WANGARATTA Woollen Mills is being remembered for its community minded workforce during a research project into its history.
Bendigo Woollen Mills, owners of the Wangaratta mill, is celebrating their 40th anniversary next year, and RMIT University historian Robert Crawford is working on a chronological history of the mills and its connections.
With Wangaratta Woollen Mills being sold to the company in 2017, it then inherited the history of the Wangaratta mills, dating back to 1923.
University of Melbourne historian Jackie Dickenson has been helping Professor Crawford with research and visited Wangaratta last Thursday and Friday, going through countless pages of records at the Wangaratta Historical Society museum and visiting the mills to explore cultural and business history.
Dr Dickenson said, as a labour historian, she was interested in learning of the cultural history of the mills.
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“I suspect it’s to chronologically explain how this company is connected now to this long history of woollen work in Australia, which in Victoria has been a really important employer and essential to a town like Wangaratta and its existence really,” she said.
“We’ve found a lot of employee handbooks, when an employee joined Wangaratta Mills the handbook showed how they should behave, the ethics and all the things they should do.
“I was really happy to see that Wangaratta was somewhere that the employees weren’t just employees, they were actually a part of a community."
Dr Dickenson said she was interested in learning firsthand the experiences of those who used to work at the woollen mills in the past to learn more about the social and cultural changes at the mills over time, including the childcare of the women who worked there.
“The kind of questions I would like to ask link into local history, like what was the meaning of the mills to the people of this town,” she said.
“It brings it to life, otherwise it’s just a dry bit of history; it’s the people and the community who make it interesting.”
Any past workers at the woollen mills or family members of former workers who wish to be interviewed for the research are encouraged to reach out to edit.chronicle@nemedia.com.au.
