Viva Cribb was passionate about the preservation of Ipswich’s history, with a love of the city born from her heritage as the great-granddaughter of one of the city’s early pioneers, and her legacy is encouraging others to follow in her footsteps.
The Viva Cribb Bursary, named in her honour, offers up to $5,000 of funding to help with a project that documents or records a significant aspect of Ipswich’s local history and it is open for entry until 29 February. The completed project will be made available to the whole community through Picture Ipswich.
As an ancestor of Benjamin Cribb, founder of Ipswich’s Cribb & Foote Department Store, established in 1849, Viva had many memories to share and dedicated herself to the research and recording of the city’s heritage as a founding member of the Ipswich Genealogical Society and as a member of the Ipswich City Council Heritage Consultative Committee. The Viva Cribb Local History Collection is now part of the Ipswich History Room at Ipswich Libraries.
Like Viva, Shirley Byrne became totally immersed in Ipswich’s history as soon as she arrived in the city as a young bride in the 1960s.
“One of the first things I noticed about the city of Ipswich was its heritage buildings, built in the1800s and still standing as great architectural statements to that period,” Shirley says.
She turned her curiosity and her experience as a business owner in the centre of the city into a research and writing project of her own, chronicling a period in history of Top of the Town in the 1990s, which became the recipient of the Viva Cribb Bursary in 2019. Shirley’s project became a booklet called A Dream Comes True, The revitalisation of the Top of Town Ipswich and she is now working on a revised edition to include more information and pictures she has been able to source since its first publication.
Shirley, now 81, remembers Cribb & Foote, the grand department store with its ornately carved counters and a flying fox whizzing through the air but it had long disappeared by the 1990s, when she became a business owner in the city in her own right.
Shirley opened and closed her own shop and ran her own successful restaurants on the strip of Brisbane Street bordered by Ellenborough and Waghorn Streets known as the Top of Town. Her eatery at the Old Flour Mill and Saddles Piano Bar and Restaurant at Goleby House pioneered al fresco dining in the city and Shirley became a keen advocate for the revitalisation of what remained of the Top of the Town when others wanted to (and did in the 1980s) bulldoze the old buildings to make way for new developments.
“At that time a lot of people couldn’t see the beauty in the old buildings at the Top of Town and they were pushing for the whole area to be redeveloped,” Shirley recalls, but instead a committee was formed to save the strip and was successful in securing funding to modernise infrastructure while restoring the building facades.
For Shirley, recounting that ‘dream come true’ was an intensive trip down memory lane as she poured over her own collection of newspaper clippings, magazines, letters and pictures, recalled stories from notes written on coasters and found other sources too with stories and pictures to share.
Shirley has since been successful in completing another history project with the help of a Viva Cribb bursary in 2022, writing Dreams and Visions in collaboration with U3A Ipswich and West Moreton to mark the organisation’s 30 year anniversary.
The Viva Cribb Bursary is open to individuals and not-for-profit organisations to apply for assistance with their project costs, and projects can be in a range formats, from a book to an App, video or even oral history, as long as the subject is someone, or something of historical value connected to Ipswich.
Find out how to apply for the Viva Cribb Bursary, and other funding programs, at Ipswich City Council’s website.
