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CINEMARECORD

OUT IN THE STICKS Cinema History No. 78

Early cinema in Melbourne's outer eastern suburbs ·

By Roger Seccombe

The Sticks claypits of the prosperous brick and tile trade. Even around about
1948 it was still very much like this. This was the year when I had
In the late 1960s when I was moving from the ci.vilized my first glimpse of this area, 'dinked' as a child on the back of
respectability of Kew to the wilds of Mitcham, friends would joke my mother's bicycle on sketching and painting expeditions from
that the Aborigines still roamed the roads around there! While I Kew to Ringwood Lake (quite a haul by bicycle in those days!).
was to subsequently find this was far from accurate, for an avid
Nunawading (or Tunstall as it had been named up until l945) was
film-goer from the inner suburban picture palaces, cinema-going
a few commercial buildings on Springvale Road beside the station
'out in the sticks' was quite a different affair: Once you left Box
while Mitcham was similar. Ringwood was, of course, a larger
Hill behind, you were definitely into the territory of 'country hall'
settlement. In between was open space and little else along a
cinema!
straggling two-lane country road that was Whitehorse Road.
The Lilydale and Femtree Gully Railway and Whitehorse Road
(further out,Maroondah Highway) were the main parallel arteries The Country Hall Cinema
of transport to the east of Melbourne. The railway had been Despite the sparsely settled nature of much of the outer east it's
opened between Box Hill and Ringwood and, out along these remarkable that th.e cinema came early - a measure, I suppose, of
corridors, Melbourne's suburban sprawl had expanded towards the appeal of this new marvel, especially for the many migrants
the east and the Dandenong Ranges. As the suburbs thinned out from Britain who had settled in .areas like Croydon and brought
after Blackburn (and I'm talking immediately post-war) you were with them a lifestyle habit of cinema-going. One of the easiest and
into an area of market gardens, orchards, small farms and the least risky ways of opening a cinema was to operate from one of

Cinema Halls in Melbourne's Outer Eastern Su.burbs, circa 1950
t.;
. \ Warrandyj.~.\ 1 Box Hill Rialto { N
I I "'\ 2 Box Hill Regent I t
{ - /''--/"1 ; 3 Boronia Progress Hall
. • rr·-----·,/ '....: .I .1 1 4 Boronia Electra
'·~~- - --t..T.emplestowe f / \
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1 1 East ~o ~.... 1 ./ 3 • . Boronla \ r.., \ ... - . '-/ '') r·v--...
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--~~TER ~~. :fWheelers .#""-~·, .. -,.,- · {
I ........ ~--;Ct.> Hill ,., Scoresby ' -.,....,.Jo._ Beigrave
J / -9~~ .... - .. _ _, ... •· l Upwey -~-~~~~~'--~/'~,
I f ! ~~ Map drawn by Martin Powell, March 1999. . -~ \
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