Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum's nod to history leaves a sweet taste

It wasn't until he got a call from Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum that Warrnambool's Ken Gibbons discovered that his great grandmother had opened the town's first lolly shop back in the 1800s.

"My mother was a Kucks but I didn't know anything about her mother, or grandmother," Mr Gibbons said.

When the collections team at Flagstaff Hill was doing some research into the history of local confectioners they found out Sibilla Kucks had come from New York to settle in Warrnambool in 1858. 

The museum has named its lolly shop after her.

Originally from Prussia, Mrs Kucks was heavily pregnant with her second child when she sailed to Australia with her husband, Johann, on the Ocean River.

They arrived in Melbourne just 17 days before William Jr was born, the second of seven children they would have.

In 1859, the young family settled in Warrnambool, which at the time had a population of 2000, and purchased Fergusson's bakery in Timor Street, opening it under the name W. Kucks Baker.

Mr Kucks, who is one of the dozens of faces on Warrnambool's pioneer honour board, supplied bread to the Warrnambool hospital until the 1880s.

The Kucks even had a street named after them in Warrnambool, but in 1975 it was one of a number of streets that were renamed Merrivale Drive.

In 1873, they built a row of four shops at 140-146 Liebig Street - one of them became the home for Mrs Kucks' confectionery shop.

By 1896, their sons William Jr and Henry took over operation of the business as Messrs Kucks Bros Bakers & Confectioners.

Their 38 kilogram monster pyramid cake filled with coins that they baked for a local bazaar in 1907 was the talk of the town.

William Jr also became licensee of Terang's Wheatsheaf Hotel, its name and logo paying tribute to the family bakery.

Mr Gibbons, a former vice-principal at Jamieson Street Primary School, is William Jr's grandson and said it was amazing to think his ancestors had started a confectionery business in Warrnambool all those years ago.

"It was fantastic all that history," he said. "I'm a diabetic so I'm not supposed to eat lollies."

The Krucks link is not Flagstaff Hill's only tie to Warrnambool's past, after all it is a museum. But there are many seemingly hidden links to our past that go beyond the historic items on display.

First planned in 1972 and constructed over the next five years as a way to draw tourists to the district beyond what was then a five-week summer influx of holidaymakers. Former mayor and chairman for the Flagstaff Hill planning committee John Lindsay said the community raised $100,000 and the Victorian government chipped in $200,000 for the project.

"There was such tremendous support from around town and council," he said.

"At the time when we first started planning there were nine motels in Warrnambool, now there is in excess of 100 motels," he said.

Flagstaff Hill at the time was an open paddock where horses would graze and there was just the flagstaff and three national trust buildings on the site.

"It had historical significance as being a guidance into the port of Warrnambool going back over 100 years," Mr Lindsay said.

He rejects suggestions it was just a man-made village. "The lighthouse keepers' cottage, four fortifications and the flagstaff are national trust buildings. They were there on a vacant site," he said.

"We started to tell and depict a picture of what a little town was with those sorts of buildings." He said most of it was built using the same materials early settlers used including local sandstone and bluestone blocks from Penshurst.

He said divers discovered that some of the shipwrecks along the coast carried a lot of building materials, among it was plenty of green slate from California.

Mr Lindsay said former Flagstaff Hill director Peter Ronald had, with his mates, recovered much of the slate from the Falls of Halladale that was wrecked at Peterborough. Some old handmade bricks also came off the wreck of The Childers and were used in village buildings. "A lot of the green slate on the buildings he picked up off the ship and put them on a trailer to be used to roof many of the main buildings," he said.

The village buildings themselves were built in the tradition of some of Warrnambool's original buildings, designs inspired by historical photographs and by walking the streets looking at old buildings that had survived.

Mr Lindsay said that one of the museum's design draftsmen, Warrnambool's John Perry, would walk around town and "look at a particular building and just convert it into something that snuggled into the township and gave that same impression".

"To try and reproduce an exact building down there I don't think was the way to go. But what you're picking up is a theme of early Warrnambool," Mr Perry said. "We had great stacks of photographs to work from."

He said the two-storey sandstone building in front of the village pond was modeled after the old brewery on the corner of Timor and Fairy streets. The museum's lifeboat house was a scaled-down model of the original lifeboat house that was once located at the breakwater.

The round chimney, located at the back of one of the houses and next to the old church, came from the former butter factory in Grassmere. "That round chimney is probably the top-most part of the old Grassmere Butter factory chimney. That was brought in brick by brick. They're obviously special bricks because the bricks are made with a slight camber so they can be built around a curve," Mr Perry said.

Other materials were salvaged from notable buildings across the district and reused in many of the buildings in the village.

The window in the church is from the old hospital, and the church itself was the former WIlliamstown Mission to seamans building. One of the jails on the site was the former Koroit jail house. Mr Perry said he enjoyed working on the project saying there was a lot of excitement around the town at the time.

One of the most recent buildings on the site is the newspaper office which was rebuilt after it burnt down in 2012. Graeme McIvor has been volunteering at the museum a few days a week for the past 16 years, at first restoring antique furniture and now producing printed products in the museum's Examiner newspaper office.

The 121 cases of type and other historic metal pieces that are now a melted mess hang on the walls of the building as an artistic nod to history.

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