Celebrating 100 years of Flinders Street Station

[ozbob]

Beyond the Facade Celebrating 100 years of Flinders Street Station

Open 10 am - 4 pm
Monday to Friday

6 May to 31 August

Special weekend opening during Melbourne Open House
Sat 24 & Sun 25 July

An exhibition Celebrating 100 Years of Flinders Street Station is currently showing at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, 239 A'Beckett Street, city.

Fortunately I will be in Melbourne in a week or so for a few days, on the list to do!

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Flinders Street Station Clocks  A famous meeting place, 'I will meet you underneath the clocks ...'



Photograph R Dow 7th January 2010

Once the busiest railway station in the southern hemisphere.  Going to Flinders Street station as a young boy was always an adventure!  Exciting, with a wide variety of trains and always steam passing through.

From the Melbourne Age click here!

Where the city finds its way


http://images.theage.com.au/2010/07/23/1711811/Flinders2-420x0.jpg

Where the city finds its way
July 24, 2010

Lives converge beyond the steps of Flinders Street Station, writes Andrew Stephens.

MICHAEL Binney's allotted spot at Flinders Street Station used to be in front of the brass railing on the far left side as you go up the steps. Under those famous clocks, he and a swag of other boys sold newspapers and on a regular day he would sell "100 dozen" by the time he knocked off around 10pm. He'd have inky fingers and an eyeful of the happenings, the characters, and the amusing and sad things he'd have witnessed that day.

Binney worked there for about 15 years, beginning in 1964, but his father and his uncle — identical twins — had worked there selling newspapers since they were just seven years old. People marvelled at how the nimble newsboy (they didn't know they were twins) moved so quickly between two distant parts of the station.

The brothers started work in 1897. Almost 78 years later, Binney's dad finally retired, having raised a family of 12 children on his paperboy's wages (plus some bookmaking proceeds) and having inducted some of his five streetwise boys into the art of spruiking the daily tabloids and broadsheets. In his days at Flinders Street, Binney senior — estimated by his son to have sold 17 million Heralds over the years — went from standing amid gas street lighting and horses and carts to the era of bumper-to-bumper cars and traffic lights, with a few wars, joys and peaceful times in between.

He saw buildings go up and buildings torn down, but one of the buildings that went up right behind him was the magnificent station itself, opened in 1910. That building, celebrating its centenary last January, remains a sight of majesty, even if we are all too busy using it to actually admire it.

His father is long dead, but Binney the younger's memories of his own days at Flinders Street remain spectacularly vivid — as lively, perhaps, as are the recollections of so many other Melburnians whose childhoods, then adulthoods, have been marked by repeated visits through this beautiful, functional, unpretentious, yet somewhat mysterious place. Significant things happen here.

These days, more than 100,000 people pass through it every 24 hours. Some of us have been doing so for decades on end, yet how many pause to contemplate and wonder what goes on in its labyrinthine innards? How many stop to regard the elegant architecture? With its grand, crown-like dome and dirty mustard and brick red paintwork, it is the locus of so many memories, so many meetings for the city's populace. As one commuter in her 70s said to me, "All exciting happenings start at Flinders Street."

And they do. Researcher Jenny Davies has probably been privy to being told more memories about Flinders Street Station than anyone else in this city. In 2007, she started work on a book to mark the station's January 22 centenary. During the course of her detailed research, Davies ferreted out an impressive mix of people more than willing to share their recollections with her. In the book Beyond the Facade (2008), Davies recounts these stories in between detailing the station's official history.

When the centenary happened in January, that beautiful architectural gem's usage came to the fore, along with yet another government plan to revitalise it (yet to be realised). About a third of the building's interior and upper floors, including the ballroom, are unused and some parts are dilapidated but it was once a thriving hub of Melbourne's cultural life.

The station building, up until the 1970s, famously housed an astonishing array of activities under the auspices of the Victorian Railways Institute. There were people coming and going to dances, concerts and ballroom competitions, while others attended musical, dramatic and literary societies. There were also many clubs in the long stretch of the Elizabeth Street side of the building: photography, draughts, wireless radio, horticulture, cricket, golf, wrestling, fencing and debating, among others. There were even men-only "smoke socials", a wine appreciation club, a ladies' club and a great breadth of sporting activities, which extended to a sauna and a 400-metre running track on the roof. There was even a nursery on the second floor for the care of travellers' little ones.

Elwyn Davis, an attendee at the nursery, writes in Davies' book of a vivid memory of sitting on a magnificent rocking horse in the nursery, while Mavis Plaw, who worked in the nursery, recounts stories of the many mothers dropping off their children. Other women tell their tales of Miss Dorothy Gladstone's dance classes, held from the mid-1920s to the '70s in the Room 56 dance studio, which had a wooden barre and windows overlooking Flinders Street.

The building's arts legacy has been rich in other ways, too, including a Flash Mob gathering (2003) and a Melbourne International Arts Festival light projection on the facade (1998). Oscar Redding's The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (2007) was one of many films shot around the station, just as there have been concerts in the dome and theatre productions on the concourse, such as Back to Back Theatre's Small Metal Objects (2005).

Back in the 1880s, though, the station site was just a confused tumble-down collection of timber and brick structures. It was, says Davies, an inefficient, uneconomical eyesore consisting of buildings for staff accommodation, a lamp room, licensed bars, an oyster saloon, book stall, fruit and confectionary shops. There was no focus to the place, no architectural statement that this was the central valve for Melbourne's growing numbers of commuters.

When plans were drawn up for the new building, the results were spectacular and the building we know — almost Venetian in its colour scheme and design — has aged well.

The clocks at the main entrance on the corner of Flinders and Swanston have been sentinels above countless meetings on the steps. Bought in the 1860s, they were in the original terminus, then re-instated at the new building when it opened. Frederick, my paternal grandfather, would have often passed beneath them. He worked for the railways and would sometimes take his son with him to the clerk's office upstairs at Flinders Street Station while lodging his timesheets. It was a great adventure for young James to be in that lively, noisy place. It was — it still is — the axis of Melbourne in far more significant ways than its role as a metropolitan transport hub would suggest.

It was years later that James met his future wife Judith, who also had a strong relationship with the station, as most Melbourne people did in those days before ubiquitous cars and freeways. She would meet her sister on the station concourse on weekdays to travel home to Elwood via the St Kilda line, running across Sandridge Bridge. Their weekend outings brought them back to Flinders Street Station, and across the bridge to Wirth's Park and Animal Menagerie, to the Trocadero for dances — girls would just turn up on their own — and to the majestic Glaciarium Ice Rink, mum's favourite. And they, like me several decades later, would be mesmerised by the beauty of an advertisement across the river: the Allen's sweets sign in its evocative lolly-neon colours.

The station was the epicentre of all this: the place that marked commencement and closure, the terminus between the worlds of the private family home in the suburbs and the public, wider world in the heart of the city, where everyone would come to shop, be entertained, and promenade.

For Michael Binney, the station is unsurpassed as "the melting pot and the meeting place" of Melbourne. "I do have a lot of happy memories," he says. "To this day, when I come into the city I'll often wander past and just stand where I used to stand — but you can't get it back, it's gone. You still have your memories."

Among those are sad stories — women and their children walking around with nowhere to go, prostitutes looking for trade, thugs, intellectually disabled people left to drift, terrible assaults (some on police), sexual predators and "just people in the raw".

"In the time that dad was there, I can recall at least three occasions where he brought home a young woman from Flinders Street Station," says Binney. These women would have come into the city from the country, waited for relatives or friends to collect them — but somehow, they wouldn't turn up and the woman would start to panic. So Binney's father would bring them home to Clifton Hill and they would be put to bed with one of the seven sisters. "Can you imagine that happening today?"

Other travellers' mishaps ended up well, too. Gordon Barnard, who worked in Victorian Railways administration in the 1950s, recounts how in 1956 he had travelled up from Moe on the steam passenger train to meet his fiancee at Flinders Street Station "for our two precious days together".

"On this day, however, I had not had a feed for some time and I was very tired and hungry, not wanting to miss catching the train at Moe," he says. So, after the long journey, he hurried outside to the Princes Street Station opposite St Paul's Cathedral to get some food — but he passed out.

"I was walking across the wide striped walkway crossing over the tram lines in Swanston Street, when next thing I was waking up in the ambulance room on the Flinders Street Railway Station concourse. The police were asking questions as to whether or not I was drunk, sick, or suffering from a drug overdose. I was questioned and I explained my predicament. The policeman somehow found my fiancee and whilst I was given the opportunity to recover, the St John Ambulance officer and the policeman organised a cup of tea and biscuits for us and bought a meat pie for me."

The couple married that September and are still together. "So you can see, these memories are very precious and the Flinders Street Station building is also very important to us. May it last for another 100 years."

An exhibition Celebrating 100 Years of Flinders Street Station is currently showing at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, 239 A'Beckett Street, city.

www.historyvictoria.org.au

Jenny Davies began the Flinders Street Station Project in early 2007.

[ozbob]

From Film Australia

More than a million train passengers a day go through the gates at Flinders Street Station, Melbourne. Claimed to be the largest one station traffic in the world. Control of passengers and freight trains, in and out of Flinders Street and on time, is a masterpiece of precision planning. Made by National Film Board 1953.

Marvellous!!