Warrawong Kindergarten for Emergency Care

The Warrawong Kindergarten for Emergency Care in Ringwood East began to provide temporary emergency care in the 1960s. Run by the Graduates Association of the Melbourne Kindergarten Teachers College, it started off as a holiday home for children attending kindergartens affiliated with the Free Kindergarten Union. Opening in 1937, it was a “sister” institution to the holiday home at Forest Hill which had opened in 1927 to provide inner city children with a country holiday with plenty of food and fresh air to improve their health.

It was originally known as Ware Holiday Home, and was located on 25 acres of land that was donated to the Graduates Association by Fred Davey. Davey had seen the success of the Forest Hill holiday home, which had recently constructed new buildings, and offered up his home and land for a similar institution. Davey announced in November 1938 that he was satisfied with the running of the Ware Holiday Home, and transferred the title deeds over to the Past Students’ Association of the Free Kindergarten Union. A newspaper article from 1938 described Ware as “25 acres of ground on the slopes of a hill” with a house that could accommodate 10 children at a time (The Age, 28 November 1938).

Due to the epidemic of 1937-1938, the Home began by accommodating children convalescing from polio, rather than children from inner city kindergartens. At that time it was known as the Ware After-Care Home for convalescent children and it accommodated 10 children at a time (Fern Tree Gully News, 7 January 1938). An article in the Age said that the “beautiful property” at Ware was “proving admirable as a means of restoring to health those little convalescents who need nourishing food and change of surroundings” (The Age, 28 October 1937).

After World War Two, it was decided that the old homestead Ware was not a suitable building, and fundraising began to construct a new one, described as a “peace memorial” (The Age, 26 November 1945). The proposed new home would have capacity for 20 children, a one storey building “with a sunny outdoor sleeping porch and a glassed-in day nursery”. A 1946 article mentioned that the Home would also be used to give holidays to “tired mothers” (The Argus, 5 April 1946). The new building, named Warrawong, started to receive children in 1957 and was officially opened by Lady Brooks on 27 September 1958.

During the 1960s,  Warrawong began to offer emergency care for families in crisis situations (the kindergarten in Forest Hill had been providing temporary residential care since 1960). Children would stay at Warrawong for a period of 10 days.

From 1971, Warrawong provided an emergency day care program for 36 children and a kindergarten program for 20 local children.

An undated press clipping from around the mid to late 1970s in the collection at University of Melbourne Archives refers to severe financial difficulties at Warrawong. It stated that the kindergarten had been able to keep providing a service by selling off most of the land originally gifted in the 1930s. The article describes Warrawong as a day care kindergarten for disadvantaged children (providing “temporary emergency care”, as well as a regular kindergarten for local children. There were 20 children in each group, which were both in the one building but functioned separately. The article suggests that Warrawong stopped providing overnight care around the end of the 1960s (“Has it come this far just to die?”, University of Melbourne Archives).

The date when Warrawong ceased providing emergency day care is not known. The kindergarten kept operating until it was closed in 2003. After the sale of the property in 2003, the Foundation of Graduates in Early Childhood Studies established the Warrawong Fund which provides grants for early childhood education projects.