Coburg Primary School's 1925 facelift

Argus, 20 Feb 1925

The man waving his arm about is the Minister for Education, Sir Alexander Peacock and he's opening the new look Coburg State School no. 484 in Bell Street. The remodelling cost  £16,208 and the school claimed it could accommodate 1,500 children. (There were 1,250 on the roll.) On three and a half acres of land, the school was said to be one of the largest in Victoria. 

Move forward 90 years or so and here are some photos I took at the back of the school in March last year at a Saturday Farmers' Market.

It's all so very different from when I was a student there from 1962 to 1964. Sure, there were bubble taps and a playground, but it was all pretty stark. The playground was asphalt and divided by a huge shelter shed and toilets. 

The first photo you see here was taken standing in what was then the boys' playground. We girls only ventured there when we practised marching, or played rounders (as a class activity) and perhaps crossball and tunnel ball were practised there, too - pretty sure that's right. My memory tells me we did folk dancing in what was the girls' playground. And for some reason I think the folk dancing happened on a Friday afternoon. (I have no idea why I remember that, of all things.)

One of my favourite additions to the school grounds is the Chicken Wing on the school's western boundary.

I had to smile when I first saw it, because on the other side of the cyclone fence behind the Chicken Wing (and just a little further north) is what is now Peppertree Place, but was the Methodist Parsonage grounds in my day. That's where I lived and my dad had his own collection of chooks that roamed free-range through the garden during the daytime. He'd be chuffed to know that the school was growing vegies and keeping chooks, just as he had done next door all those years ago!

Coburg 'Blitz' cyclists prepare for action, 1942

Herald, 5 January 1942

They might look like creatures from outer space, but these Coburg women, styling themselves 'Blitz' cyclists, donned their respirators, tin helmets and ARP (Air Raid Precaution) armbands and were ready to act as messengers if there were air raids in the area.

This might seem a little far-fetched to us from a distance of nearly 80 years, but there was a very real fear at the time (perhaps whipped up by local authorities who thought that Coburg citizens - and others - were not taking the war seriously enough) that Australia would be invaded. Air raid trenches were dug in local parks and school playgrounds. Plans were put in place to evacuate children to the country. A mock air raid took place at Coburg oval and air raid wardens were trained to deal with any potential attacks on the municipality. Melburnians soon became accustomed to brownouts and everyone was on the lookout for the enemy in their midst.

The fear levels of the citizens of Coburg may well have risen as a result of all this activity, but it is more than likely that women had more to fear from the problems presented by brownout conditions, especially once the 'Brownout Strangler' began strangling women. He murdered three women before being identified as American serviceman Edward Leonski. Leonski was hanged at Pentridge Prison in November 1942.

Several years later, an air observation post was put in place on the roof of Walker's Department Store in Sydney Road. Local volunteers used binoculars to spot aircraft activity and report it to Essendon aerodrome, especially important at a time when there was very little in the way of air traffic control. Historian Richard Broome recorded in Coburg, between two creeks that 'in the twenty months till the post was closed in October 1945, 17,451 aircraft had been spotted by 146 volunteers, many of them women and senior students.' 

It's raining again - Merlynston floods, 1949

Herald, 20 July 1949

Age, 21 July 1949

The street identified in two of these photographs is Sussex Street, which runs all the way from Bell Street through Pascoe Vale and across Boundary Road in North Coburg, where it is very close to the Merlynston Creek, which one caption tells us had overflown. The grocer and the baker still managed to make their deliveries, however. The milkie didn't, but as we see here, Mrs G.A. Allsop saved the day and delivered milk to 'marooned householder' Mr E. Blackmore.