane force during the afternoon, and the air was filled with dust. All wished for the trying weather to culminate in a thunderstorm. These hopes were realised when about 4 o'clock, banks of cloud rose slowly above the horizon in the northwest. The firmament had a lurid portentous appearance which deepened as the general canopy of heaven became obscured. The whole sky assumed this red and hazy hue, imparting a terribly weird and ominous appearance. Shortly before 5 o'clock these strange elemental phenomena increased to become positively awe-inspiring and a premonition of coming disaster struck the hearts of the inhabitants. Just on 5 from out of the lurid heavens a rapidly revolving and fast approaching white circular column was observed, it burst upon the town with all it's roar and fury with overwhelming force - huge buildings were lifted bodily and thrown shattered to the ground, some avere that fire balls played over the store and burst like incandescent bomb shells, the rain came down in torrents and vivid lightning played with dreadful menace. After a most fearful 15 or 20 minutes the violence decreased, but the town presented a truly dilapidated and desolate appearance, and great were the lamentations when the full extent of the damage was ascertained.
The main street had evidently suffered most, the east side of Victoria St was so terribly battered and partially demolished as to almost unrecognisable, not a verandah was left standing, many shop fronts were bashed in, and doors and windows were literally "nonest".
Kozminsky's Commercial Hotel, standing right on the corner evidently was hard hit, but, being the splendid edifice it is, it withstood the force of the cyclone gallantly, though the brick work ridging was blown in, and a large portion of the roof through which the raion poured.
 

The east side of Victoria Street - the red brick Commercial Hotel (left) & billiard room, Smith's fruit shop, Harris' store, Commercial Bank (centre)

M. Harris' general store received terrible damage and the front portion demolished while stock was badly damaged. Mr T. Smith's fruit shop (Formed a portion of Harris' building) suffered. The Commercial Bank was very severely hit, the upper portion being rendered unsafe (the windows gave in at the first blast and the windswept with hurricane fury demolishing the furniture and lifting the doors from their hinges. Masses of plaster and bricks fell in, and altogether the interior was in a most deplorable condition).

The west side of Victoria Street - Terry's chemist (left), Bree's boot shop, and the remains of the Farmer's Arms billiard room.

The Farmer's Arms Hotel (on the corner) and its outbuildings were pretty well destroyed, struck with awful force, portions of the roof and sides were lifted and dashed against the other side of the street with destructive force. The adjoining billiard room lay in ruins, and Bree's boot shop and Terry's chemist shop were both terribly knocked about.

In Nelson Street - Ryan & Bond's large auction rooms had not a single spar left standing, all being totally wrecked, the whole row including 2 empty shops, office, Wheare's coach-building factory & O'Dougherty's bakery were destroyed.

Amazingly, a providential preservation of life marked the whole event, but there were many narrow escapes and serious accidents. Mrs Graham with her child in her arms opened her door to the full blast and both were whirled right out of the place, carried over the sand hill, and when she regained her senses she was still grasping her infant 150 yards from the house (the child was so greatly affected it did not recover consciousness for a long time). J. Nealy the blacksmith was working at his forge when the whole place was blown about his head and the stripper he was repairing was blown over the top of him, pinning him to the ground with a broken leg and dislocated ankle.
Text from "Nhill & the 1897 cyclone", and photos from "Nhill's fabulous century".

THE storm of 1897

I am compiling a list of all the schools which have existed in this area, using the mighty tome Vision & realisation as the chief source of information.
When working through the different entries, I started coming across a couple mentioning the storm/cyclone/hurricane of 1897.
Curiosity got the better of me and I went off at a tangent to discover the magnitude of the storm damage across the area, and in particular where it was mentioned in relation to school buildings.
As most of each of the school entries are only a paragraph long, if the storm rated a mention in the book, it had to have been a fairly momentous event in their history - it may be that more schools were damaged, but that it wasn't recorded at state level. I then created a map of each site to grasp the extent and breadth of the storm.


View 1897 storm in a larger map
Each place marker indicates a school which suffered damage in the storm. You can zoom in or out using and Google tool in the top left corner, and click on the place markers to learn more about each site.
Other posts will detail the storm damage to Horsham and to Nhill.

Perfect pictures

"Caring for your Photos and Documents" - Nick Selenitsch, Special Projects Conservator, from The University of Melbourne's Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation will conduct a workshop discussing the factors involved in the deterioration of fragile items such as photographs and paper documents. He will provide advice on how best to preserve your valuable collections.

Participants are invited to bring in examples of photographs or paper documents from their own archives for specific conservation advice during this workshop (there will also be a tour of the PROV repository).

The workshop will be held at Victorian Archives Centre/Public Records Office, 99 Shiel Street in North Melbourne, on Wednesday 22nd  February 2012, from 11:00am to 1:30pm. 
Register for this free workshop by booking online

Going Mobile

I have just changed this blog's template. For those readers who use a mobile phone device to access these posts, it should now fit into an appropriate screen layout instead of the old desktop style.
If you wish to see or access the links in the Sidebar, just use the View web version option at the bottom of the posts.
For those who view it via a PC, it will still appear in the desktop version.
What do you think??

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.