On March 23^rd, 1936, 80 years ago, the enormous Coliseum Hall caught fire. Built in 1908, it was originally designed to seat 4,000 to 5,000 people and had been the home of the South Street Society since that time. The largest building in Ballarat, it was leased by Paramount Pictures and used as a movie palace when not required by the society. This use was to prove its inflammable demise.

The building stood on the corner of Little Bridge and Grenville streets and opened onto the former. Prior to its construction it had been Rennie’s Livery and Letting Stables. It was built at a cost of £13,000, a sum which is improbably difficult to convert to a value today, but might well be considered near $2 million. Similar in design to the Ranger Barracks in Curtis Street, constructed 20 years earlier, the Coliseum had a Queen Anne frontage and was built of timber.

To give an idea of the importance of the Society to Ballarat even in its early days, the prize lists for 1910 contained the following amounts: £500 for brass band contests, £370 for choral, and £450 for vocal, gymnastics, essays, debating, pipe bands, instrumental music and elocution – a total of over £1,300, plus another £100 from the state government for the best essay addressing “Victoria: Its Resources and Greater Possibilties.” Considering that the average yearly wage for a male factory worker was around £150 at that time, and for a female worker around £70, the generosity of the prizes reflected the status of the competition. More important was the role fostering culture among all classes of people in the city – valuable training in public speaking and musical opportunities were offered to both the wealthier schools and institutions such as the Melbourne Ragged Boys' Home Mission.

Royal South Street was to occupy the Coliseum for the next 28 years, until the morning of March 23^rd, when a cleaner noticed smoke rising from the eastern walls of the building. Despite the local fire brigades responding promptly, a hot northerly wind blowing that day drove the fire into a 15,000 ft (4.5km) stockpile of movie film. Composed of nitrocelluose until the 1950s, film stock was then aggressively incendiary. As soon as the stockpile ignited, the timber building – and the Athenaeum building attached to it – was doomed. The Coliseum burned to the ground within 40 minutes. Nothing was saved. Film projector equipment belonging to Paramount and valued at £5,000 was destroyed. Overall damage was estimated somewhere between £20,000 to £30,000 – barely offset by insurance of just £6,000.

Responses to the loss of the Coliseum are reflected in letters to The Courier at the time. R. H. Ramsay wrote:

“I have been a member of the committee of the South Street Society for the last 17 years, and can speak with definite knowledge of the wonderful asset the society is to Ballarat, and realise what a tremendous loss, not only to Ballarat., but to the whole of Australasia, the discontinuance of the Competitions would mean. Now that the Coliseum has been destroyed, there is no hall in which these huge Competitions can be carried on… there is a great fear the Society will be forced out of existence… The Society has been the finest publicity agent Ballarat has ever had...”

And V.E.Greenhalgh proposes bringing forward an idea that wasn’t to come to fruition for another twenty years:

“There can be no doubt that the citizens of Ballarat will be behind any movement to help the South Street Society overcome their disastrous loss… Everything points to the adoption of the civic centre scheme as being the most suitable site…”

The site that the writer was referring to was not the current hall site, by the way, but rather the block between Lyons and Raglan streets, south of Sturt. ‘Culture’, another writer, supported the idea:

“The present area of land owned by the Society is admittedly set in surroundings little better than a slum and is a blot on our fair city.To erect a handsome building there without attempting to demolish the adjacent eyesores would be a grave mistake… proceed with the first stage of the Civic centre scheme proposed by Mr Coburn (a councillor at the time) and build the hall on the south side of the Sturt street block between Lyons and Raglan… or remodel and enlarge the present City Hall...”

Finally ‘Think Big’ wrote:

“The old Coliseum was nothing more than a death trap, and I shuddered to think what might have happened if the building had been full and a fire had broken out… Now is the chance for the South Street committee to get themselves out of the doldrums and get a long-felt want for the staging of theatricals. Think big and you will act big.”