Stories
Original features about the people, places, food and ideas shaping Latrobe City and the wider region.
From Churchill's planned streets to a self-guided audio journey across the Valley, two October walks invite you to slow down and read Latrobe through the decisions, voices and ambitions held in place.
6 min read
A garden can give someone a reason to choose Latrobe. Local businesses can give them reasons to stay, spend and return. At A New Chapter for Latrobe, Power of Colour will show how that visitor pathway is designed to work—and where your business might fit.
5 min read
Sweet peas, roses, vegetables and carefully arranged bowls brought the work of Yallourn's gardens into shared view. In one room, private cultivation became part of community life.
4 min read
The weekend of 10 and 11 October opens a rare window into the systems that keep daily life moving across Latrobe—from food and resource recovery to water treatment and regional aviation.
6 min read
How a returned serviceman made care a way of life in Yallourn North.
6 min read
Before opening Valentina + Botanix in Seymour Arcade, Hailey knew flowers as farm crops, wholesale stock and florist’s material. That whole working education now meets at the Traralgon counter.
2 min read
A beautiful place carries the work of people who prepared the ground, learned its needs and returned. Jock Lawson's years at Yallourn show how horticultural skill becomes part of everyday community life—and why the hands behind the finished view deserve to be seen.
5 min read
The next part of life is already being shaped by what you keep close and what you leave behind. From Spiders Cafe in Moe, First Light explores how memory, loyalty and hope compete for room in the life ahead.
6 min read
Five Open House Latrobe places reveal how Traralgon makes room for performance, movement, learning, memory and urban nature—and how people turn those spaces into public life.
6 min read
A town becomes easier to imagine as part of your life when its green spaces belong to the routes you use every day. Yallourn's story shows how planning opened that possibility—and how generations of care gave it character.
6 min read
Bees need flowering plants for pollen and nectar. In Moe, the Latrobe Valley Beekeepers Association has invited members to put that knowledge into the ground by creating a community pollinator garden.
3 min read
Months of collecting, coordinating and riding connect local donations with Christmas support for families. For more than two decades, Alf and Stella Vella have helped riders, workplaces, clubs, volunteers and charities turn individual contributions into a tradition people across Latrobe can enter.
4 min read
Behind the Churchill Hub, raised growing beds, a greenhouse and renewed earth are giving local people something valuable: a clear place to plant, learn, contribute and return. Churchill Community Garden is growing through the work people share.
3 min read
Escape Rooms Traralgon turns clues, puzzles and a time limit into a shared adventure where different ways of thinking can move the whole group forward.
4 min read
Readiness can arrive in pieces. Sometimes it opens the door; sometimes the first small movement makes room for it. From the tables and coffee window at Jay Dee's Cafe in Morwell, this First Light story explores how a step, a pause or a return can carry hope forward.
5 min read
Six Open House Latrobe experiences invite you into the places where Morwell creates, seeks justice, preserves memory, tests ideas and gives children room to make. Choose a door and discover how a town becomes public through the people who take part.
7 min read
At Habitat Creations’ Moe nursery, future wetlands, waterways and planted landscapes begin with seed, provenance and the patient work of raising plants for the places they will enter.
3 min read
Four Open House places reveal how energy has shaped Latrobe's landscape, buildings and continuing story.
12 min read
At Glengarry Plant Farm, the future of a garden or revegetated landscape begins at hand scale—in locally sourced seed, small forestry tubes and the care that prepares an indigenous plant to leave the nursery.
4 min read
At Van Berkel Wholesale Nursery, Arch and Leree Van Berkel give young trees the time and hands-on care to leave Gippsland ready for streets, developments and landscapes far beyond the nursery rows.
4 min read
A place earns its pull when work, home, nature, services and recreation strengthen the same daily life. Ebenezer Howard drew that relationship as a third magnet. Yallourn gave selected parts of it a Latrobe form, and Power of Colour brings the idea into the ground people care for today.
5 min read
At Traralgon West Nursery, a young tree or rose is encountered at the beginning of its story—small enough to carry, yet already asking the gardener to imagine years ahead.
4 min read
Grow Master Traralgon has brought plants, practical advice and landscape materials together since 1964, helping local garden ideas find a form that can live beyond the nursery gate.
4 min read
Five prominent Australian cartoonists beneath your feet in Moore Street. Victoria's 2007 Sustainable Communities Tidy Town title. A national urban-design award beside the railway, followed by a Victorian civic-landscape honour. In Moe, external recognition is part of the town's legacy—set into its streets, carried in its buildings and lived in the places people use every day.
2 min read
Ebenezer Howard asked how work, home, nature and community could belong to the same life. Power of Colour brings that question into Latrobe through the places people shape, the care they contribute and the future they can help make visible.
4 min read
Follow Moe from the railway edge into a story of wheels, music, public service and whole buildings moved across Gippsland.
5 min read
Robyn Bull began I Do I Do Gippsland in Traralgon with a clear purpose: help people find the remarkable wedding businesses already working across the region. A decade later, the magazines, directory, stories, fairs and industry gatherings Robyn has developed show how many hands can carry one celebration from its first idea to the day itself.
11 min read
Some flowers are chosen to outlast the day that gave them meaning. At Posy Silk and Dried Florals, colour can follow people from ceremony to celebration and then home, where memory becomes part of everyday life.
3 min read
Each summer, dahlias turn Amber Rhodes’s Budgeree hillside into colour people can carry, celebrate with and learn from. She knows that beauty begins months earlier, with cold soil and the work of choosing what will live again.
5 min read
Along Yinnar's Main Street, a former butter factory, a cottage gallery and a railway goods shed carry the town's creative and historical life through making, showing and remembering.
4 min read
Chels began growing flowers because she needed something that belonged to her. In the hills of Callignee, those first beds became work her family could grow alongside and colour other people’s lives could carry home.
4 min read
A wedding gathers many people around one promise, with colour carrying that idea through the day.
4 min read
Every bouquet begins with a person and a reason, then with the early choices that bring colour back to Moe.
5 min read
On the 10th and 11th of October, the doors of Latrobe's libraries, galleries, civic buildings, industrial sites and community spaces will open onto a regional story shaped by the region's deep history, collective effort, design, care and the work of imagining what comes next.
8 min read
Donna Hicks began Dear Delilah Florist in a home studio. The Florist’s move onto Commercial Road gave Morwell a public doorway into a growing botanical practice.
3 min read
Finding enough energy to continue can change the direction of a day—or a life. From Anna Mary Robertson Moses to a busy café in Morwell, this story explores the different changes we call a second wind, and why knowing the difference matters.
6 min read
For more than fifty years, family-owned Tiffany's Florist in Traralgon has helped Gippsland find colour for celebrations, farewells and the moments when ordinary words need a hand.
2 min read
At a Traralgon florist filled with fresh flowers and locally made gifts, Gippsland growers, creative work and the milestones of everyday life meet in colour.
3 min read
The lines of five prominent Australian newspaper cartoonists remain embedded in Moe's Moore Street footpath, where the politics of 1991 and one tiny hidden fishhook still reward a careful look.
5 min read
At Dunedin in Tyers, Jean Galbraith and her family made a garden from heavy clay. She learned through its failures, wrote its changing life into Garden in a Valley, and gave generations of readers a place to recognise their own.
5 min read
At 36 Main Street, a small cottage brings exhibitions, leadlight craft and community projects into one intimate room. Since 1999, artists, students and visitors have used Matchbox Gallery to make, show and encounter art.
4 min read
Wendy Stanway's search for ways to support her daughter led her towards a larger local purpose: giving people in Moe a place built for deliberate rest. Her answer now sits behind a green shopfront on Kirk Street.
7 min read
Follow Churchill’s gentle town loop and discover how an early school site, a commemorative wall and the unmistakable Cigar carry local history into the streets.
4 min read
After weeks of unsettled weather, Morwell’s organisers had a famous aircraft due at eleven, a growing crowd beside a soft paddock and one morning to bring the Southern Cross safely to ground.
4 min read
Inside Stadium 34 in Moe, Australia’s largest indoor inflatable playground turns every climb, slide and obstacle into movement, laughter and the immediate pull to go again.
3 min read
Twenty-two numbered bus routes connect Latrobe City’s major towns and smaller communities, turning public transport into a practical way to see how the Valley’s places and stories fit together.
4 min read
Follow the sound of Narracan Creek through open farmland and trees to Narracan Falls, where water spreads across a broad rock shelf before gathering in the pool below—a quiet Gippsland place for picnics, photography and time beside the creek.
3 min read
Newborough Hotel earned first place in the 2026 AHA (Vic) Parma of the Year award with a perfect score of 100—recognition built one service, one plate and one careful decision at a time.
4 min read
Eden of the East