Prahran College
The Prahran College of Advanced Education, formerly Prahran College of Technology, was a late-secondary and tertiary institution with a business school, a trade school, and a multi-disciplinary art school that dated back to the 1860s, populated by instructors and students who were among Australia’s significant artists, designers and performers.
After undergoing various mergers, splits and incarnations over the years, the Prahran entity ceased to exist from 1 January 1992, when an Act of Parliament brought Prahran College of TAFE under the auspices of Swinburne University of Technology. The tertiary courses, Graphics and Industrial Design, remained on the campus. All others were moved to Deakin University, except Prahran Fine Art, which was relocated and amalgamated with the Victorian College of the Arts.
History
The art school in Prahran grew from beginnings in the 1850s. The Prahran Mechanics' Institute was established in 1854 with part of its activities separating and being identified as Prahran Technical Art School in 1915. That was incorporated in the Prahran Technical School in 1950 with its tertiary and trade education becoming the Prahran College of Technology in 1967. This then became the Prahran College of Advanced Education in 1974. It offered a wide range of higher education and TAFE courses, with a focus on art and design. On 9 December 1981, the TAFE component was spun off as the Prahran College of TAFE.Prahran Mechanics’ Institute
In the 1850s what was an as yet unnamed district of Melbourne south of the Yarra River was occupied on its hills by large estates, an extant survivor being Como House, served by a population of around 8,000 workers in cottages set in often swampy, flood-prone lower-lying areas. A settlement along what is now High Street, Malvern Road and Chapel Street, became Prahran, and the minister of the chapel after which the street was named, Rev. William Moss, held public educational lectures for skilled tradesmen. A 1 May 1854 meeting he attended with other businessmen of the district resolved to establish a Prahran Mechanics’ Institute, and from a fund-raising campaign a dedicated building was constructed in Chapel Street and opened in December 1856.Throughout the 1860s the Victorian government, seeking to improve industrial design, established schools of design for 'working men', and a School of Art and Design was set up in Prahran. By 1876 the emphasis had switched to preparatory classes for university entrance and for public examinations leading to employment in the Public Service. The institute closed for lack of funds during the 1890s depression, but Henry Furneaux in his appointment as secretary in 1900 re-established the institute, started to restore its membership and agitated for better accommodation for classes. He proposed to his committee of management the employment of Thomas Levick, part-time art teacher at the Working Men’s College and previously at the Castlemaine School of Mines, and he was duly appointed from 1 July 1908.
Prahran Technical Art School
4 September 1909 brought Education Department recognition as a Prahran Technical Art School, but unlike for other such schools Prahran did not receive government maintenance grants and though by August 1911 the School had an enrolment of forty-eight, Furneaux was obliged to continue lobbying for a new building. When Levick resigned to take up a permanent position at the Melbourne college Furneaux strategically left the appointment of his replacement to the Education Department which on 6 February 1912, hired William R. Dean, a lithographer and commercial artist who had gone on to study at the National Gallery in London and was made Associate of the Royal College of Architecture. "Prahran Tech", combining secondary and tertiary schools, began in 1915 with costs shared largely by the Prahran Mechanics’ Institute and Prahran Council. In 1931 Dean, then inspector of art education in Victoria, continued to express favour for a generalist, rather than vocational, art education in saying that "originality should be encouraged and that Australian forms, feelings and colouring should be stressed as much as possible." Under his tutelage, enrolments increased.Prahran Technical College
In 1960 Prahran offered diploma level Art & Design courses, which also attracted overseas enrolments. A new trade block was opened in 1961 on the corner of St John and Thomas Streets, with a second stage finished in 1963. Trade courses it housed were Fibrous Plastering, Cabinet-Making, French Polishing, and Upholstery. Evening courses were also provided in Cabinet-Making and Home Wood Craft; Shorthand; Typewriting; Dressmaking; Invalid Cookery; Ticket writing; Display; Millinery and Preparatory Apprentice Class.Art school
The Committee on the Future of Tertiary Education in Australia was appointed on 27 August 1961 and via the Universities Commission reported to the Commonwealth Minister, Senator John Gorton. Willis Connolly heading the Victorian State Advisory Committee on Technical Education oversaw implementation of the recommendations of the Commission and created the Victorian Institute of Colleges through an Act on 9 June 1965.That year the senior part of the school had begun to call itself Prahran Technical College and Alan Warren, a graphic design teacher from RMIT School of Art replaced Duncan as Principal. Warren, Art critic on the Sun News Pictorial newspaper from 1951 to 1971 and member of modernist Contemporary Art Society, proved himself a vocationalist in contrast to Duncan, committed to running a ‘college’, rather than a ‘technical school’, which trained "creative designers, craftsmen and draughtsmen" but not "artists in a vacuum" and least of all, "oil painters." In teaching theory, knowledge of art forms, encapsulated by Roger Fry in Vision and Design , was to be imparted but not "simply a History of Art".
Warren was an active publicist for the college; the school published a magazine, prahran, in 1962 and mounted an art display in the Port Phillip Arcade in the city, then from 1963 the art school produced a Bulletin written by Warren and his staff, then including drawing teacher Pam Hallandal; Mrs Nancy Moore ; Max Ripper, Instructor in Advertising Art; Robin Wallace-Crabbe, Instructor in General Art; Nan Ritter, Instructor in Drawing; John King, Instructor in Painting; Edgar Howell, Instructor in Instrumental Drawing; and J. Freivolt, Instructor in Craft.
Prahran was considered to be at the vanguard of design education, offering the first Diploma course major in photography in Australia. Enrolments then in the art school under Head of Art Frank Carter then comprised 80 secondary teachers in training who received £15 a fortnight from the Education Department, 30 Certificate of Art students and 200 part-time students. Art and Commerce Diploma courses were available in 1962 alongside Certificate programmes for Commerce, Accountancy and Certificate of Art.
Prahran College of Technology
Prahran was affiliated with the Victoria Institute of Colleges in 1967, in its application emphasising the ‘School’s unique character…implicit in its foundation as a Technical Art School….retained throughout the ensuing half-century of operation,’ and stressing that in Victoria there was need ‘for a modern advanced Institute of Design, planned, staffed and equipped to train students for the Industrial Design, Visual Communications and the Film and Television Industries,’ and supported by a suggestion that Prahran art students would benefit from the 'intimate association with both Liberal Arts and Business Studies.' Its favourable position was backed up by the fact that the school had an established council that could become a new autonomous College council as suggested by VIC.In order that the institute could officially become a College in line with Principal Alan Warren's ambitions, and affiliate with the Victoria Institute of Colleges, General Studies was included in the curriculum from May 1965. From that date the school was ‘Prahran College of Technology.’
The Prahran and District Parent-Teachers' Council and the Victorian Teachers' Union organised a meeting at the Prahran Town Hall on 12 May 1966 to protest conditions in local schools and carried a resolution calling on the State Government to apply the Health Act to State Schools. Cr Martin Smith, president of the Prahran Technical School Council, responded by showing the meeting plans for a new Arts and Commerce Block for the college, a multi-storeyed building which had been approved by the Education Department against a background of inaction since 1947 despite Union complaints since the 1930s of leaky Technical School roofs and ‘slum-like’ conditions.
A new building
The new building, of five storeys and a basement, was constructed during 1966 and 1967 at a cost of $1.5 million with $800,000 granted by the Commonwealth Government. It accommodated 350 students of the art section in thirty workshops, studios and lecture rooms. The 1967 Handbook detailed an overall ‘integrated’ program as preferable to it being divided into separate ‘channels’. Three-dimensional media including Industrial design, sculpture, ceramics, and stage design would share a core in Structure Studies, and graphic artists, illustrators, painters and photographers a common course of Image Studies, while "Communication Studies bring together film-makers, television and theatrical designers. Thus the old boundaries of Fine and Applied Art can be broken and a rich interchange of creative ideas can be stimulated."This structure became the basis of Prahran’s well respected ‘Preliminary’ or ‘Foundation’ Year, headed by Gordon Leviston, which in 1970 included Liberal Studies: History of Arts 1, Matriculation English Expression; Design Studies: Image Design, Structure Design; Related Studies: Drawing, Technical Drawing, Lettering, and Rendering. Students could add extra subjects in Typing, Mathematics, Science and Chemistry.
This building was demolished fifty years later for the construction by the Andrews government of a 25 million 'vertical' secondary college, next to Melbourne Polytechnic and the National Institute of Circus Arts, and which opened in 2019.