VPRS 18448 Mount Beauty Housing Index Cards

Full description

This series consists of index cards that record the houses that were built to house State Electricity Commission (SEC) employees at Mount Beauty during the construction of the Kewa Hydro-Electric Project.

Large tracts of land were purchased by the SEC as part of the Kiewa Hydro Electric Project. The State Electricity Commission (Extension of Undertaking) Act 1937, resulted in the SEC purchasing land situated at the junction of the East Kiewa and West Kiewa Rivers, upon which the town of Mount Beauty was built in September 1938. Between 1938 and 1960 Mount Beauty was a town built by the SEC to house employees and contractors who built the dams, tunnels, pipelines, roads, power stations and serviced the construction camps. The Kiewa Hydro Electric Prject increased from an installed capacity of 117 MW in 1937 to 289 MW when Parliamentary approval was given to the augmented project on 13 July 1948 (State Electricity Commission Act 1948, No. 5272).

488 houses were built at Mount Beauty to house it's employees during the construction of the Kiewa Hydro-Electric Project. Construction of the houses commenced in 1946 and was completed in 1952. During the Project personnel numbers peaked at 3,598 in 1950 to 1951, and many had moved their families to Mount Beauty.

The cards were used to record the following information about each house built and owned by the Commission in Mount Beauty:

Section, Allotment, Type of House, Number of Rooms, External Cladding Type, Type of Hot Water Service, Type of Cooking Range, Address, Tenant, Date Occupied, Date Vacated, Rental, Extras, Information regarding sale of house. The reverse side of the card contains information on Graden Supplies provided to the house. The Commission provided it's employees with the materials to fence and landscape the property.