Back to search results » Back to search page »

TRUBY KING CENTRE

Other Name

Coburg City Band, Truby King Baby Health Care Centre

Location

cnr. ELM GROVE, and URQUHART STREET, COBURG, MORELAND CITY

Level

Included in Heritage Overlay

Statement of Significance

The Statement of Significance is adapted from the Victorian Heritage Register:

What is significant?
The Coburg Truby King Baby Health Centre in Elm Grove, Coburg.

How is it significant?
The Coburg Truby King Baby Health Centre is of historical and social significance to the State of Victoria and is aesthetic local significance to the City of Moreland.

Why is it significant?
The building of 1926 is historically important as the first purpose-built Truby King Baby Health Centre to be erected in Victoria. The centre has further historical importance for its links to the earlier Coburg baby health centre, which was the first such centre in Victoria to practice Truby King mothercraft methods when it opened in 1919.

The centre has further historical importance for its association with Dr Sir Frederick Truby King of New Zealand, who became famous worldwide for his promotion of the 'Plunket Nursing system' which advocated a complicated feeding formula and a strict routine for babies. His methods were largely ignored by the Victorian Baby Health Care Association who chose to promote other expert opinions. King laid the foundation stone for this centre in 1925, and opened the Victoria's first centre in Coburg in 1919.

The building is socially important for its enduring civic value to the community. Its function which combines facilities for baby health as well as for the city's brass band meetings has been an unlikely but successful union since the building's opening, with the premises being in continual use since then. As a baby health centre, the building is socially and culturally important for marking phases in the lives of mothers and infants. Designed to resemble a typical middleclass suburban house, the purpose-built centre was a symbol of domesticity. It was also symbolic of a culturally progressive caring society, a place associated with new scientific ideas, and professionally designed programs designed to improve the health education of women raising families in the developing suburbs.

The building is of aesthetic local significance as a good example of a domestic inspired form used as civic architecture.

Group