Yallourn
town in Victoria, Australia
Yallourn is a locality in the Latrobe Valley region of Victoria, Australia, 126 kilometres (78 mi) east of Melbourne, located within the City of Latrobe local government area. Yallourn was originally a company town, built between 1921 and 1961 to house employees of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV), which operated the nearby Yallourn Power Station complex. However, expansion of the adjacent open-cut brown coal mine led to the closure and removal of the town in the 1980s.
Whilst the township no longer exists, the locality remains with a diminished population; at the 2021 census, Yallourn recorded a population of 143, down from 251 at the 2006 census.
Design
The town was planned by A.R. La Gerche, the SECV's Architect. It is sometimes mistakenly thought to have been designed by Walter Burley Griffin, who planned Canberra, Australia's capital city.
The design of Yallourn incorporated lessons learnt from the early UK garden cities of Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth Garden City inspired by the work of Ebenezer Howard. It included a formal central square adjacent to the shopping area and a "Broadway" bounded by parks between the shopping area and railway station. The whole town area was surrounded by a green belt varying between native vegetation, open parkland and sporting and recreational complexes.
Residents were charged below market rentals and the SECV adopted the role of paternalistic landlord in addition to its role as employer to the majority of the town's income earners.
The public source identifies “Yallourn” as town in Victoria, Australia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Yallourn, town and Victoria.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Yallourn”, the useful work is to connect “town in Victoria, Australia” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1853588. VIAF identifies the subject as 125468927. The Library of Congress control number is n78029290. Authority coordinates are -38.183, 146.333. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1961, 2021 and 2006.
Modern boundaries and familiar names can conceal earlier jurisdictions or structures that do not align with the present site. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yallourn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.