Yallourn Technical School
On a Tuesday night in May, 1928, the first students of the Yallourn Technical
School disappeared through the door of St Andrew’s Presbyterian church hall,
ready for the school’s inaugural class. At first the school had no permanent
staff or equipment, and for the next eight years, the accommodation consisted
of little more than three cottages, two of them fitted out as classrooms
and one as a laboratory. But there was a strong commitment to technical education
in a town surrounded by state-of-the-art technology that was modernising
and electrifying Victoria.
Despite its cramped conditions, the school offered many things, ranging from
junior secondary education to trade certificates and diploma level courses in
electrical and mechanical engineering. As an early school prospectus claimed,
the diploma was a ‘special passport for a young engineer setting out on his
voyage of life’. The courses offered at the school reflected the close connection
between the new institution and the SEC.
With the school bursting at the seams, principal Howard Beanland ingeniously
shuffled his students between cottages, sheds and SEC facilities so that the
school could expand its offerings. At the same time, the SEC strenuously lobbied
the Education Department for a building. Eventually, with the promise of a generous
subsidy by the SEC, chief architect of the Public Works Department, Percy Everitt,
drew plans for an impressive technical school building that was completed in
1936.
Yallourn youth could not avoid being affected by the engineering microbe’,
asserted SEC chairman, F.W. Clements, in his speech at the opening stressed
the importance of technical education. The students soon settled into the science
laboratory, machine shop, art rooms and workshops housed in the sleek, modernist
building.
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