Edited transcript of the interview with Malcolm McIlvena, former President of the Coburg Historical Society (2006-2017). Well probably the first thing that people don’t realise is that there were to the north, of us and Pretty Sally is one of them, there were seven volcanoes. We’re going back several hundred thousand years here and those […]
Tag: Pentridge
Digger Smith and the conscription debate
By Cheryl Griffin. “E’s been once wounded, somewhere in the leg…” 6906 Private Lawrence Joseph Smith enlisted on 18 July 1918 and served with the 22nd Infantry Battalion. His parents were William Smith, an overseer, and Letitia Josephine McLoughlin. He’d been born in Coburg, lived with his parents and siblings in Coke Street (later Cope […]
Adela Pankhurst, the anti-conscription movement and Pentridge Prison
By Cheryl Griffin. Not long ago, my attention was drawn to several articles relating to a crowd of ‘no conscriptionists’ who had gathered outside the Women’s Prison at Pentridge to protest the imprisonment of Adela Pankhurst, daughter of English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and sister of Christabel and Sylvia. Estranged from her family, she had arrived […]
Pentridge Prison: Draft Resisters Protest, 1971
By Iain McIntyre. With anti-conscription sentiment and opposition to the Vietnam War reaching an all-time high, 7,775 men were balloted in and made subject to prosecution for failing to register during 1971. At the same time the Federal Government’s will to deal with draft resistance begins to falter, with only 1,089 being prosecuted in any […]
Coburg Primary School
The story of Coburg Primary School begins during the Victorian gold rush decade of the 1850s when Coburg was a small rural village called Pentridge. In those days, market gardens and orchards lined the banks of the Merri Creek, cattle and sheep grazed on land that would later be occupied by factories, and farmers grew […]
Pentridge Prison
As a result of a greatly increased crime rate in Victoria due to the gold rush, the government decided to establish a number of penal stockades and also make use of abandoned ships. One of these stockades was set up at Pentridge (the old name for Coburg) to receive, in December 1850, sixteen prisoners from […]