From State Library of Victoria News No. 26, July 2004 - October 2004
For 100 years, Melbourne turned to wrecking company Whelan the Wrecker when a structure needed demolishing. The State Library’s Creative Fellow Robyn Annear has been knocking around the Library for the past year, researching a book on the wreckers’ history.
I was born under the sign of Whelan. At the year, day and minute of my birth the ‘Whelan the Wrecker Is Here’ sign was up at the Eastern Market in Bourke Street as well as on the monumental Colonial Mutual Life building at the corner of Collins and Elizabeth Streets. Perhaps half a dozen more Melbourne landmarks were freshly flattened, their salvageable bits on sale at Whelan’s scrapyard in Brunswick. Yes indeed, the star of Whelan was in the ascendant.
The original Whelan the Wrecker, old Jim, had started in the demolition business during the depression of the 1890s, pulling down spec-built houses that had never found owners. Thirty years later, while wrecking a building in Swanston Street to make way for the Capitol Theatre, one of his workmen carved the words ‘Whelan the Wrecker Is Here’ into the exposed wall of a photographer’s darkroom. The famous sign was born |
Old Jim’s sons succeeded him in the business, followed by their sons. It was this third generation of Whelans whose wrecking spree made headlines throughout the era of booming city development, from the 1960s to the ’80s. Growing up in Melbourne during those years, I found Whelan the Wrecker’s exploits entrancing – more akin to archaeology than demolition.
The Whelans got out of the wrecking business in 1991, after exactly 100 years, and the company records were subsequently donated by Myles and Jean Whelan to the State Library of Victoria. When I applied for one of the SLV’s inaugural Creative Fellowships in order to study Whelan the Wrecker’s Melbourne, I envisaged that the company records – 67 boxes of them, now part of the Australian Manuscripts Collection – would form the keystone of my research. And I was right.
Taking up my Fellowship in July 2003 – the same week that the La Trobe Reading Room opened – I settled down for an intensive stretch of paper-shuffling, penned in by trolleys full of manuscript boxes, in the old Secure Reading Room in the north-east wing of the Library. For a month or more, I had to resist the lure of my Fellow’s study, standing empty and inviting in its nook off the dome. But the weeks spent elbow-deep in boxes paid off. Not only did I glean a detailed outline of Whelan’s 100 years, but I landed on unexpected gems such as the one pictured here – ‘young’ Jim Whelan’s jotted estimate (c.1948) of the cost to demolish the two entire city blocks bounded by Lonsdale, Swanston, La Trobe and Elizabeth streets. That wholesale demolition never happened, but Jim’s notes were kept. I found them pinned to a page of an old wages book.
Done (for now) with the Whelan records, I spread investigative tentacles wide across the State Library’s collections, plunging deep into Genealogy, Newspapers, La Trobe (Australiana), Pictures, and Maps. In tandem with the story of Whelan the Wrecker, I wanted to explore the Melbourne that the Whelans wrecked.
While I made a smorgasbord of the State Library’s collections, the Library was changing shape around me. I watched as the pictures were hung in the Cowan Gallery and was passing when the doors of the beckoning ‘red room’ cracked open for the first time. One day in December I wandered into the new Redmond Barry Reading Room and was struck (almost) dumb by the magnificence of it. I made a beeline for the far end of the reading room’s lofty gallery, where I sat feeling like Queen of the World. The horrors of Ice Station Zebra (as I had come to think of the north-east wing) were soon a thing of the past. The splendid Heritage Reading Room also opened in December, as did the grand new homes of the Manuscript, Map, and Picture collections.
When my fellowship began, I was dazzled by the newly unclad domed reading room. I missed its former gloom. Soon though I grew accustomed to it and, worse, I began to take the dome for granted. Now I make myself look up whenever I scurry beneath it from my study, drinking in the grandeur of all that space and light. Just occasionally, though, I catch myself appraising the dome as a Whelan might—as one that got away.
Robyn Annear was one of the State Library of Victoria’s 2003-04 Creative Fellows.
Illustrations:
Left: Watson's Chambers in Flinders Lane is demolished after being gutted by fire, c. 1920
Centre: One of old Jims;s sons (in bow tie) surrounded by Whelan's workmen, c. 1920
Right: A worker demolishes the buttress of the Duke of Rothsay Hotel, Elizabeth Street, c. 1915 |
