Kandos a Rare 20th Century Town
On 15 July 1933 Kandos Talkies would treat you to a double-bill, Beauty and the Boss, a “radiant romance, spicy and snappy – She had ‘IT’ but she hid it”; and “a sparkling satire Once in a Lifetime which reveals what goes on in the private offices of Hollywood film studios”!
What could be more mood-altering than a dance hall that suggested a glittering French palace.
In 1934 Lue had a pub, school, railway station, baker, butcher, one church, another store and fewer than twenty scattered houses.
There was something magical about the ropeway. A continuous stream of buckets gliding across the landscape, sliding against imperial towers, over rugged hills, and deep gullies, above sheep grazing in paddocks or a plough turning the soil.
Our rotunda might seem solitary and neglected, yet it is, to me at least, romantic and uplifting. I would suggest also that it has more to say about Kandos history, and even our state history, than any other building in Kandos.
Buildings have their history and also their mystery. The name alone, Cockroach Castle, is intriguing. When did the reputation of this building sink so low as to acquire that pejorative?
Architect William Kemp introduced a new style of bush school, the Beehive. It avoided the Gothic, had an enclosed verandah, semi-circular galvanised iron roof and was built with local materials (in the case of Pyangle, timber and stone).
Education was pretty raw a hundred and fifty years ago. Imagine a dozen or more kids squashed on a couple of long benches, scraping their feet on the dirt floor of a slab and bark shack, reciting letters of the alphabet, while the untrained teacher pointed with his cane.
W B Murphy jumped out of on-line newspapers so many times I finally said, 'OK! I'll do your story.' But how to begin?
So what does an English Baron have to do with Kandos? It seems the cement company was hanging on Leverhulme's coat-tails to promote its own workplace philosophy
The internet rules our lives today, but just a century ago the latest technology was the telephone.
Kandos History 