Shed built during a sticky situation

Holidaying recently in Halls Gap with my kids and my parents, my dad suggested we take a drive to The Stick Shed in Murtoa in Western Victoria’s Wimmera region (roughly halfway between Melbourne and Adelaide).

I’d never heard of it before he suggested it, but always down for an adventure and to lay eyes on something I’ve never seen before, he didn’t have to ask me twice.

We all piled into one car for the hour-long trip and let him drive while we napped off our morning’s hike in The Grampians and gigantic lunches at Pomonal’s Barney’s Bar and Bistro.

Dad told us a little of what he knew about this big shed.

When we arrived, I realised describing it as ‘big’ probably wasn’t an effective enough word for the monstrous structure.

This ‘Cathedral of Wheat’ is the length of five Olympic swimming pools and has a floor space of 1.6 hectares.

For those still calculating land space in acres, it’s almost four of them!

It was built in 1941, during World War II, as an emergency grain store.

And this one, the last remaining shed of two on the site for the same purpose, was actually the smaller of the pair.

Wheat production was high in the era and shipping was limited, so the government had this giant shed built using thousands of unmilled mountain ash poles, instead of steel, which was in short supply at the time.

It operated until 1989, when the Grain Elevators Board deemed it uneconomic, and after the Heritage Buildings Council issued an interim protection order that year, it is now heritage-listed.

Inside, while impressive, it was eerie.

It was windy when we visited.

The tin sheets high above rattled and the sides were being sprayed with debris that had flown across the vast paddocks surrounding the shed, building momentum with every tumble.

The sounds echoed inside, amplifying them into an unsettling chorus of clanging.

We were the only visitors there at that time of day (right before the 3pm closing time), which made the immense space all the more spooky as we took up very little room inside its huge belly.

It was also stifling hot inside, despite the high ceilings, despite any draft.

The workforce of mature-age men (because most of the young ’uns were at war) who built it, did so without any safety gear, sitting high on that roof on top of flapping sheets of tin to hold them down while they waited for the next man to come along and nail them down.

Building technology has obviously advanced a lot since the 1940s, but when you consider it took only four months to build — construction started in September 25, 1941, and was complete and ready to receive wheat in January 1942 — and it’s still standing 85 years later, I don’t care who you are, that is impressive.

An information sheet I picked up on entry before watching a short video about The Stick Shed’s history says there were 560 unmilled poles — or sticks — forming 56 rows of 10 to erect it.

It’s around 270m long, 60m wide and about 19m high along the ridge.

The floor is concrete and the roof angle reflects ‘the natural angle of repose’ of stacked bulk grain.

Apparently there was a bumper yield of grain in 1941, but the war had limited exportation, and hessian bags and cornsacks were hard to find.

So this high volume facility was the solution to storing it.

Grain was deposited into a hopper below the railway line and lifted by steam-powered elevators in the working house to a conveyor belt just under the apex of the roof, which ran the full length of the building.

By June 1942, The Stick Shed was filled with 3,381,600 bushels of grain, which sat undisturbed until April 1944.

The second — and larger — shed was built in 1942-43 after the first filled up.

It could hold 7.5 million bushels.

It was demolished in 1975, the same fate that in 1987 befell an even bigger grain storage shed in Dunnolly that could hold 10 million bushels.

Construction started on a third shed in Murtoa, but it was never completed.

While The Stick Shed might sound uninteresting to some, an excerpt from a 1994 study by Econsult describes its aura well: “It resembles a giant, serene cathedral … From certain angles within, the wooden support poles resemble a forest of trees.”

It is certainly worth seeing for yourself.

Because, while pictures tell part of a story, they cannot make you feel as tiny as this towering shed can make you feel being right there inside of it.

It’s both humbling and surreal.