Mysia Memorial School centenary plans for 2021

It has been touted as Victoria’s first memorial school, with links to Anzac Day and Gallipoli. This year, it will mark a very special anniversary.

Mysia Memorial School circa 1920s

IT WAS a story that made newspapers across the state.

The little town of Mysia, near Boort in northern Victoria, in 1919 had proposed to build a new school in memory of the men from their district that had fought and died in World War I. The residents were going to stump up £500 of their own money towards the cost.

The residents were proclaimed “patriotic and practical” by The Herald that June, when the proposal was taken to the minister for education, who reportedly called “this offer a unique one”.

“The community was naturally looking around just now for means of securing the best, most lasting, and most useful memorial for their fallen heroes, and he could think of no better purpose that a memorial could be devoted to.”

Less than two years later, the £500 had been raised by a town already credited with raising £1200 for the war effort and sending 4000 parcels to the soldiers at the front.

The foundation stone was laid on May 24, 1921. It doubled as a tribute to those who fought, while listing five names of locals who were killed.

Among names on the foundation stone was a local man who was part of the Gallipoli landings in 1915 at just 18 years of age.

Clifford Boyle was repatriated back to Australia suffering injury and illness, and was presented a gold watch from the people of Mysia as a mark of esteem. He returned to the front after two months at home, this time to France, where he was killed in December, 1916, aged 20.

Another of the men listed on the foundation stone, Thomas Ritchie, was killed at Gallipoli.

Mysia locals Bob Rollinson and Ray Chalmers and the school's foundation stone.

The Mysia Memorial School was officially opened by the Governor of Victoria, the Earl of Stradbroke, in spring 1921 (he also opened the Boort Agricultural Show on the same trip).

Mysia in 1921 had a population of 198, according to that year’s census. By 2016, that number had fallen to less than 50.

But while the school has long since closed, locals are planning the centenary commemorations to celebrate what has been touted as Victoria’s first memorial school, now used as a community hall.

“What a great thing to do, in the sadness of war, to think about building a school which is just such an investment in the future and so positive,” says local farmer Susan Gould, who is part of the team organising the event later this year.

“To think ‘let’s do something for the kids’ rather than be dismal and morbid about it.”

Two sons of Elizabeth and Thomas Chalmers, Peter and Alec, are also remembered among the fallen on the foundation stone, which Elizabeth was chosen to lay due to the losses her family suffered.

“The farm we bought that we live on is actually a Chalmers property … she lived here,” says Susan, who has lived at Mysia with her husband for about 25 years.

“I just think as a mum, how horrible, how awful, two of your boys have gone from here and never come back.

“You feel those ghosts when you live on a place — I suppose I feel those ghosts.”

Mysia local Ray Chalmers started at the memorial school in 1965 and was there when it closed in about 1970. “It is just a special place in our lives,” he says.

“We appreciate the significance of it even more now we’re older.”

Deniliquin’s Brad Chalmers, who started at the Mysia school in 1963, has spent the past year researching and writing about the school and the local students who fought.

He hoped to have the soldiers’ biographies completed in the next month.

While the first school at Mysia was opened in 1872, the local school by the 1910s was being called “dilapidated” so building a memorial school allowed the community to address two issues. Brad says original documents showed 50 people donated money to the new school, which added up to £504.

He says the school has two honourboards, donated in about 1917 by brothers Thomas and David Chalmers — one with 33 photos of Mysia students who had enlisted, the other carrying 38 names.

Although only five fallen soldiers are named on the foundation stone, Brad says his research has found 10 of the men on the larger honourboard were killed.

“It was a very patriotic district — 38 ex-pupils of the school volunteered — and it became the first war memorial school in Victoria,” he said.

Photo of the Mysia Memorial school that was discovered in Canada and returned to the locals in December.

While the anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone is just more than a month away, the centenary celebrations will be held on October 10, the day after the Boort show.

And a special photograph, sent from Canada to Mysia in December, will be a highlight. Susan, who believes the photo was captured not long after the school opened, says the woman who found it believed she’d obtained it at an auction in Ontario. No one in Mysia had seen it before. “We couldn’t believe it, it was such a beautiful little photo of the school, and you can see the optimism so clearly in that photo because the kids made that beautiful garden,” she says.

MORE

BROTHERS’ DEATHS REMEMBERED THIS ANZAC DAY

JASON IN TUNE WITH RURAL LIFE

CHANCE TO RUN YOUR OWN MURRAY RIVER PUB