Battles lasting decades have been fought, and won, by champions of the region and The Standard has been there every step of the way.

Take the campaign to bring a rescue helicopter to the south-west for example.

A rally on parliament steps, a petition with 28,000 signatures and countless posters tied to roadside fences was hard to ignore.

The petition tabled in parliament was the second largest it had seen.

Only a petition about Ronald Ryan, the last man ever hung in Victoria in 1967, was bigger.

The high-profile campaign dominated three state elections and when The Standard shared the powerful story of people like Garvoc's Dominque Fowler, the government started to take notice.

The region was in the middle of its public campaign when Ms Fowler's daughter Alycia, 18, was involved in a car crash at Allansford.

Alycia was transferred to The Alfred hospital after a five-hour wait and four arduous stretcher transfers. She died in hospital 17 days later.

Mrs Fowler's courage spurred many other grieving families to speak about their own experiences and up the ante for a locally-based rescue service.

In 2012, after a 12-year campaign to win state government approval and funding, a rescue helicopter finally landed in Mailors Flat.

Four years later, the region celebrated another huge milestone when the South West Regional Cancer Centre opened.

It was the culmination of seven-and-a-half years of campaigning by Warrnambool resident Vicki Jellie and the Peter's Project Foundation for a state-of-the-art facility for cancer patients, after Ms Jellie lost her husband Peter.

The Standard ran a concerted campaign urging state and federal politicians to commit funds.

And after countless community fund-raisers, corporate donations and government pledges, Peter's Project reached the $5 million needed to establish the centre.

Peter's Project Foundation director and former Warrnambool mayor Glenys Phillpot said The Standard was "absolutely essential" in the campaign.

"The Standard played a vital role in informing the community about the project and its progress and it really wouldn't have been possible without that whole-of-community support and drive to get the project over the line," she said. "It certainly wasn't easy to get money from both the state and federal governments but the community involvement and fundraising that went into it was really part of the success of the story."

Ms Phillpot said there was a real sense of pride when communities came together to campaign for something they believed in.

"Our community feels as if it is their cancer centre and that is something that makes it even more special," she said. The importance of such advocacy certainly cannot be underestimated.

In 2008 a ban on jumps racing, as advocated by animal welfare groups, had the potential to destroy Warrnambool's jumps-focussed three-day May racing carnival.

A campaign spearheaded by The Standard in August that year revealed the carnival's demise would have meant thousands of job losses across the region, businesses going to the wall and tourism marketing opportunities gone.

The Save Our Carnival campaign, run jointly with Warrnambool Racing Club, attracted a petition with 2259 signatures and gave the club tangible evidence of support for jumps racing when it made submissions to both racing authorities and a review by a county court judge.

About three months after the launch of the campaign the then-Warrnambool Racing Club chairman Marg Lucas received a text from then-chief executive Andrew Pomeroy.

"Jumps will continue," the message read.

"I had to pinch myself," Ms Lucas told The Standard at the time.

The Reid Oval upgrades, rail improvements, a new Warrnambool Special Developmental School and Warrnambool Base Hospital redevelopment have all come about through community pressure.

So has the preservation of the region's only university, which nearly shut its doors after Deakin announced in 2016 it was prepared to end its 25-year history with Warrnambool.

The Standard's Save our Uni campaign gave a voice to current and former students, lecturers, community members and education networks desperate to keep a thriving campus in our region.

It revealed the vital opportunity the university provided for people who didn't want to leave the region they grew up in, and ended in a multi-million dollar federal government bailout being secured.

Five years later, Warrnambool's Deakin University celebrated a 13.6 per cent rise in the number of first-choice listings, vindicating the fight to save the campus.

More recently, the region celebrated the announcement the dangerous and dilapidated Princes Highway West had finally been funded for upgrades.

It came after an exhaustive 20-year battle which saw five south-west councils form the lobby group Princes Highway West Action Alliance.

The Standard's campaign Let's Make Highway One number One saw a blockade of the highway opposite the old Raglan Parade office and more than a hundred stories written in 2020 alone.

Clearly it worked, with $60 million committed for upgrades.

Then in December last year Powercor, the energy giant responsible for the St Patrick's Day bushfires in 2018, made a commitment to deliver a safer network.

The devastating fires destroyed houses, fences and livestock, and led to The Standard backing a campaign aimed at highlighting and pushing the energy giant to fix its maintenance systems and issues.

A commitment has since been made to replace or repair 7000 poles a year.

And while some campaigns have celebrated success, pressure remains on those yet to come to fruition.

The Western Region Alcohol and Drug Centre (WRAD) has been lobbying for funding for residential rehabilitation facility The Lookout for the past six years and is still waiting with bated breath for the state government to come to the party.

The centre has committed about $820,000 to the facility with community pledges reaching $685,000.

WRAD director Geoff Soma said he couldn't have raised such funds without the help of The Standard and the wider community.

"The Standard has been incredibly supportive of The Lookout and that's evident with the amount of coverage on a very regular basis," he said. "Without the support we wouldn't be as close as we are today to secure funding. It's been a remarkable partnership."

When Vern Robson rolled into Warrnambool in 1975 he encountered a city that would be almost unrecognisable today.

Arriving as the new town clerk - the equivalent of today's council chief executive officer - Mr Robson beheld a town that was "beautifully laid out", but in desperate need of a makeover.

"When I first visited Lake Pertobe it was a total shambles of a place. Then out toward Thunder Point that's where the local tip was, and in my first visit there were rats swarming everywhere, it was an absolute disgrace," he said.

"I was ashamed there had been such neglect from council. To have rats running around was not the done thing."

In those days councils were run under the "dual management" of the town clerk and city engineer, a certain Ted Johnson.

"It became obvious to us that change was needed," Mr Robson said. "Ted was an excellent engineer and the foundations for the growth of Warrnambool started with the foresight of Ted Johnson."

Mr Johnson conceived the epic transformation of Lake Pertobe, creating the islands, on which 30,000 trees were then planted.

At the time Flagstaff Hill was "basically a rubbish tip", the west Warrnambool industrial estate and Deakin University campus in the east were vast expanses of bush and farmland and the abattoir was a malodorous blight on the city.

Each project took years of work, and for Mr Robson that meant communicating an ambitious and expensive vision to the people of Warrnambool. That was where the local paper became invaluable.

"There wasn't a day when I wouldn't meet with The Standard, I always had an open door policy," Mr Robson said.

"Through those meetings with reporters I was able to get information out to the public and truly communicate our plans. I don't think people realise how lucky we are to have a daily newspaper."

Mr Robson said he was lucky to work with a "stable and progressive group of councillors" through much of his two decades at the helm, but the ratepayers still needed convincing.

"We had to do plenty of borrowing, to build everything - the art gallery, the performing arts centre, the water treatment plant, as well as all the roads and roundabouts, and to the credit of The Standard it brought that message to the people," he said.

The newspaper also offered a regular forum for locals to have their say on what the council was doing.

"You had to take the good with the bad," Mr Robson said.

When he arrived, Warrnambool's two biggest employers were Fletcher Jones and the Warrnambool Woollen Mill, but both businesses were living on borrowed time after the Whitlam government's decision to turf textile tariffs.

But while those businesses waned, the newly privatised abattoir flourished as Midfield Meat, along with a burgeoning education sector, maintaining the local economy.

Each of those moves - critical in hindsight - were documented and hotly debated in the daily paper, providing an indispensable guide for the council.

"It was so important that we had those conversations with the public," Mr Robson said. "We shouldn't be afraid to talk through important change, and I think the history of the city has been well preserved in the pages of The Standard."

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