Nandaly

Nandaly is a rural village in the Mallee region, north-west Victoria. It is on the Calder Highway, west of Lake Tyrrell, and on the railway line from Sea Lake to Kulwin. During the early 1900s the Nandaly district, then under pastoral licences, was opened up for farm selections. Most of the land was cleared by Mallee-rolling the eucalyptus scrub, burning and the grubbing out of stumps and suckers. It is thought that the name Nandaly was derived from an Aboriginal word describing fire.

Although farm selections were occupied at Nyarrin, about 10 km south of Nandaly, in 1893, the development of Nandaly village came only with the opening of the railway in 1914. Shortly before the railway, water supply channels from the Mallee-Wimmera system were constructed.

The Nandaly Progress League was formed in 1914, and succeeded in getting a school opened in 1916 and a public hall built in 1918. By the 1920s there were two stores (replacing an earlier smaller one) and a Catholic church. Anglican and Methodist churches functioned from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Nandaly is an area in which mainly cereal crops are grown. Bagged wheat was freighted from the railway station until the first silos were built in 1957. In the 1960s a wine saloon was relicensed as a hotel, and an infant welfare centre was opened in 1969. Notwithstanding there being such a centre, the primary school was closed in the early 1990s.

Nandaly has a post office, a hotel, Catholic church, a local reservoir, a grain shed and silos, a public hall, a golf course and a recreation reserve.

Nandaly’s census populations have been: