Rowville Village Drive-In

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Rowville Village Drive-In 1233 Stud Road, Rowville, VIC

The Rowville Village Drive-In opened on 12th July 1956 – The evening’s “smash-hit, debut feature was ‘Rear Window’ starring Grace Kelly and James Stewart plus Betty Hutton in ‘Red Hot and Blue’. Admission prices were four shillings for adults and one shilling for children.

Brain Child

The Rowville Drive In Theatre was the brain child of Stewart Finn whose father Jack was a man who had never been afraid to take on new business opportunities. A visit to the Croydon Drive In had impressed 22 year-old Stewart and he was able to persuade his father that the family’s thirty acre property lying in a triangle between Stud and Bergins Roads would be an ideal site for such a venture. Stewart and Jack put their proposal to Bill Spencer, the managing director of the Village Drive Ins at Essendon and Croydon, and he quickly recognized the suitability of the location with its proximity to Dandenong and Ferntree Gully. A new company was established and Jack and Stewart set about converting the pasture land to a properly terraced site. It is important to remember that this occurred in 1956, the year of the Melbourne Olympics, because with the coming of the Games another phenomenon was also about to be launched – television – which would eventually have a severe impact on cinema attendances. However, in early 1956 the directors were confident of the future success of the Rowville Drive In.

Building the Drive In

While Stewart and Jack were busy at the site supervising the shaping of 12,000 cubic yards of crushed rock and the laying of 20,000 yards of cables to the 720 individual speakers, the Village technicians were grappling with the problem of providing a better screen for their outdoor theatres. The Americans had developed a material whose light reflective qualities were far superior to the painted screens used then in Australia but the Village executives were unable to obtain government approval to import this product. So they set about designing their own and, after many failures, came up with an aluminium alloy etched and fluted strip that they named Lustre Light. Hundreds of these strips, each six feet long by five inches wide, were tongue and grooved together to create the huge Rowville screen that measured 40 feet high and 82 feet long.

Opening Night

The Rowville Drive In was officially opened on a cold July night in 1956 by Sir George Knox. This ceremony was followed by a parade of entrants in the Dandenong Hospital Beauty Queen competition. Two hundred pounds of the opening night’s takings were donated to the hospital’s building appeal as well as to other Dandenong and Ferntree Gully charities. The evening’s “smash-hit, double feature show” was ‘Rear Window’ starring Grace Kelly and James Stewart plus Betty Hutton in ‘Red Hot and Blue’. Admission prices were four shillings for adults and one shilling for children. A special double page advertising feature run in the Argus on the day of the opening spoke glowingly of the Drive In’s “sylvan setting”. “Located at the junction of Stud and Wellington Roads, Rowville – four miles on the city side of Dandenong – the theatre is surrounded only by a few farmhouses, sheep, cattle and a stud farm.

Giant Screen

From the top of the 80ft tall screen tower you can look down on as attractive a bush land scene as could be imagined. The drive-in nestles comfortably in a shallow fold of undulating field. Around it rises hills and mountains covered with trees and dotted here and there by neat patches of ploughed land.

Survival

As anticipated by the directors the Drive In did survive the early television era but eventually succumbed in 1983 as more and more homes were equipped with colour TVs and video players. The land’s zoning was converted to residential and is now occupied by housing along Streeton Court, Heyson Close and the northern section of Sunshine Street. The only reminder of the Rowville Drive In Theatre is a single poplar tree to the south of the Baton Rouge Motel. A row of these tall trees once flanked the back of the giant screen.

by Bryan Power

First published in the September 2005 edition of the Rowville-Lysterfield Community News – Contributed by Greg Lynch –