Showing 21 items
matching land, themes: 'local stories'
Diverse state (50)
Aboriginal culture (16)
Built environment (10)
Creative life (10)
Family histories (3)
Gold rush (4)
Immigrants and emigrants (9)
Land and ecology (21)
Local stories (21)
Service and sacrifice (4)
Sporting life (2)
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Isaac Douglas Hermann & Heather Arnold
Carlo Catani: An engineering star over Victoria
... One of Carlo Catani’s foremost swamp reclamation schemes saw the opening up of thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land and new village settlements and a host of new roadways. The Koo Wee Rup Swamp was drained between 1889 and 1893 ...After more than forty-one years of public service that never ended with his retirement, through surveying and direct design, contracting, supervision, and collaborative approaches, perhaps more than any other single figure, Carlo Catani re-scaped not only parts of Melbourne, but extensive swathes of Victoria ‘from Portland to Mallacoota’, opening up swamplands to farming, bringing access to beauty spots, establishing new townships, and the roads to get us there.
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The Welsh Swagman
... to enter for Melbourne William’s Town, Geelong, and so on by going half a mile southwards This spot of Australia is a tongue of land extending out to the Hobson Bay and divides the water into two channels the Southern channel takes the ships to Geelong ...Joseph Jenkins was a Welsh itinerant labourer in late 1800s Victoria.
Exceptional for a labourer at the time, Jenkins had a high level of literacy and kept detailed daily diaries for over 25 years, resulting in one of the most comprehensive accounts of early Victorian working life.
Itinerant labourers of the 1800s, or 'swagmen', have become mythologised in Australian cultural memory, and so these diaries provide a wonderful source of information about the life of a 'swagman'. They also provide a record of the properties and districts Jenkins travelled to, particularly around the Castlemaine and Maldon area.
The diaries were only discovered 70 years after Jenkins' death, in an attic, and were in the possession of Jenkins’s descendants in Wales until recently, when they were acquired by the State Library of Victoria in 1997.
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Kate Luciano
School Days: Education in Victoria
... One of the earliest Aboriginal schools in Victoria was established in 1846 near the Yarra Aboriginal Protectorate Station, on land between the Merri Creek and the Yarra River. This early Aboriginal school was supported by the local tribe ...The exhibition, School Days, developed by Public Record Office Victoria and launched at Old Treasury Building in March 2015, is a history of more than 150 years of schooling in Victoria.
It is a history of the 1872 Education Act - the most significant education reform in Victoria, and a world first! It is a history of early schooling, migrant schooling, Aboriginal schools, women in education, rural education and, of course, education during war time (1914-1918).
This online exhibition is based on the physical exhibition School Days originally displayed at Old Treasury Building, 20 Spring Street, Melbourne, www.oldtreasurybuilding.org.au and curated by Kate Luciano in collaboration with Public Record Office Victoria.
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Women on Farms
... of agriculture in this region today. Some of our land is suffering degradation, some commodities are barely surviving while others are succeeding." - Lorraine Ermacora ...In 1990, a group of rural and farming women met in Warragul for what was to be the inaugural Women on Farms Gathering.
A group of local women had developed the idea while involved in a Women on Farms Skill Course. It was to prove inspirational, and the gatherings have been held annually ever since, throughout regional Victoria.
The Women on Farms Gathering provides a unique opportunity for women to network, increase their skills base in farming and business practices, share their stories and experience a wonderful sense of support, particularly crucial due to the shocking rural crises of the last decade. Importantly, the gatherings help promote and establish the notion of rural women as farmers, business women and community leaders.
The relationship between Museums Victoria and the Women on Farms Gathering is a model of museums working with living history.
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Against the Odds: The victory over conscription in World War One
... going to the hymeneal altar with Chinese and other coloured bridegrooms, and the assurances that Maltese, in numbers varying from hundreds to millions, were on board vessels off the cost waiting for a 'Yes' vote to land, were innumerable ...In October 1916 and December 1917 two contentious referendums were held in Australia, asking whether the Commonwealth government should be given the power to conscript young men into military service and send them to war overseas.
These campaigns were momentous and their legacy long-lasting. This is the only time in history that citizens of a country have been asked their opinion about such a question, and the decisive 'No' vote that was returned remains the greatest success of the peace movement in Australia to date. Yet the campaigns split families, workplaces and organisations, and left an imprint on Australian politics that lasted for decades.
Many of the actors and events that were central to these campaigns were based in the northern Melbourne suburbs of Brunswick and Coburg. In many ways, these localities were a microcosm of the entire campaign. Against the Odds: The Victory Over Conscription in World War One tells the story of the anti-conscription movement in Australia during World War 1 through this lens.