BendigoWeekly www.bendigoweekly.com.au
ISSUE 1080 FRIDAY, JULY 27, 2018
Kinder cash to boost quiet time NOISY Neangar Preschool will be less so thanks to a state government grant. The California Gully kinder is one of several in Bendigo to score valuable funding to upgrade technology. The money at Neangar will be put toward acoustic material to drown out noise in the echo-filled main building. It will make story time much easier for staff, who say it will also create a better learning environment for students.
HOLD COURT
GOOD STORY: Reading time will be easier for Indie (pictured) and fellow students. Photo: ANDREW PERRYMAN
By SHARON KEMP
BENDIGO’S law courts have emerged as a strong contender to be the future site of a museum, with Court Services Victoria offering no objections nor foreseen hurdles to the project, according to a leading advocate. Wayne Gregson, who is the interim convenor of a community taskforce lobbying for a museum, said he met with CVS officers this week who said they wanted to maintain courtroom one as a heritage court in Bendigo to be used for for-
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Historic building key to museum hopes
mal occasions such as the start of the legal year. “They haven’t thought too far down the track to what will happen to the old law courts but they saw a lot of synergy in what we were saying to them, that of all the buildings in Bendigo, that is the one that most looks like a museum,” Mr Gregson said. “They agree a museum on that site would not be incompatible with
their need to maintain a heritage court. “They encouraged us to keep working on the idea and to maintain contact with them and they will keep us in touch with what might be the future of the old building.” Also propelling the proposal is the potential for the project to be a state election campaign vote winner. All parties fielding candidates in the November state election have
work in race for finals – Page 3
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backed the project but are divided on who should pay. A museum fit-out for the law courts all depends on the Victorian government funding new courts for Bendigo, infrastructure to which it has already allocated $3.9 million to develop a business case with Bendigo TAFE’s city campus as the preferred site. It is understood CSV is in negotiations to use a portion of the Mc-
Crae Street campus for a 10-courtroom facility by mid-2022. It would leave the old courts empty. Mr Gregson said the museum proposal was in its infancy and the work now for the loosely formed taskforce, consisting of himself as Bendigo Heritage chairman, Bendigo Historical Society president Jim Evans and member Pip Johanson, and La Trobe University doctor of history Penny Davies, would be formalised in the coming weeks.
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