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Tuesday 10am - 4pm Sunday 10am - 3pm

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Sir John Monash Museum inc Yallourn Botanic Garden, 30 Yallourn Drive, Yallourn (2026)

03/09/2026

HOW MONASH BROUGHT 160,000 AUSTRALIANS HOME
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Full article available here: https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/how-monash-brought-160000-australians-home/
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On 29 January 1919, the band of the 9th Battalion played as the first homeward draft marched along the Grand Rue at Roux in Belgium. The men had enlisted in 1915. Since then, their battalion had fought from Gallipoli to the Western Front. They had lived through years of bombardments, mud, separation and grief. Now, at last, their names had reached the front of the roll.
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Home lay 12,000 miles away.
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Eleven weeks had passed since the Armistice. Around 167,000 Australian servicemen remained overseas, spread across camps, hospitals and units throughout Europe and Britain. Some carried wounds that would follow them for life. All had families, homes and futures waiting on the other side of the world.
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The Australian Government had planned for their return since 1916. Peace brought a new concern: thousands of men arriving together would place immense pressure on employment, farms, land settlement and government services. A slower return offered more time to prepare Australia for their arrival.
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For the men waiting overseas, every delay added another day to a separation already measured in years.
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Prime Minister Billy Hughes accepted that the soldiers should return at the fastest rate shipping allowed. In late November 1918, he placed Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash in charge of demobilisation and repatriation.
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The first estimate suggested the task would take at least eighteen months.
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Ships were desperately scarce. The war had damaged global shipping. Ports were crowded, vessels required repair and ships prepared for European waters needed to be refitted for tropical conditions. Allied armies, prisoners of war and refugees were all trying to move through the same strained transport system.
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Monash began pressing for every berth Australia could secure. He worked through the British Ministry of Shipping, pursued changing departure dates and pushed Australia’s claim whenever a vessel became available. Hughes, Joseph Cook and Defence Minister George Pearce added political pressure.
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Sixteen ships sailed in December 1918 carrying 13,312 Australians. It was a beginning, yet the greater challenge remained: deciding who would go first and moving thousands of men through a system capable of carrying them safely home.
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Most servicemen believed the longest-serving men had earned the first passage. Monash agreed. Length of service became the governing principle, with family and employment circumstances helping shape individual cases. Divisions were grouped according to the half-year in which their men had enlisted.
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The vast movement was divided into drafts of about 1,000 men. Each group had to match the capacity of trains, camps, ports and ships. A draft moved from France to Le Havre, crossed to England, completed leave, pay and paperwork, and then waited for its vessel.
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Clear instructions and a visible queue gave the men a sense of progress. They could see the road ahead, understand their place within it and prepare for the day their turn arrived.
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Monash also saw an opportunity within the waiting. After years of military life, the men were approaching a country transformed by war. The AIF Education Service offered university study, agricultural instruction, industrial experience and trade training. Australian soldiers attended lectures in Edinburgh, studied farming and learned practical skills in workshops at Jeumont.
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The journey home was becoming a passage towards civilian life.
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By March 1919, around 37,500 Australians had embarked. The tempo continued to rise. A process expected to take eighteen months returned the great majority of the force within eight months. Around 160,000 Australians were carried home in less than nine months.
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The achievement belonged to a vast network: engineers, administrators, clerks, educators, railway workers, depot staff, port authorities, ship crews, commanders and the servicemen themselves. Monash gave their work order, momentum and a shared purpose.
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Back on the Grand Rue, the band played as the first draft marched away. One thousand men at a time, the distance between war and Australia began to close.
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Home was waiting.
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Sir John Monash Museum
30 Yallourn Drive, Yallourn
Open
Tuesday 10:00am–2:00pm
Sunday 10:00am–3:00pm

30/08/2026

HAMEL OFFENSIVE SHOWS HOW MONASH'S LISTS SAVED LIVES

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Full article and more pictures available here:
https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/the-lists-behind-john-monashs-leadership/
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John Monash carried unfinished work forward.

On his daily agendas, completed tasks disappeared beneath a system of horizontal and vertical lines. The gaps remained. They became the beginning of the following day.

In June 1918, that habit of making responsibility visible expanded across seven typed pages headed:

SECRET. HAMEL OFFENSIVE. AGENDA.

The document moved through the coming operation piece by piece. Infantry. Artillery. Tanks. Machine-guns. Aircraft. Medical arrangements. Ammunition. Food. Water. Transport. Communications. Prisoners. The clearing of the battlefield.

Each entry represented a question that had to be answered before thousands of people moved into danger.

The final conference before the Battle of Hamel brought approximately 250 officers together to work through 133 agenda items. It lasted four hours and 20 minutes. The battle that followed was expected to reach its objectives in 90 minutes.

It took 93.

Monash had taken command of the Australian Corps at the end of May. Hamel would be his first set-piece operation as corps commander, after years in which Western Front attacks had consumed enormous numbers of lives for advances often measured in hundreds of metres.

He understood the battlefield as a connected system. Infantry, artillery, tanks, aircraft, engineers, medical services, transport and supplies had to act in sequence. A failure in one part could expose people in another.

The agenda made those connections visible.

Monash had used lists for years. He allocated time to tasks, allowed for work that overran and carried unfinished items into the next day. His lists extended into packing for leave and cataloguing papers, photographs and souvenirs.

A list held information outside the mind. It gave unfinished work a visible place and allowed a person to return to a task without relying on memory or mood.

At Hamel, the same principle operated among hundreds of officers and thousands of soldiers. Tank officers, artillery officers, airmen, engineers, infantry commanders, medical staff and supply services contributed their expertise. Conference followed conference as the operation became more detailed. The surviving agenda included a separate notes column because it was built for decisions, amendments and action.

Earlier Western Front experience had given Australian infantry reason to distrust tanks. Machines had broken down, become stuck or failed to arrive. At Hamel, tank crews and infantry trained together. Tanks were paired with battalions, and battalion insignia made those relationships identifiable.

Machine-gun planning included ammunition and spare barrels. Aircraft were assigned reconnaissance, bombing, contact with troops on the ground, the masking of tank noise and the delivery of ammunition. Administration covered medical arrangements, engineers, food, transport, prisoners and water.

Water belonged on the same agenda as artillery and tanks. So did the movement of wounded people. So did the ammunition required after the advance. The list placed the celebrated elements of battle beside the practical responsibilities that allowed people to survive and continue.

Approximately 8,000 Allied personnel were assigned to the operation, supported by about 550 guns, 60 tanks and 85 aircraft. They faced approximately 5,000 German troops.

About 1,000 American soldiers from four companies joined the attacking force. American platoons were attached to Australian companies, making Hamel the first battlefield on which Australians and Americans fought together.

Their participation almost ended on the eve of battle when six of the ten companies originally proposed were withdrawn. Monash pressed the importance of maintaining the confidence built between troops who had already trained together. Four companies went forward the next morning.

The attack began before dawn on 4 July 1918.

Artillery struck selected strongpoints while a moving barrage created a line of fire ahead of the infantry. Tanks moved with the soldiers to engage machine-gun positions and fortified points. Aircraft observed the battlefield, attacked targets and carried information. Other aircraft delivered ammunition by parachute, although some parachutes failed to open. Supply tanks carried loads that would otherwise have required large numbers of people to cross exposed ground.

Each carrier tank delivered 12,500 rounds of ammunition with defensive stores. Aircraft attempted to deliver another 112,000 rounds. The agenda's attention to supply continued after the attacking troops reached their first objective.

The operation advanced approximately two kilometres along a front six kilometres wide. Its principal objectives were taken in 93 minutes.

Allied forces captured approximately 1,600 German prisoners and 177 machine-guns. Total German casualties exceeded 2,000. Official figures record approximately 1,380 Australian and American personnel killed or wounded in the battle and its associated diversion, commonly rounded to 1,400 Allied casualties.

The familiar figure is a casualty total rather than a death toll. Hamel remained a violent battle, and many people paid for those 93 minutes with death or injury. Measured against the attacking infantry, the casualty rate has been estimated at roughly one person in five.

Earlier Australian battles show the scale of the burden already carried by 1918. At Fromelles in July 1916, the 5th Australian Division suffered 5,533 casualties in approximately 24 hours. The attack failed in its objectives. At Pozières, 42 days of fighting produced approximately 23,000 Australian casualties, including about 6,800 people killed or dying from their wounds.

These battles differed in commanders, objectives, terrain, technology and duration. Together, their figures show why the development of more accurate artillery, improved tanks, aerial reconnaissance, communications, rehearsal, secrecy and coordinated supply mattered. At Hamel, the whole force worked to reduce the infantry's avoidable exposure.

Every machine-gun position suppressed before soldiers reached it changed what happened to the people advancing. Every load carried by a tank reduced the need for people to carry it across open ground. Every unit that understood the timing and task of the unit beside it had a better chance of responding when the plan met reality.

Monash's operational ability existed alongside his abhorrence of war. He later described his wartime days as filled with “loathing, horror and distress.” He was also ambitious, exacting and capable of driving himself and the people under his command intensely.

Hamel reveals a commander using available knowledge, people and technology to achieve a defined objective while reducing risks that could be anticipated. His lists showed that foreseeable failures carried human consequences.

Preparation became a form of responsibility.

Near the end of the surviving document appears another heading:

AGENDA AFTER BATTLE.

It covered consolidation, reserves, relief of units, the movement of guns, the clearing of the battlefield, salvage and future responsibility for defence. Reaching the objective created another phase of work. Wounded people needed care. Exhausted units needed relief. Ammunition and supplies had to move. Newly captured ground had to be defended.

A plan that ends at the moment of success leaves other people to discover what comes next. Monash's lists kept the next responsibility in view.

The Battle of Hamel is often compressed into two numbers: 90 minutes planned, 93 minutes achieved. The agenda opens those numbers and reveals the work inside them.

Leadership appears on its pages as attention to timing, equipment, specialist knowledge, communication, supply, uncertainty and the people required to carry every decision into action. It appears in the willingness to expose unresolved questions while there is still time to answer them.

Those principles extend into public and everyday life. Engineers, emergency services, community organisations, governments, businesses and families all make decisions whose consequences are carried by other people. Preparation allows risks to be found earlier. Shared plans allow expertise to meet. Visible responsibilities are harder to forget.

At Yallourn, the Sir John Monash Museum preserves the story of a man whose name became inseparable from Victoria's great electricity undertaking. The Hamel agenda offers another way to encounter him. It brings leadership down from the scale of reputation to the scale of a page: one question after another, each waiting for an answer, each connected to what somebody else would have to do.

Completed work could be crossed away.

The remaining gap began tomorrow's list.

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Sir John Monash Museum
30 Yallourn Drive, Yallourn

Open
Tuesday 10:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.
Sunday 10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.

27/08/2026

Replace one word in a movie title with 'Yallourn'.

Add your title in the comments below.

No repeats!

26/08/2026

NED KELLY MEETS JOHN MONASH

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For the full article, go to the web link:

https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/did-john-monash-meet-ned-kelly/
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Did young John Monash meet Ned Kelly?

Norman Campbell wrote that Monash once named two proud moments in his career. One was a council of war on the Western Front, where British officers listened as the Australian commander set out his plan before the breaking of the Hindenburg Line. The other, Campbell wrote, was “when I had a yarn with Ned Kelly.”

That second moment takes us to Jerilderie. Campbell’s account places Monash as a boy on a hotel verandah during the Kelly gang’s occupation of the town in February 1879. Kelly calls him over, asks his name and offers advice about how people should conduct themselves. Other versions place Kelly on horseback, with young John holding the reins; another has Kelly selling a horse to Monash’s father and giving the boy a shilling for his help.

The story cannot be settled from the accounts that survive. Monash attended Jerilderie Public School from 1875 to 1877, while the Kelly gang reached the town in February 1879. An earlier encounter remains possible. Charles Bean kept Campbell’s story and wrote that “Miss Monash” knew nothing of it. Bean had distrusted Monash and joined the 1918 effort to replace him as commander of the Australian Corps, a campaign he later regretted. His note preserves neither his question nor Miss Monash’s answer. It records what Bean understood, but cannot by itself decide whether the meeting happened.

The legend endures because it brings two remarkable Australian lives into one brief moment. Kelly and Monash shared intelligence, self-belief, planning ability and the power to make others follow. Both knew how to use words. Kelly sought to have his Jerilderie Letter published, setting out his grievances against police and authority. Monash filled his working life with plans, calculations, letters and carefully ordered tasks.

Both also used armed confrontation and lethal violence, but their choices carried those qualities in profoundly different directions.

Kelly’s violence was personal and close. At Stringybark Creek in 1878, the Kelly gang killed Sergeant Michael Kennedy and Constables Thomas Lonigan and Michael Scanlan. The gang then carried out robberies at Euroa and Jerilderie. At Glenrowan, they held townspeople in an inn and prepared for a police train to be derailed. The train was warned, the derailment failed and a gun battle followed. Ned Kelly was tried for Lonigan’s murder and hanged at Melbourne Gaol in 1880, aged 25.

Monash commanded violence through military authority, maps, orders and machines. At Hamel in July 1918, he directed Australian and American forces with infantry, artillery, tanks and aircraft. The battle achieved its objectives in 93 minutes, but it also killed and wounded human beings. Monash wrote of war’s horror, cruelty and misery. His answer was disciplined preparation, coordination and overwhelming force intended to achieve an objective while reducing avoidable losses.

After the war, Monash used that same organising power to bring Australians home. As Director-General of Repatriation and Demobilisation, the organisation under his direction returned 160,000 servicemen in less than nine months. He later led the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, helping direct the work that developed Yallourn’s mines, power generation, briquette production and transmission network.

Jerilderie has given its own form to the meeting story. In November 2024, the town unveiled *The General & The Bushranger*, a bronze sculpture and storyboards commemorating the reported encounter. The memorial confirms the place this story holds in the town’s memory. The conversation itself remains one of history’s possibilities.

Two driven lives. One small town. One question that still invites reflection on how talent, ambition and power can shape the lives around us.

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Sir John Monash Museum
30 Yallourn Drive, Yallourn
Open
Tuesdays 10am - 2pm
Sundays 10am - 3pm

24/08/2026

POWER OF COLOUR AWARDS 2026

At Sir John Monash Museum remembering the Yallourn garden city and the people who make Latrobe beautiful.

https://eden-of-the-east.com/power-of-color/

Celebrating the gardens, gardeners and shared creativity that bring colour and pride to Latrobe.

14-15 November 2026

The Idea
Ebenezer Howard’s 1898 Garden City idea was in response to a crisis of urban living, overcrowding, poor health.

From an idea to action to now
1898 - Howard names the human problem
1921 - Garden City thinking reaches YALLOURN
Policy - Public policy promotes wellbeing and livability
Now - Power of Colour advances Howard's idea for a new generation

Learn more at
https://eden-of-the-east.com/power-of-color/

23/08/2026

YALLOURN RAILWAY STATION: THE GATEWAY AT THE END OF BROADWAY

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Full article and more pictures here
https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/yallourn-railway-station/
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The train journey ended where Yallourn began.

From the railway platform, Broadway led arriving passengers into the heart of the planned town. Behind them, the line ran back towards the Gippsland main line and the rest of Victoria. Around them stood the open cut, power station, briquette works, stores and sidings of the State Electricity Commission.

The railway and the town had been planned together. Construction began in the early 1920s, and passenger services opened on 11 January 1922. A surviving photograph shows steam locomotive D 980 beside a small timber station, believed to be the first passenger train to arrive at Yallourn.

Another photograph captures several men walking away from a Victorian Railways carriage. The central figure, carrying a walking stick, is believed to be Sir John Monash. In that moment, the immense system he led contracts to the scale of one man stepping from a train and walking towards the town.

Residents began journeys from this platform. Railway employees kept its traffic moving. Official visitors arrived to see the undertaking transforming Victoria’s electricity supply. In 1954, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh also stepped from a train at Yallourn before visiting the open cut.

At the end of Broadway, the station became the threshold where Yallourn met Victoria.

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Sir John Monash Museum
30 Yallourn Drive
Yallourn

Open
Tuesdays 10am to 2pm
Sundays 10am to 3pm

20/08/2026

AUSTRALIA'S TALLEST CHIMNEY AT YALLOURN

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Full article and more photos available.
https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/australias-tallest-chimney-at-yallourn/
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In April 1923, the men working in the foundation of Yallourn’s new chimney had nothing above them but sky.

A photograph shows them inside a great circular excavation among timber, reinforcing steel, a small cart and an ordinary builder’s wheelbarrow. They were standing where Australia’s tallest structural er****on would begin. Within little more than a year, a reinforced-concrete chimney would rise more than 100 metres above Yallourn.

Its extraordinary height began with the coal beneath their feet.

Yallourn’s brown coal held an enormous energy resource, but it also contained an extraordinary amount of water. Turning that wet coal into briquettes that could be loaded onto trains and used in factories, boiler rooms and homes demanded heat on a formidable scale. Five large boilers were installed at the briquette works, four normally operating while the fifth remained in reserve.

Keeping those fires alive meant feeding them an immense quantity of fresh air while moving the resulting gases through the boilers and out of the works. About 2,000 cubic feet of gas every second had to keep moving.

Inside the chimney, hot gas formed a lighter column than the cooler air outside. At ground level, that difference created pressure: outside air pushed through the furnaces while the hot gases rose. Greater height produced stronger draught.

At Yallourn, airflow became architecture.

Before that architecture could rise, workers dug down to hard clay and began constructing a circular foundation 45 feet across. The surviving photograph captures the part of the landmark that would eventually disappear beneath everything above it. Against the scale of the excavation and reinforcing steel, the wheelbarrow in the foreground looks almost comically ordinary.

Then the workplace began climbing into the sky.

The formwork had to remain rigid and perfectly aligned while containing tons of wet concrete. Wind, weight and balance mattered more with every foot gained. From the ground, some observers became convinced that the half-built chimney was leaning. Sir John Monash inspected it and dismissed the supposed crookedness as an optical illusion.

The men working high above Yallourn faced a more immediate concern. They argued that the danger justified additional pay, and the dispute became a strike that delayed construction for three months. From below, the chimney was becoming a national engineering achievement. From the working platform, it was also a very long way down.

By June 1924, the chimney had reached its full height. It would become working machinery, a familiar landmark and one of the defining shapes of industrial Yallourn.

Look again at the wheelbarrow in that first photograph, and then at the empty sky above the men beside it.

Yallourn was about to fill it.

17/08/2026

QUEEN ELIZABETH II VISITS YALLOURN

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The full article, restored photographs of the Queen and the SECV video 'Yallourn’s Royal Hour' on the website
https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/the-day-the-queen-came-to-yallourn/
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Some women waited through the night. One brought a dog. On 3 March 1954, the royal train reached a Yallourn transformed by flags, flowers and thousands of waiting faces.

Model electricity pylons stood on either side of Broadway with a welcome banner suspended between them. The Yallourn Brass Band was in place. Souvenir sellers moved among the decorations. Children, Guides and Brownies waited near the railway-station dais with flags. Former resident Harold Park remembered two fountains made at the Yallourn Base Workshops and installed in the town square. Yallourn workers had used their own skill to prepare the town’s welcome.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, were making the first Australian tour by a reigning monarch. Their itinerary covered nearly two months of capital cities, country towns, parliaments, hospitals, sporting grounds, farms and industrial sites. On 3 March, the official route ran from Sale to Traralgon, Yallourn and Warragul before returning to Melbourne.

At Yallourn, the program opened with an Address of Loyalty at the railway station. The official party then travelled on to an inspection of the brown-coal open-cut workings. The visit joined the town’s public welcome to the work of the State Electricity Commission.

Gippsland municipalities declared a public holiday. Special trains and buses carried people towards the royal route. Houses and businesses were decorated. Local committees arranged transport, bunting, crowd positions and children’s places. The Morwell Advertiser estimated 70,000 people across Traralgon, Morwell and Yallourn, with 20,000 gathered at Yallourn. The surviving photographs show women and children packed along the route, people waiting behind barriers, a royal car passing beneath the welcome banner and the town’s civic spaces filled for the occasion.

Yallourn’s garden streets, public gardens, schools, sporting grounds and town square belonged to the same public undertaking as its mine, power station, briquette works, workshops and transmission lines. The State Electricity Commission had built the town to house the people required by the power scheme. The gardens, civic buildings, dredgers and boilers formed one connected system of home, work and infrastructure.

Sir John Monash had accepted the general managership of the SEC in 1920 and soon became its chairman. Power from Yallourn was turned on in 1924. By 1930, the state grid had been established. Monash died in 1931, and his legacy remained present in the state undertaking, planned town, engineering workforce and belief that Gippsland brown coal could be organised into electricity for Victoria.

By 1954, Yallourn Power Station had expanded over more than three decades, with further development under way. Electricity from the Latrobe Valley had entered the ordinary structure of Victorian life: homes, factories, transport, shops and public services.

The open cut revealed the scale of that system. Brown coal was exposed and extracted on an industrial scale. Dredgers, railway lines and working faces formed the supply system behind the power station. Museums Victoria photographs show the Queen and the Duke inspecting the mine. The State Electricity Commission also made the 16-minute film Yallourn’s Royal Hour.

The film places miners, engineers, tradespeople, operators and the community inside the public story Australia was telling about itself in 1954. The Queen and the Duke travelled through Yallourn and stood at the mine. The strongest image is the movement from the station dais to the work that put Yallourn on the national itinerary.

Sir John Monash Museum
30 Yallourn Drive
Yallourn

Open
Tuesdays - 10am to 2pm
Sundays - 10am to 3pm

fans

15/08/2026

WHEN THE TOWERS ROSE OVER YALLOURN

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The full feature, including the engineering behind Yallourn W’s natural-draught cooling towers, the reason their white plumes are not smoke, and the story of the two Yallourns that briefly shared the same landscape, is now available on the Sir John Monash Museum website.

Read the full article here:
https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/when-the-towers-rose-over-yallourn/

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During the 1970s, concrete began climbing into the sky west of Yallourn.

The curved shells rose above the open cut, the power stations and the garden town whose streets were steadily emptying below. Each completed section altered the skyline until three immense structures stood above the Latrobe Valley.

They were cooling towers, although that simple description barely captures what they represented.

Yallourn W’s towers were the first natural-draught concrete cooling towers used at an Australian power station. Their shape formed part of the machinery itself. Warm condenser water fell through the structure while cooler air entered through the open base and rose naturally through the narrowing shell.

The white plume above each tower was principally condensed moisture from the cooling process—not the combustion gases released through the station’s chimneys.

The towers also rose during one of the most consequential periods in Yallourn’s history.

Below them, the Garden City created beside the original power scheme was being dismantled. Houses disappeared from blocks. Buildings were demolished or moved. Schools, clubs, churches and public institutions faced closure, relocation or reinvention.

This placed two futures in the same view.

Below stood the first Yallourn, built around civic design, gardens and community life. Above it rose Yallourn W, built at the scale required by a state whose dependence upon electricity had become absolute.

Sir John Monash never saw the towers and played no direct role in their construction. His connection lies in the institution he helped build: a statewide electricity undertaking that treated mines, power stations, transmission, engineering and community as parts of one public system.

The town disappeared.

The towers kept working.

They remain the concrete signature of the second Yallourn—and of the people who built Victoria’s electricity system one solution at a time.

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Historical image: Virtual Yallourn. Restored by Sir John Monash Museum.
Contemporary photographs: Damian Andrews.

11/08/2026

CAN MONASH’S PRINCIPLES HELP SOLVE A CLIMATE PROBLEM?

Read the full article: https://eden-of-the-east.com/sjmm/stories/can-monash-principles-help-solve-climate-problem/

Sir John Monash and the engineers of the State Electricity Commission built Yallourn by studying Victorian brown coal on its own terms.

At the time, brown coal was widely regarded as the wrong coal. It was young, unstable and extraordinarily wet. Where it was mined at Yallourn, the seam averaged 65 to 67 per cent moisture. Every three tonnes of raw coal carried roughly two tonnes of water.

Monash did not begin by asking how to make this material behave like the black coal engineers already understood. He and the SEC began with a more useful question: what was Victorian brown coal, how did it behave, and what kind of system did it require?

The answer became much larger than a power station. The SEC designed a mine, briquette factory, transmission system and town around the material Victoria actually possessed. On 15 June 1924, electricity generated from Yallourn’s brown coal began flowing to Melbourne.

A century later, the same first-principles discipline may help us examine a very different problem.

Modern agriculture depends on nitrogen fertiliser, but plants do not recover all the nitrogen applied to soil. Some can leach into water, some can escape as ammonia, and some can be transformed by soil microbes into nitrous oxide.

Nitrous oxide has approximately 270 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide and can persist in the atmosphere for more than a century. Even comparatively small nitrogen losses carry a substantial climate cost.

Researchers tested whether brown coal’s organic and humic characteristics could help soil retain nitrogen from urea fertiliser for longer, giving crops more opportunity to use it.

The early results are positive. In soil-column experiments across three Australian soil types, brown coal–urea granules reduced cumulative nitrous oxide emissions by 31 to 42 per cent and mineral-nitrogen leaching by 42 to 65 per cent compared with conventional urea. A later glasshouse study involving silver beet reported lower nitrous oxide and ammonia emissions, together with increased nitrogen uptake.

Plants still require nitrogen, and urea remains a concentrated source of it. The question is whether combining the two materials could help more of the applied nitrogen remain within the plant–soil system rather than being lost to the atmosphere or water.

Most published work has been conducted under controlled laboratory, soil-column and glasshouse conditions. Soil, crop, climate, application rate and formulation all matter. Larger field trials and a full life-cycle assessment—including the processing and transport of brown coal—are still needed.

That caution is part of Monash’s method. He succeeded by making brown coal's problems specific enough to solve.

The Sir John Monash Museum stands inside the last surviving building of the original brown-coal development. It is an appropriate place to ask whether a material once studied for the energy it could release might now be studied for something entirely different: its potential to help reduce the damaging climate effects of nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere by fertiliser use.

Yallourn’s first question helped power a state. Its next may begin beneath our feet.

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Sir John Monash Museum
30 Yallourn Drive, Yallourn
Open
Tuesday 10:00am–2:00pm
Sunday 10:00am–3:00pm

Sir John Monash Museum inc Yallourn Botanic Garden

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