Stories from early years in Darnum

Way back on January 17 I met a really nice woman, a thoughtful woman. She had offered me information on the history of Darnum so I drove up to Warragul in fairly heavy rain, got subdivisionally lost, used my GPS and arrived at exactly the appointed time, more by good luck than good management.

Barbara Hedley opened her garage roller door as I arrived so I was able to park out of the rain. How thoughtful is that? She also had a very nice morning tea ready. There should be more people like Barbara.

There was a book – it is more than a booklet – produced for the centenary of the Darnum State School (er, Primary School) in 1881, and she had a copy for me, because I had said in an earlier column that I knew little about Darnum.

The book opens with the several stories about the name but it seems to clear up the matter with the information that the name could be an Aboriginal word for ‘parrot’ but was also believed to be an old name for Doncaster in England, telling me (for the first time) that Doncaster was built on an old Roman station called Danum. That all makes sense to me.

The railway was opened in 1878 and the book cleared up another mystery. There was a grave beside the Princes Highway, just west of the town, and the dip in the road there was Dead Man’s Gully. “A railway worker was killed there during the construction. He was buried just south of the highway on the side of the hill and until recently (1981, remember) the posts marking his grave were visible from the road”.

One wonders, uneasily, what happened to the grave and the human remains when the Princes Highway was duplicated. That part is not cleared up.

When the District Roads Boards were replaced by municipal councils Darnum was in the Narracan Shire in 1878. In 1880 it became part of the then-vast Buln Buln Shire and by 1885 it was part of the new Warragul Shire. On June 13 of that year it was officially declared to be a township. Finally, perhaps, Darnum is now part of the Baw Baw Shire.

The Darnum community began as the Moe

River Camp for the railwaymen. There were people enough in the area but there was no real town in existence until 1878, with rapid growth over the next decade. There was an early hotel at the Moe River Camp in 1877, doubling as a bakery and a butcher’s shop.

That hotel, “little more than a shanty”, was owned by Julius Stoffers, and served the railwaymen. Stoffers added a brick over to make and supply bread. A Mr Tatterson took over from Stoffers and built a bigger and better hotel, still with a bakery and now selling meat as well.

There is a story in the book about Tatterson bringing up the bricks for his hotel from Beaconsfield. I can’t work out why he didn’t use the new railway, nor whether he used bullocks or horses, but the roads were so bad, the book says, that at every significant hill the bricks had to be unloaded and carried up the hill by hand, so to speak. The bricks from ‘Beaconsfield’ were almost certainly from James Wells’ kiln at Officer, which is still there on the side if the highway, or the works opposite

There was a store in Darnum from 187980. The railway was opened in 1878 and the railway station was opened in 1880, the Darnum State School was opened in 1881 and the Post Office opened in the following year. An important addition was the Commercial Hotel, opened in 1883. Those four years saw Darnum solidly established as a community. There were at least four stores built. It would be fair to list Darnum as another town created by the coming of the railway.

In 1879 Darnum also had the “Full and Plenty Boarding House”, where meals were a shilling and a room was 15 shillings a week. Most towns had a boarding house because travel was often slow, and because salesmen, traders, all sorts of people, needed somewhere to get their heads down.

The railway was critical in sending out the two main products of Darnum, milk and timber, and there was an outcry when it was announced the station was going to be closed in 1882. Without the station the timber and the milk would have to be hauled to Warragul over roads that were barely passable.

The station was saved, and in 1910 stockyards were built with the cost being met by local farmers. In 1915 a new, larger station building was put up. In 1953 a whole new station was built when a cutting was created to ease the climb up from Nilma as part of duplication of the track. This was when the overhead bridge was built, and somehow Darnum remains one community despite the physical divide.

As settlers moved into the timbered settlements along the line the first industry was usually sawmilling. The railway made it possible to send commercial loads of timber from Darnum. Part of the pattern of settlement was the huge task of clearing the land. Forests were cleared, sometimes by fire, and huge tonnages of excellent timber were destroyed. There was no real alternative but the sawmillers certainly played their part.

That is a story we’ve told before, and which I’ll tell again. The tramways built into the forest reached many mills and brought out untold tonnages of timber. There was a sawmill at the station until 1910, when the saleyards were built.

The Mechanics’ Institute was opened in 1891, and in the same year an Anglican Hall was built. The Institute was rebuilt in 1907 but was burned down when “a severe fire swept through Darnum in 1944. It was not rebuilt until 1956 and it was moved in, I think, 1997, for the roadworks, including the overpass.

There is nothing too spectacular about Darnum. It is a pleasant place where the people know each other, and have a sense of being part of and belonging to a real community. I will one day come back again to the story of the sawmills and the tramways, but next week’s column will be about the dairy industry and its role in Darnum’s past and present.