Woodanilling Road Board Hall still stands strong as a symbol of the town’s rich history

The Woodanilling community is proud of its strong ties to the settlement history of the Great Southern — and there is no better symbol of the town’s history than the Woodanilling Road Board Hall. While the current hall was completed in 1922, construction of the original agricultural hall started west of the Great Southern Railway in 1901 within 10 years of the town being gazetted in 1892. Stone was carted in by farmers from Jam Hill and the 40m x 20m stone hall flourished. The town flourished too, thanks to the hard work of the early settlers, wrote John Bird in Round Pool to Woodanilling. Bird explains in his historical account that the opening of the original agricultural hall featured the biggest crowd to gather in the Shire, with Frederick Henry Piesse unveiling what was considered by many as the finest building in town on April 16, 1902. The grand opening featured a picnic and a dance in the evening, and coincided with a cricket match in town during the day. In the early 1900s, Woodanilling was home to several general stores, banks, a school, a hospital and the first trotting track outside Perth. Outside of the dances the hall hosted in the evenings, school lessons were held for 10 students a day in those early years. During World War I, Edna Bell produced concerts in the hall to raise money for the war effort. In 1917, ambitions to form a co-operative emerged at a meeting in town. Five years later, using the stone from the original agricultural hall, the current Woodanilling Road Board Hall was built on Robinson Street at the expense of the former hall. Opening near the peak of the town’s prosperity, the hall’s stage design and capacity of more than 200 people made it a major entertainment attraction. The next year, in October 1923, WA Governor Sir Francis Newdegate and his wife Lady Newdegate were given a reception at the new hall. As was the case with many of the other communities featured in this series, dances, badminton matches and musical performances at the town hall were central to the social lives of residents along the Great Southern Railway. On some nights when dance events were not taking centre stage, there were silent film screenings. But as life changed in regional towns along the railway, and the use of such venues changed with it, the Shire of Woodanilling Council stepped in to build its chambers alongside the hall in 1976. The council upgraded kitchen facilities at the hall in the early 2010s. The building still stands as a central feature of the town and a place where people can ex-perience the annual Coun-try Women’s Association mar-kets or mark major life milestones. Shire of Woodanilling deputy chief executive Sue Dowson described the hall as a lovely community building which people from all over WA were welcome to visit.