By Narelle Coulter
Dandenong’s vast history is being carefully preserved thanks to a dedicated band of volunteers at the Dandenong and District Historical Society.
Each Wednesday a handful of volunteers gather at the society’s rooms in the former municipal building in Clow Street.
They index and digitally store photographs, documents and ephemera, they answer heritage inquiries from individuals, businesses and local government, and publish a twice-yearly magazine called Gipps-Land Gate.
The society occasionally publishes books and hosts exhibitions including an annual exhibition at the Dandenong Show.
It was a letter to the Dandenong Journal from reader Susan Perham on 3 April 1963 that led to the formation of the DDHS.
Ms Perham wrote to the editor urging the local community to record and preserve Dandenong’s history and memoirs before they were lost.
An inaugural meeting was held in Ms Perham’s home on 5 June. Three weeks later the Dandenong and District Historical Society was formed.
One of the society’s founding members was legendary Journal editor Greg Dickson. Mr Dickson became a life member and was editor of the Gipps-Land Gate for 22 years from its first issue until his death in 1993.
When he sold the paper Greg Dickson donated his collection of South Bourke and Mornington Journals and Dandenong Journals dating back to 1877.
Another hero of the society’s story is Marjory Criddle who rescued a large number of historical negatives from disposal after Beaver Photographics was sold.
Today the society has 135 members.
Secretary Jenny Ferguson was in her 20s when she joined in 1973.
She has been secretary since 2004.
“I came to Victoria to work at the new Dandenong Library from South Australia. I thought I would join the society so I would find out a bit more about the place I was working.”
Jenny’s late husband Alan joined her as a member.
“Somehow history gets you,” Jenny said, who completed a thesis on the history of the Dandenong Market.
“I guess I’ve always had a love of history. I like to find out the reasons why. Why did this happen as it did.”
Tom Stein grew up in Dandenong and joined the society two years ago.
Recently Tom has been helping digitally catalogue the society’s vast collection of material.
When the Journal visited he was working through a folder of photographs of the town’s old ice works.
Owned by the Brown family, the ice works were in McCrae Street before they moved to Cheltenham Road.
“I enjoy getting things organised,” Tom said.
“We don’t have any central catalogue so it’s important that we create one.”
Fellow member Ray Carter’s interest in history was piqued when he wrote a history of the Salvation Army in the region in 1988.
“I had to get a lot of information from the historical society and the people were so lovely and helpful that I joined.”
Ray has created a slide show of photographs documenting the redevelopment of the Dandenong Market, which will be on display at November’s Dandenong Show.
He loves visiting other historical societies when he is away on holiday and spends countless hours exploring old issues of the Journal on Trove, the online newspaper archive. Ray estimates that he has corrected 36,000 lines of text on Trove.
Jenny Ferguson said people were welcome to visit the rooms on a Wednesday.
She said the society needed volunteers who were good at research and were competent with computers.
“We aren’t old-fashioned in the way we go about cataloguing.
“We are preparing ourselves to be an internet resource,” she said.
