The growth of Tanjil Bren

Tanjil Bren has always had a fascination for me. Perhaps it is the name, or perhaps it is the rather remote location.
There were two Tanjil cattle runs to put the name on our maps, whether we spell it as Tanjil or Tangel. Billis and Kenyon, in "Pastoral Pioneers of Port Phillip" tell us that first was the 16,000 acres of "Tangel", on the right bank of the La Trobe River southwest of Sale. This run was established in 1844 and had Gippsland licence No 4.
I'm not sure why the second Tanjil run had Gippsland licence No 3 though it was established in 1848, four years later, by Pearson, Reoch and Brodribb, three men who became legends in the pioneering of this part of Gippsland. This run was called Tangel Hills and is more relevant to today's Tanjil Bren. It had 15,360 acres and was described as "Shady Creek and Moe River.
The next stage in the growth on Tanjil Bren and its legends was the finding of the goldfields and the famous 'Tanjil cement'. The mining was north of the currect site of the town.
The mining was further north in the direction of Mount Baw Baw and was part of the Russell's Creek-Baw Baw diggings (1859). Both sites are on the Tanjil River, Tanjil near its headwaters and Tanjil South on the river flats.
There had been gold found in the Tanjil River and in Russell's Creek from 1859 but then 'Tanjil cement' was discovered, gold in a sedimentary and hardened mix of decomposed granite.
This needed machinery to extract it and crush it, so the tin-dish men gave way to the the businessmen who had the needed capital.
This was the home of Cement Hill and California Gully and from, I think, 1865, the Tangil Cement Gold Mining Company had the No 1 Tangil claim. Note the spelling.
Of course, and inevitably, the Tanjil field was played out enough to make it unviable to the big mines and not of great interest to the prospectors.
In 1936 the Saxton Timber and Trading Pty Ltd, acquired a logging lease on the Eastern Tanjil River. In 1938 the firm selected a semi-permanent sawmill site and this gave birth to Tanjil Bren. The name arose from the Tangel pastoral run (1844) and it is said the word Bren was a play on the milling operation being at the speed of a Bren gun. You may treat that statement with more than a little caution. It seems more likely that it was from a Scottish dialect and means or has to do with a river.
I should mention that Tanjil, however the white men spelt it, was an Aboriginal word meaning snow or ice - or perhaps just damned cold.
In January 1939, the Black Friday bushfires destroyed the mill and infant township, and nine persons died at Tanjil Bren. The column has told the story before of the fearful 1939 fires and the tragedy as Saxton's Mill.
Tanjil Bren was rebuilt within 18 months, in support of the timber salvaging projects. There were hundreds of thousands of super feet of good timber to be had from the burnt forests, if the millers moved quickly enough.
No fewer than six sawmills were set up, Tanjil Bren got a Post Office, shops, a garage and even a café.
More that 1100 million super feet of salvaged timber powered a lively little community, but like gold the timber ran out. By 1950 the timber was gone. The mills closed and Tanjil Bren shrank and almost died. The schools tell the story, as they always do.
There have been three 'Tanjil' schools.
The first was State School 1517, Tanjil, opened to serve the goldfield area "about 20 miles southwest of Walhalla". This was a private school at first but in 1870 the Government provided financial support and it was renamed Tanjil Rural School 40.
Mrs McDonald, the original teacher, retired in 1870 and a new head teacher John Ward was appointed. He ran it as a night school and it was not open during the day. The district inspector reported that he had visited and found no school in operation. He was unimpressed and Ward was dismissed.
The school reopened in 1875, in a new building, and was run on more official lines, but the gold petered out, as it does, so it worked half-time with the Hill End State School. Tanjil was closed briefly in 1893, reopened in 1894 and closed forever in 1898.
The second Tanjil school, SS 2840, Tanjil South, was only six miles north of Moe on the Willow Grove road. It opened in 1887 with only ten pupils, and that is a little surprising. The Education Department usually wanted a much larger potential enrolment before providing a school, or a teacher, but settlement continued and the enrolment grew slowly but steadily.
The third was at Tanjil Bren.
State School 4585 Tanjil Bren was badly needed when it was opened on July 12, 1940. There were now twelve sawmills working in the area, one of them the Northern Timber Mill, owned by Sir William Angliss. There were 20 students enrolled on that first day. The head teacher was Robert Nield, who joined the RAAF shortly after and made the supreme sacrifice. Sawmills inevitably have a finite lifespan as the available timber cuts out and the Tanjil Bren school struggled for enrolments at times. It closed in November 1951 but was reopened the following April. It was 'unstaffed' in June of 1953. The enrolment was then only 15 but losing the school in that remote spot was a disaster for the families. Tanjil Bren State School was finally and formally closed in June 1954.
During the rediscovery of the Victorian snowfields commercial potential in the 1950s people would pass through Tanjil Bren on the way to the Mount Baw Baw snows. The town responded and started providing accommodation and services. This brought Tanjil Bren, bearer of an ancient name, one-time gold village, one-time mill town and little community high in the hills, a new lease of life.
I still do not know exactly how Tanjil Bren was named, or exactly what the name means.