Stories

YALLOURN FOOTBALL CLUB 1945 -65

50 YEARS AGO ~ SEASON 1964…GARRY BUTLER & TED HEESOM

1964 was a season of ‘lost opportunity’ and several narrow defeats proved frustrating and indeed costly for YFC that year. During the season YFC had beaten Moe in Round:10 and had also defeated a powerful Maffra team in Round:12. Such wins indicated the team’s potential to match it with the ‘best in the competition’ but the club ‘paid the price’ for a slow start to the season.

After nineteen home and away games the LVFL Ladder in 1964 looked like this:-
TEAM W D L For Agst… more

Memories of a Town No More by Lucy Bathurst (Crowe) (circa 1991)
My memory has to serve me well now as the town where I was born, lived and grew up, no longer exists – YALLOURN.
My dear mother on the occasion of my birthday would often remind me of the fact that had I been born a little sooner, I would have received a hand-knitted layette. Instead, I let a boy from Yallourn North beat me to it. The prize of the layette was for being the first baby to be born at the new Yallourn Hospital. So you can guess my memories go back a long way!
Yallourn was a pretty town with neat… more

Subject: Future of Town of Yallourn
(from documents of Lou D'Alterio)

Memories of Yallourn by Harold Park (circa 1991)
My earliest recollections of Yallourn go back to 1936 when I commenced work at the Open Cut Maintenance. My wife, Kit, and I stayed at No 1 Hillside with Mr & Mrs Hehir (which was directly opposite the front entrance of the Yallourn High School - the house was later occupied by the McWilliams family).
Mick Hehir was foreman at the Open Cut and a very good and kind man he was, to us. Wednesday nights were late night shopping and the town square was lit up like Luna Park and everyone was there – not just to shop, but to meet… more

The death of Mrs Vida McMaster in July 1990 (at the age of 90) has caused me to contemplate on the fact that, years ago, when an old respected resident of the district died, the newspapers usually paid tribute to them and to the part they had played in the life and development of their town and district.
These days, with much larger populations, local papers have been much more impersonal and folk who have given great service to their community, never rate a mention except in the obituary column.
In the four years since my book “The Old Brown Coal Mine” was published, over 30… more

To us kids, summer time meant “the pool”, the big pool, the tower, the boards, the reeds – and we knew every square inch as we explored, swam and played.

Without knowing it, we always had a guardian. To us littlies, he was the man who taught us to swim in the little pool, until we graduated by passing the Herald Learn to Swim Certificate.

I can still remember puffing and struggling as I dog-paddled my 25 yards in the big pool. In those many years, just how many hundreds of children did Hughie Graham teach to swim?

But it didn’t stop there – we then had Hughie joining… more

Bus Escapades En Route to Trafalgar – 1950s (circa 1990)
A young ‘gentleman’ called John, whose surname shall remain a secret, was walking with his sister to catch a school bus when he and his sister had a disagreement. It must have been quite a disagreement because his sister ‘hitched’ him to the overhead bridge by his braces (braces were a common method of keeping ones trousers up in the 1950 era).
When he disentangled himself, he found he had missed the school bus so went home and told mum what had happened. She said “walk to school”. So, off he went walking along the road… more

Biography of C H Beanland ‘A Lifetime in Technical Education’ (Chapter 6) : Yallourn – Busy Tears in a Young School

I had chosen not to continue in the position of Acting Principal at Stawell Technical College beyond June 1932 at which time I was transferred as Acting Principal to the Technical School at Yallourn, where we rented an S.E.C. house in Ridgeway West. The previous Principal at Yallourn had asked to be relieved on the grounds of ill health and because he considered that the college had no future. The future was to prove how incorrect his expectation was.

The staff… more

My father was Wilhelmus Johannes Titulaer, from Venlo, in the South of Holland. Like a lot of other "migrants", he came out to Australia after the war, and settled in Melbourne. I believe he actually initially travelled from Holland to Indonesia with the Dutch Army, but was "demobbed" ("demobilised") in Australia, and he had met a man who worked at "The Argus" newspaper, and who said to dad that if he came back from Holland, that he would help him find a job.

Dad returned to Australia in 1950?, (as regrettably there was "not much left" in Venlo for him), and true to form, his… more