What Drouin used to be like
Recollections of people’s early days in the Drouin district are being preserved as part of a major project being undertaken by the Committee for Drouin.
Snippets from the first of what will eventually be a collection of 40 CDs were played to an audience of people residents and visitors at the project’s launch at Lyrebird Village Hostel in Drouin.
Hostel residents Charlie Thomson, Ethel McDonald and Eileen Smith were among the first to have the recordings of their times living in the area put to disc along with former resident Bill Palmer, who passed away earlier this year.
Others whose contributions to the project, “Stories of Drouin”, have been completed include Jim and Doris Smethurst, Phil Edwards, Joy Paynter, Doug and Barbara Hatfield and Simon May, Mr May reading recollections written by his late father.
Committee for Drouin president Keith Cook said the group had formed a sub-committee to “preserve the assets of Drouin” - its buildings, houses, trees and people - working on conjunction with the Drouin History Group and community radio station 3BBR whose Lynn Wells had recorded and edited the stories.
Co-ordinator of “Stories of Drouin” Judy Farmer said the project was made possible by a State Government local history grant of $10,500.
She said 19 interviews had been completed and the set would eventually include 40 CDs to be held by the history group and available to the public.
Brief sections of the stories of Ms McDonald, Mr Palmer, Mr and Mrs Smethurst, Mr Thomson and Ms Smith were played as part of the launch presentation.
Ms Farmer said the interviews to date had included farmers and their wives, pioneering families, shire presidents, councillors and workers, an engineer/blacksmith, a publican, school teachers, people from local industries, shop attendants and returned servicemen.
Ms McDonald’s interview reveals how she moved to the district after marrying a local farmer, hand milking cows - a task she had been assured by her husband she wouldn’t have to do - and receiving one shilling (10 cents) for each snake she killed near the house.
The late Mr Palmer recalled his work at the Drouin Co-operative Butter Factory, then a major cheese maker, and Ms Smith spoke of her more than 20 years’ employment at Bacon’s Drapery store noting the changing fashions and the “massive amounts of wool” the shop sold to women to knit clothes for their families.
Mr Thomson tells of leaving school at 12 years of age after gaining his “merit certificate”, milking cows and chopping and delivering wood to the factory to fire its furnaces.
Mr Smethurst remembers Drouin as “quite an industrial town” with sawmills and the butter factory when he arrived there as a boy with his family.
He said he and other family members, grandfathers and uncles as well as himself, served a total of 61 years as Buln Buln shire councillors.
His wife Doris tells of how she was one of eight children that grew up on a North Poowong farm, travelling to school by horse and jinker and the farm chores they had to fit in between arriving home from school and being sent to bed no later than 7pm.