Cataloguing in Gippsland

Musings of a Cataloguer at Large in Gippsland. Just personal thoughts - absolutely no bearing on the thoughts of any organisation with which I am working.

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Location: Victoria, Australia

Monday, September 3, 2012

Trove Tuesday - Hotels and More Hotels

Trove Tuesday is when bloggers of a certain ilk post something about finds on Trove.

Mine for this Tuesday is the absolutely unbelieveable story I found when I put "Shakespeare Hotel" Stratford into Trove for the Maffra Spectator and for the Gippsland Times. (I have just learned, in passing, that unless it is The Times of London, one does not capitalise or italicise "The" in front of newspaper. Nice to know. Thanks Trove Forums)

Not only up came the Shakespeare Hotel, and there is was losing its licence in 1886, but also it was part of the very first successful Local Option vote in the state, aimed at decreasing hotel licences. We definitely didn't know that. As we followed its fate through the hearings, and then the compensation hearings, we found two other hotels we had never heard of that also lost their licences, plus saw a lot of others we knew about losing theirs. In many cases we were given wonderful detail of number of rooms, types of customers, if the police had reservations about how the hotel was run, etc etc.

In the end, of the 19 hotels in the Stratford Licensing District, nine lost their licences, to rationalise them down to nine (one seems to have gone first of its own volition). And we ended up with a book. We definitely wouldn't have known about this if it had not been for Trove. To read the publicans, some of them women, speaking in their own voices in the hearings, as they fought to keep their hotels, was precious beyond belief.

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