DAYLESFORD SCHOOL OF MINES

The Daylesford School of Mines comprises the Laboratory Building with Chimney and the Art Department Building dating from 1890, and the Technical School Addition of 1914. 
Both the Laboratory Building with Chimney and Art Department Building were designed by architects Figgis and Molloy and built by John Patterson. The Laboratory Building contains the metallurgical laboratory and the chemical laboratory. Each laboratory has a hipped corrugated iron roof with lantern providing daylight. The metallurgical laboratory is particularly intact with unplastered walls, furnaces, fume cupboards, and a part flagstone floor. It is serviced by a substantial, tapered brick, dichromatic chimney with bracketed capping on its western wall. The chimney is a fine example of its type and a landmark in Daylesford. 

The Art Department Building features a slate mansard roof, and a corrugated steel skillion roof which enable daylight to be provided to the interiors through banks of timber framed windows that project into the mansard, and through glazed roof bays. The Technical School Addition designed by architect F.A. Horsfall and built by G. Clayfield forms the street facing frontage of the school. It is a simple red brick structure with rendered horizontal bands, lintels and sills, and a capping to its parapet. Cupboards and workbenches from the 1890s, featuring diagonal boarding, is present in several rooms of the complex. 

The Daylesford School of Mines is of historical and architectural significance to the State of Victoria. It satisfies the following criterion for inclusion in the VHR: 

Criterion A
Importance to the course, or pattern, of Victoria’s cultural history.

Criterion D
Importance in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a class of cultural places and objects.

 
 

 

The Daylesford School of Mines is historically significant as a forerunner of the technical schools that were a key part of the Victorian education system for many decades. Gold mining was foundational in the rapid development and economic growth of Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century and created the need for post primary school education, and education that was more technical in nature than that provided at the university. The Daylesford School of Mines, along with others in Victoria, filled that gap in the education system and later became a Technical School and High School that complemented the neighbouring State School. The Daylesford School of Mines building demonstrates the sequential development of technical education in Victoria with the School of Mines laboratories and art department at the rear and the later technical school addition facing Vincent Street. 

 

The Daylesford School of Mines is architecturally significant as it retains a combination of fine features that are characteristic of an early technical school - roof lanterns for daylighting, distinctive brick assay chimney, furnaces, fume cupboards, and 1890s joinery. The Art Department Building retains its roof and window forms which provided the lighting necessary for its function in the teaching of subjects such as drawing, casting and dressmaking. The combination of the three building phases on the site show all the characteristics of a new higher education system in which both the arts and sciences are taught within the one building complex. The Technical School Addition provides classrooms that support or supplement the older buildings and demonstrates the further expansion of the technical and high school curriculum in the twentieth century.