Beginnings and Sources
For this article, the author mainly utilised VPRS 640 Central Inward Primary Schools Correspondence 1878-1962 and VPRS 795 Building Files: Primary Schools 1863-1975. To open a box at PROV and take out the fragile records of Loch State School is to enter a world as familiar and foreign as the moon, yet these events took place only three generations ago. It is a world of deprivation and hardship, of deference and pride, of religion and manners, of isolation and sometimes of danger, of uncertainty and also of hope and optimism, a world where it can be said 'the township is a rising one ...'¹

We bought our farm at Loch, a small township in South Gippsland, in 1982 and shortly after its purchase I embarked on research for a thesis based on the history of education in Victoria. For a major piece of work, I chose to write a history of the Loch State School and subsequently embarked on many visits to Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), then based in Laverton, to peruse the Victorian Department of Education's primary school records. I found a wealth of letters, receipts, marginalia, scribbled notes, petitions, reports and attendance records that contained the names and signatures of early European settlers already familiar to me through the street, track and laneway names of Loch and its surrounds. These were people who cleared and settled the land carved from an early pastoral run, the Kangaroo Run, itself formed by arbitrary boundaries imposed on the steeply forested hills and gullies of the lands of the Indigenous Bunerong people.² I also delved locally and found published oral histories, recorded reminiscences, newspaper articles and a photograph of the school obtained through a somewhat clandestine loan. I was fortunate to be able to interview a local resident who had attended Loch primary school in 1906. I found many of Loch's first citizens, with whom I had developed familiarity, in the cemetery at Nyora and some in Poowong. I discovered our farm formed part of a parcel of land pegged out by Mary Henrietta Leys, the first Head Teacher at Jeetho West. I felt personally located in the early days of this small Victorian township that owed its establishment to a fortuitous change in plans for the route of the Great Southern Railway when it was decided to utilise the easier gradients of the valley of Alsop's Creek through Loch and Bena rather than follow a ridge of hills through Poowong to Korumburra.

Recently I revisited this work and again appreciated the broad application of school records for the historian. They not only document the day to day concerns of bureaucrats, students and teachers, but contain a wealth of sources that illuminate broader personal and community aspirations, social and religious values, institutional and bureaucratic activity (and inertia), class structures and issues of gender, attitudes to power and authority, community health issues, and attitudes to the environment. My research using the state archives at PROV provided me with information on what it was like in a difficult environment with a harsh climate, isolation, primitive facilities and lack of infrastructure. It also enabled me to come to some understanding of life in a small township in the late nineteenth century, its social composition of European pioneering families, community leaders, ambitious professionals, canny speculators, workingmen and itinerant travellers; and their personal aspirations, concerns, ambitions, achievements and disappointments. I have reworked my earlier writing to encompass this broader perspective.

Victoria Road, Loch, c. 1913.
Photograph courtesy of Loch & District Historical Group

The Township
Motorists on the South Gippsland Highway, travelling through the usually green and pleasant hills to Korumburra, Leongatha, Wilson's Promontory and on to Yarram, will pass the turn-off to Nyora and then swing left on a bypass road that skirts the edge of the small township of Loch. If they glance to the right on this swift journey, they may notice a small railway station, a hotel, an old bank and a post office. They will be well past, and will not see, Loch's small primary school, situated on a gentle rise on the curve of the old highway that is now a quiet side route into the township. The school's position was considered 'a fine one' in 1888 when protracted negotiations took place for the purchase of land. It was then on the main road into the town, opposite land later provided for St Vincent's Roman Catholic Church. For a century, then, those two civilizing influences, church and school, formed a gateway into the town. The original school building with quarters has long disappeared but a 'new' building of 1892 and a companion building erected in 1910 are still visible though now obscured by the later addition of a 1965 extension which spans the northern elevation of the school.