The Development of the Latrobe Valley
The institution that grew from the Yallourn Technical College into the Gippsland
Institute of Advanced Education and Monash University Gippsland Campus, had
its origins in Yallourn, a model company town that lies submerged in the blackness
of the Yallourn open cut.
Yallourn was no ordinary town. It had a planned life and a planned death.
Owned by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, Yallourn was designed
as a model town in 1921 to house employees coming to the banks of the Latrobe
River to mine brown coal and generate electricity for the state. The latest
technology employed in this mammoth undertaking drew admiration and praise
from visitors at home and abroad, and the town mirrored the meticulous planning
of the industrial enterprise. ’Residence in Yallourn’, explained the SEC’s
first chairman, Sir John Monash, in 1920, ‘should be nearly as ideal as it
is possible to make’.
Until the 1950s, brown coal mining and electricity generation
were concentrated at Yallourn, but with the sharp increase in demand for electricity
in the postwar years, the SEC’s operations spread throughout the Latrobe Valley.
An industrial region emerged as a brown coal mine, briquette factory and power
station were built at Morwell and plans were made for a gigantic power station
and open cut near Traralgon. With employees living from Moe to Traralgon and
beyond, the model town of Yallourn was no longer vital for the SEC’s operations.
In the 1960s, the SEC announced that it would demolish the town to mine the
coal that lay underneath. By the mid 1980s, the town had disappeared.
The pioneering electricity generation at Yallourn and its expansion into the
Latrobe Valley is the backdrop for understanding the history of this institution
and of tertiary education in Gippsland.
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