Businesses and Services in Orford in 1960s

Services in Orford were mainly oriented towards tourists and their needs. By the end of the 1960s there were several blocks of flats. The roadhouse was the main eating place for visitors. There was a service station on the corner of Charles St where it is now.

Atkins' shop was in Charles St opposite the service station. It burnt down in 1964. It was replaced by the shop currently known as Orford Riteway, built about eighteen months later by Rex Kube.

There was no police station at Orford in the 1960s. Law enforcement came from Triabunna. There was also no fire station. The Triabunna doctor would hold clinics at Orford in the building that is now used by the vet. It was shared with the State Library. Local school children were vaccinated at the clinic and given a “sugar cube” with the medicine in it. Most local babies were delivered in the hospital at Triabunna.

The post office and manual telephone exchange was located in Charles Street.

There was a small shop and milk bar in the building that is now owned by Dr Roger Cox. The butcher’s shop was built in 1964.

The following table shows an overview of the way businesses and services have changed over the past thirty years.

1960’s	1990s
Post Office	Post Office and Supermarket
Atkin’s shop
Kube's Shop	Orford Riteway
Butcher	Butcher
Service Station	Service Station
Milk Bar
Roadhouse	Roadhouse
Blue Waters Motel	Blue Waters Motel
Fish Processing Plant	East Coast Seafoods
Walkers Transport	Walkers Transport
	Island View Motel
Sea Breeze Holiday Units	Sea Breeze Holiday Units
	Newhaven Nursery
	Hair Dressing Salon
	Riverside Villas
	Central Coast Courier Newspaper
State Library	State Library

Both Anglicans and Catholics used St Michael’s Church of England.

Entertainment was very limited. Blue Waters Motel held the occasional cabaret and there were one or two dances in the hall. Once a week they would show reel to reel films in the hall at Triabunna.

The big paddock behind Orford Riteway, where the new holiday units are was a swamp area where the local children used to make billycart tracks. A proposal was put forward to turn it into a caravan park in Orford but this was rejected. The Orford Cricket Ground was there in the 1960s but it was not fenced and it looked like a big paddock.

In 1965 there was a big storm that flooded the area and washed fences away.

It also washed the bridge away at Nelsons Creek. Mrs Marge Higgs just got off the bridge in time before it was washed away. It took a month before they were able to replace the bridge with a bailey bridge and residents wanting to go to Hobart had to drive though via Levendale.