CAARP
Cinema and Audience Research Project

"The Roads Board Hall was built in 1929 - a solid stone structure, on the north-east corner of the junction of Caron and McPherson Sts. Wednesday night was picture night. Bridie Evans can remember the excitement of walking two and a half miles into town once or twice a year with her older brother when she was about nine years old to attend the pictures at this venue in the mid-thirties. At that time the screen was on the stage and the bio-box above the entrance to the hall. The hall had columns supporting the roof, so patrons sought to avoid the seats with poor sightlines.

In the forties, Ray Dean's ´West Talkies' included Carnamah on its circuit, and this was one of the towns taken over by Vic Basham and Dave Cox in the fifties. They built a gardens behind the hall, along Caron St. This had metal-frame deckchairs in rows of four or five, and one resident can remember how the children in the late fifties would run across the tops of the rails from the back to the front of the cinema... At this time, the bio-box seems to have been re-sited onto the stage of the hall, so that projectors could be swung round to serve the gardens through ports in the back wall of the stage. This put the screen at the front of the hall and allowed seating to be placed on the stage - highly-valued seats, similar to the dress circle in a purpose-built cinema, so there would be a scramble to fill these first. When the partnership of Basham and Cox split up, Cox continued in Carnamah.

The building was demolished and replaced with a new Shire Hall in 1962. This hall had a bio-box, but, as the drive-in had been opened by then, regular screenings were never provided in the new hall. After the drive-in closed, the projectors were returned to the bio-box in the new hall, with the intention of starting screenings again, but by 1997 this had not yet happened." (Bertrand 2001)

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