Lascelles - VIC

Lascelles is a rural village on the Sunraysia Highway and the railway to Mildura in north-west Victoria. It is midway between Birchip and Ouyen.

Lascelles was named after Edward Lascelles (1847-1917), who promoted closer settlement and water management in the area. Lascelles, a partner in the wool broking firm of Dennys Lascelles, subdivided Mallee pastoral land into agricultural farm blocks around Hopetoun, Lake Coorong, where he built a large homestead. He was an ardent believer in the possibilities of the Mallee for grain growing and grazing, on land cleared with the heavy Mallee rollers.

Lascelles surveyed Hopetoun township in 1891 and the Minapre township (renamed Lascelles in about 1909) shortly afterwards. The street layout is formal, centred on an oval reserve flanked by Sweetapple Crescent. Development of the town was delayed by the railway not reaching there until 1903.

A progress association was formed in 1911, and its most enduring work occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, when the recreation reserve was improved and a caravan park was opened.

Today Lascelles, which was a small wheatlands settlement until the 1960s, is a township with the impressive silo art works as its solitary attraction. The Silo Art Trail, of which is it part, is one of those inspired ideas which started as a one-off project and has grown into six (and possibly more) impressive and huge works of public art on a series of disused grain silos in the Wimmera Mallee area of Victoria. It is a journey of over 200 km from Rupanyup in the south (it is a small town which lies to the east of Horsham) through Sheep Hills, Brim, Rosebery and Lascalles to Patchewollock in the north.