The Urana Soldiers' Memorial Hall is a heritage-listed community hall located at Anna Street, Urana, Federation Council, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by George Sheppard (in 1884 as the Mechanics Institute Hall) and by Sidney James Hunnings (in 1923 as the second hall and façade). The Hall was built between 1884 and 1924. It is also known as the Soldiers Hall, Mechanics Institute Hall and School of Arts Hall. The property is owned by Federation Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 8 April 2016.
History
Aboriginal land
The traditional indigenous people of Urana area are the Bangerang people. The Bangerang used the River Murray as a thoroughfare and were famous for their bark canoes. There are large middens along the Murray river, on both banks, composed of black wood-ash and burnt clay from cooking. For the Bangerang the river fulfilled a function as a major highway for communications and trade and as a major source of food. They found plentiful food, shellfish and Murray cod in the river and fruit, tubers and nuts in the adjacent country. Although they probably joined the Wiradjuri and [others] at the annual feast on bogong moths in the alpine peaks each December and January, the Bangerang were less mobile than the highland folk. The dislocation by Europeans of normal Aboriginal routines of life was increasingly severe from the 1840s onwards.
Colonisation
After initial explorations by Hume and Hovell in 1824, the first settler in the Albury area was Charles Ebden who started working land on both sides of the Murray in 1835. By 1838 the major route south from Gundagai to Port Phillip was established along the line of the later Hume Highway through Albury. A census in 1845 counted 200 people in "Urana in the centre of Bangerang country". By 1850 all desirable water frontages on both sides of the Murray had been taken up. The rivers of the plains north of the Murray in the Urana region also had attractive frontages, though more prone to drought. In the mid-1840s, there were "settlers moving down the Lachlan, Murrumbidgee, Billabong and Murray Rivers", and more moving north from Victoria.
In the 1850s the gold-rush population created a market for beef which encouraged cattle breeding. The big stations on the flat plains were typically partitioned into paddocks and the backblocks more intensively exploited. Urana's Brookong station, which in 1850 had had one paddock covering , by 1871 had twelve paddocks, each of , divided by wire fences. In the 1860s cattle disease and low prices for beef led pastoralists to concentrate more on sheep, and fine Merino wool became a dominant product. With a vigorous steamboat trade on the Murray from the 1850s and a rail link to Melbourne via Echuca, the wool clip was assured of easy transport to its markets. With closer settlement in the period from 1870 onwards, grain production became increasingly important. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw an increase in the number of pastoralists, a reduction in the general size of holdings, the increased sinking of deep wells to water backblocks and a complementary increase in the population of the service towns throughout the region.
Between 1860 and 1890 the population of the region increased by 600% and the towns took their municipal shape. Albury, the senior and always most important town, was surveyed in 1838 and gazetted in the following year. Urana developed in the mid-1860s as a crossroads on drove routes, converging from Corowa to the south, Jerilderie to the west, Narrandera to the north and Wagga Wagga to the northeast. The towns served agricultural farms and grazing properties and prospered from meeting their needs. By the mid twentieth century, irrigation channels to assist farmers on the drier lands in the west have both increased wool production and diversified cropping, although with a heavy price to pay in increasing salination around the Wakool.