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The Streamlime Moderne Korumburra Comfort Station for Women - Radovic Street, Korumburra

The Korumburra Comfort Station for Women was designed and constructed in 1944 by the Public Works Department. Located at 3 Radovick Street Korumburra, the Women’s Comfort Station is on one of Korumburra's main commercial streets.

 

Aesthetically, the Women’s Comfort Station is very Art Deco in style. Built of smart clinker brick, it is a well resolved interwar public building, which is notable as a locally rare example that features progressive Streamline Moderne influences such as the stepped pylon at the south west corner. The rounded verandah of corrugated iron with wooden supports is a much later edition, introduced when Korumburra became known for its fine Victorian buildings during the 1980s.

 

The quality of the design and prominent location of the facility illustrates prevailing attitudes to the provision of separate public conveniences for women in the pre-Second World War period.

 

Korumburra is a medium-sized dairy and farming town in country Victoria, located on the South Gippsland Highway, 120 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. Surrounded by rolling green hills, the town has a population of a little over 4,000 people. Korumburra has built itself on coal mining (after the discovery of a coal seam in 1870), local forestry and dairy farming. Whilst the coal seam has been used up, farming in the area still thrives and a great deal of dairy produce is created from the area. The post office in the area opened on the 1st of September in 1884, and moved to the township on the railway survey line on the 1st of November 1889, the existing office being renamed Glentress. The steam railway connecting it with Melbourne arrived in 1891. Whilst the train line has long since operating commercially, it has found a new life as the popular tourist railway the South Gippsland Railway which operates a heritage railway service between the major country centre of Leongatha and the small market town of Nyora.

 

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Uploaded on January 12, 2013
Taken on January 8, 2013