App for the Lost

 The National Trust's webpage begins with "Imagine if you could stand at the corner of Bourke and Exhibition Streets and see the Southern Cross Hotel as it was when the Beatles stayed there" then it goes on to tell you how you can view the hotel on 'Lost! 100 lost buildings of Melbourne' the Trust's iPhone app.
 In a period of mass destruction, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, historic buildings in Melbourne's CBD were being bulldozed at an appalling rate. At the time, such buildings were seen as useless relics, developers were going to erect better, more modern, utilitarian buildings in their place. But times change, and now we look back with regret at some of those decisions.
 Lost is a dynamic app that uses augmented reality to allow users a 3D understanding of some of Melbourne's most amazing lost and hidden heritage buildings. The interactive app enables users to "ghost" - visually overlay buildings from the past onto the present. At all 100 sites, the app superimposes images of demolished buildings over what is now at the location, by augmenting the iPhone's existing camera function. The app has links to Facebook and Twitter so users can upload their images, stories or comments about the sites.
 A history, photos and stories of these often long-demolished buildings is available. You can also view 80 'unlocked' buildings from any location - but uniquely, when you are within metres of a further 20 buildings you can access their 'locked' files.

The Fire Brigade Tower - then and now

 The app gives users an insight into buildings such as the Victorian tea-rooms in the Fitzroy Gardens, the Fish Markets and the Eastern Market (which was replaced by the Southern Cross Hotel).
The Fire Brigade Tower at the rear of 447 Little Bourke Street, built in 1882, was a 6-storey lookout tower of Melbourne's first fire station. It had an uninterrupted view of the whole of the city. The United Insurance Companies' fire brigade building was then used by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade until 1918.
In 1959 the National Trust selected it as one of Victoria's most significant buildings, despite this the unused building was demolished in 1961, to make way for a carpark for the London Assurance Company - what an improvement.

The Buck's Head Hotel development

The Buck's Head Hotel at 290 Little Lonsdale Street opened on 1st July 1848. The large building was built of brick and bluestone, it contained the bar, dining room, 4 sitting rooms, 6 guest bedrooms, and accommodation for the landlord and his family. The Hotel took up the corner of Sutherland Street (the narrow lane on the left) and Little Lonsdale Street.
After serving drinks for 103 years, the hotel lost its liquor licence and was auctioned in 1951. In 2011 the site was the subject of an archaeological dig, before construction began on a new multi-storey office tower.


The app includes eight buildings still standing, that the Trust deems under threat, including the Queen Victoria Market, the Celtic Club in Queen Street, the Le Louvre boutique, the art deco Palace Theatre in Bourke Street, and the Women's Venereal Disease Clinic.

The VD Clinic cowering beneath the towering Victoria University

 The Women's Venereal Disease Clinic, is one of the "Heritage at Risk" buildings. The former home of the clinic was constructed in 1919 at the rear of the Board of Health offices in response to the rapid increase in diagnoses following the end of the Great War. In 2011 the Melbourne City Council nominated the building for heritage protection, but the Planning Minister did not grant the request, and in April 2012 the Victoria University (the owner) proposed to demolish the clinic and neighbouring former tuberculosis clinic to erect a 32 storey high-rise.

Apparently not at risk - The Department of Forensic Medicine building, next-door to the Clinic

 The Southern Cross Hotel was opened, live on TV, by then Prime Minister Bob Menzies in August 1962. Situated on Exhibition Street between Bourke and Little Collins Streets, it replaced the grand but by then virtually unused Eastern Market. Built in the 'Featurist' style, the Southern Cross hosted Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles in 1964, as well as the Logies and Brownlow Medal count for years (before Crown was invented). The Hotel closed in 1995, a bid to have it listed by Heritage Victoria failed, and it was demolished in 2003 to make way for an office complex.

The Beatles at the Southern Cross from Picture Australia

 Currently the app is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, and Lost is free to download. Discover hidden and lost buildings you may not have been aware of at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lost!/id511203200?mt=8

History funds

PROV's "Local History Grants Program" provides small grants to community organisations to support the cost of any project that preserves, records or publishes Victorian local history. The program is administered by Public Record Office Victoria.

A new trend appearing in local history has been the significant number of new audiences who have emerged in the digital/online realm, due to the widespread adoption of digital and mobile technologies and the growing availability of broadband internet service. Electronic publishing is also becoming an increasingly popular alternative to traditional printed books, as ePublications can be distributed over the internet and through electronic bookstores, and users can read the published content on a dedicated eBook reader, mobile device or computer. These grants are a means to allow more resources to enter the digital domain.

The Local History Grants Program supports 

• the preparation and publishing of local history books, including ePublications 
• Apps for mobile devices
• the digitisation and publishing of records and documents
• virtual exhibitions
• the recording of oral histories
• the preparation and display of exhibitions
• the conservation and cataloguing of documents and objects
• internet projects that provide local history information
• training in local history skills
• the design and production of interpretation panels or plagues on heritage sites or locations
• heritage walks 
• digital storytelling

 In digital stories people use film and audio to record and tell their own story in DVD and online projects.
 Applications for the 2012-2013 Round of grants is are now open, and applications close on 12th November 2012. Link to the Grants page.

Horsham heritage study

Droylsen

Stage one of Horsham’s Heritage Study has been released all 167 pages of it.

Consultants Grieve Gillett were commissioned by the Horsham Rural City Council and Heritage Victoria to prepare a list of places of potential heritage significance.

The team met with residents and groups to identify places, and traveled throughout the municipality to locate and evaluate the suggested sites. There is also a history of the settlement of the area.

Horsham Memorial Swimming Pool

The list of over 500 potential places of local heritage value will be prioritised in Stage two, and the cultural heritage significance of these individual places and precincts will inform decisions on future heritage planning controls.

The Mechanics Institute building

A copy of the Study is available to view at the Horsham Branch of the Wimmera Regional Library, and at NC2 (the old Arapiles Shire building) and the Planning Department of Horsham Rural City.

Wesley Performing Arts Centre

Heritage on our home turf

A great new innovation is Vic Heritage’s iphone app.

Showcasing data from the Victorian Heritage database, it provides a definitive history of over 2,200 important significant and unusual places in Melbourne and regional Victoria.

It accesses a fully searchable online database containing information about Victorian Heritage Places and Precincts, including statements of significance, physical descriptions, historical information, builder, architectural style, photographs and a google-style map. You can choose to search via the normal search term, or much more fun is to search by places ‘nearby’ – you might think you know your local area, but may be surprised by what is included. It displays as either a List with thumbnail photos, or as a Map with the locations as pins.

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The classroom from the south

I was surprised to see “Pavilon Classroom - Natimuk” on the list. I had heard of the canvas sided schools, but was unaware one was at Natimuk (so was an ex-Natimuk teacher too).

The Natimuk Pavilion Classroom was constructed by the Victorian Public Works Department in 1914 as an open air classroom for school children at Natimuk Primary School. It consisted of a rectangular timber structure 20’ x 30’ with a gabled roof. 

The canvas side of the classroom

The room was intended to accommodate 48 children in dual seater desks. Three sides of the classroom are boarded with weatherboards to the height of three feet; above that height, adjustable canvas shutters were fitted right to the roofline. The back wall, on which the blackboard was mounted, was boarded from floor to ceiling. The room was built on sleeper plates for easy removal.

The remains of the canvas still adhere to the window frames

44 of these classrooms were constructed for Victorian schools between 1911 and 1914, but after World War I, the Education Department discontinued their construction. They were unpopular with teachers in winter weather. However they were used for additional accommodation in schools for many years.

Natimuk Primary School moved from Main Street to a site in Jory Street in 1961. The pavilion classroom was relocated by the Education Department to the Australian House Museum at Deakin University in 1988, because it was under threat. The building was returned to Natimuk in 2002 and is now located in the grounds of the present Natimuk Primary School in Jory Street.

Windows to the north, and canvas on the east

Open air classrooms were designed to provide a healthy environment for delicate children, and resulted from the hygiene movement in education at the beginning of the 20^th century. It was hoped that improvements in lighting and ventilation aimed at improving the child’s physical conditions would lead to better educational and health outcomes. The open air classroom reflected the preoccupation with the benefits of light and fresh air for the health and education of young children.

The ventilator near the ceiling could be slid closed, the one on the previous photo is closed

Medical opinion of the time favoured fresh air and a bracing environment for all, derived from the ideas behind the open air sanatoriums used for the treatment of tuberculosis patients. The spread of tuberculosis, known as the 'white plague’ was a constant concern, it was responsible for one death in nine in Victoria in 1902, and in 1904 was declared a notifiable disease.

This classroom is architecturally significant, as the only surviving, relatively intact and rare example of an open air classroom.

Family via letters

Archival records can help people connect with their histories, trace the experiences of ancestors and learn about the times and places in which they lived.
Footprints: The journey of Lucy and Percy Pepper reveals the story of Lucy and Percy Pepper and their family. The book reveals through letters and correspondence how they were affected by laws and government policies that defined who was ‘Aboriginal’ and who was not. It chronicles their struggle to keep their extended family together, fight for Australia in World War I, make  good on a soldier settlement block in Gippsland, and survive ill health and poverty.

Lucy with her children - Gwendoline, Phillip, Alice, Sarah, Lena & Sam

This extraordinary story of the fight is told through correspondence between Percy and Lucy Pepper, government officials and Aboriginal administrators. The letters now form a part of the collections of the National Archives of Australia and Public Record Office Victoria, they were gathered together by Simon Flagg when he worked for PROV.
Through telling the story of the Peppers, the book  illustrates many of the issues that Aboriginal families faced in early twentieth-century Victoria.
This is an ebook in epub format and requires a compatible ebook reader application on a portable device (such as iPad, other tablet computer, Kindle or Kobo), or on a laptop or desktop PC, and is available for $9.95 from the Public Records Office
Don't wish to buy the book, just borrow it? then place a Hold on "Footprints"

Percy Pepper was the son of Nathaniel and Louise Pepper. Nathaniel had grown up on the Ebenezer Mission Station at Antwerp, before moving to the Ramahyuck Mission Station in Gippsland.

The headstone of Nathaniel's brother Phillip at Ebenezer

Searching by ScanPro

Access to the Library's microfilm and fiche collection has improved with the purchase of the new ScanPro 2000. The buzz is for its ability to search via OCR.
With OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology it is possible to convert a microform image to word searchable text, to edit the image, and to save it to any output process. By selecting the Word-Search button and typing in your term in the box, the software will search for, and highlight that word where ever it occurs on that page, scroll forward and perform the search on subsequent pages with a single click.

The giant LCD 24" sized pivot screen - in portrait mode - allows you to read an entire newspaper page in a single view.

You can select information on the image and copy it to a clipboard as text for pasting into a document. It can also convert a microfilm image to a word searchable PDF document. There are a  range of available file formats to output to - PDF, JEG or TIFF.

There are the standard controls for - focus, brightness, contrast, straightening, and cropping. It also features automatic image adjustment, live editing of selected image areas, and an on-screen magnifier to inspect text or image detail at up to 500%.

The ScanPro 2000 is available at the Horsham Branch, and the ScanPro 1000 is at the Stawell Branch.

Ned's burial wish

The Victorian Government recently announced that the remains of the bushranger Ned Kelly will be released to members of his family for burial.

This decision is in accordance with Kelly’s wishes which was recorded in a letter held in the PROV Collection (PROV holds the world’s largest accumulation of original records related to the Kelly Gang).
The letter, dated 10 November 1880, is held along with other letters Kelly wrote via dictation whilst in jail awaiting execution. Kelly was unable to write any of the letters himself owing to the injuries he had received at the Glenrowan Siege, and so signed them with his mark - an ‘X’. The letter is part of PROVs online Kelly Historical Collection, which are in turn effectively pages within the Kelly Capital Case file.
This file was created at the time by the Crown Law Department to document the process that occurred after his trial to determine whether a recommendation should be put to the Governor as to whether the mandatory death sentence should be commuted to a lesser one. (This was the case for all prisoners sentenced to death for capital offences).
Kelly was executed by hanging at the Old Melbourne Gaol 11th November 1880, and buried there.

Old Melbourne Gaol

 Following the closure of the Old Melbourne Gaol,in 1929 work was undertaken to allow extensions to the Working Men’s College (now RMIT) in the former prison yard (the initials of each executed inmate and the date of his or her execution were carved into the wall adjacent to the burial plot, some of these bluestone blocks are now in the Beaumaris breakwater). The remains of all executed inmates (approximately 30 individuals) that could be located were exhumed, transferred to Pentridge Prison, and re-interred in mass graves. In 1937, four additional coffins were unearthed in a different area, and taken to Pentridge for reburial.

The initial process of exhumation, re-internment was disorganised and over time the actual grave sites became confused, and after Pentridge closed and redeveloped into a housing estate, workers uncovered a mass graves site. Heritage Victoria were called in to investigate and identify the burial locations of the Old Melbourne Gaol  inmates, and also those of the ten executed Pentridge prisoners. In 2008-09 they discovered the individual plots of the Pentridge prisoners, and 3 mass graves of the Old Melbourne Gaol inmates.

Forensic profiling and analysis was undertakrn to identify the remains. This work identified one of the skeletons as Ned Kelly's, which his family descendants will re-bury in Kelly Country.

Changing traffic

A piece of Horsham and library history has disappeared with the removal of the Lions Club's Traffic School, which stood at the corner of Park Drive and Natimuk Road for many years.
Generations of children have learnt their road rules by cycling around its mini-streets.
In the past the Wimmera Regional Library Service ran Traffic Schools as part of their Childrens Holiday Activity Program (CHAPs). It was a fun activity for the kids, and for the staff manning the signal controls as well.

Childrens Librarian Michael Hogan directing traffic in the early 80s

The small triangular recreation reserve owned by the Horsham Rural City is currently under development, as the Council employs Millers Contractors to realign Park Drive, to off-set the road intersection with Gardenia Street. HRCC will be constructing a carpark between this road and the Skate Park to provide all-day parking spaces.
This work is occurring at the same time as construction begins at the allotment next door on the new Target shopping development, though work may slow down in the current wet conditions.

The oil on Antwerp

The Library was fortunate recently to have donated, a copy of One of nature's wonderlands : the Victorian Grampians by James W.C. Audas. It was published in 1925 in Melbourne, and is a natural history,concentrating on the flora of the different regions of the Grampians.

'Turret Falls' plate from the book

James Wales Clarendon Audas (1872-1959) was a member of the staff of the National Herbarium of Victoria. His visits to the Grampians made a particular impression on him. He recorded its plant life and brought together his investigations in One of Nature's Wonderlands. During his career Audas was a prolific writer; recounting tales of his botanical wanderings all around the state over half a century.

An interesting aspect of the book was a number of advertisements in the back of the book, including one for Bosisto's Parrot brand eucalyptus oil.

Joseph Bosisto was born on 21 March 1824 in Leads, England. He left school in 1839 and was apprenticed to a druggist. Engaged by F.H. Faulding, he sailed to Adelaide in June 1848. In 1852 he married Eliza Johnston, they settled at Richmond, Victoria, where in a renovated hotel stable he had a prosperous pharmacy and was consulted as 'Doctor' Bosisto.
Keenly interested in the eucalyptus plant and its multi-faceted uses, Bosisto with the encouragement of Ferdinand Von Mueller, the Government Botanist, began to explore eucalyptus oil on a commercial basis. He set up a small eucalyptus oil distillation plant near Dandenong Creek in1852. Bosisto was probably first to make distil eucalyptus oil commercially and to win repute for manufacturing Australia's first 'original' product. His decoctions of eucalyptus oil used in a variety of medicinal products were to make him a household name. The parrot sitting on the eucalyptus branch, inside the yellow circle was his most famous trademark.

James Bosisto

Bosisto was a founder of the Pharmaceutical Society of Victoria in 1857, its president and co-editor of its Journal. He helped establish the College of Pharmacy. He served for 12 years on the Richmond Municipal Council and was mayor in 1865-67. He represented Richmond in the Victorian Legislative Assembly in 1874.

Bosisto lost heavily in the building society crashes and spent his last years in straitened circumstances. He died aged 74 in Richmond on 8 November 1898. He was predeceased by his wife, they had no children. Bosisto formed the Eucalyptus Mallee Oil Company with five other notable citizens. They purchased the Antwerp Station freehold and erected buildings for the distilling equipment. It commenced extracting oil on 24 May 1882. Another large lease of land was added in July 1884. It employed about 70 men, however it was difficult to maintain a sufficient work-force. EMU brand was distilled at the Bosisto & Co Antwerp distillery and Parrot brand at Dandenong or Emerald.

Bosisto was interested in local community affairs. It was through the gradual land settlement and employment at the distillery, that his untiring efforts gained the Antwerp district a Methodist church built on land he donated, he was the patron of the Antwerp Cricket Club. In 1887 he wrote to the Education Department requesting the establishment of a State School.

From 1900 onwards the distillery output began to wane, and in 1904-05, the Antwerp plant was moved to new sites in N.S.W. Surplus stock was disposed of, and later a section of land was sub-divided and sold by auction. Many employees received grants of land and the Antwerp township began to take shape.