Histories of urban heritage

The 1970s were a significant period for conservation in Melbourne as well as in Australia and across the world. Yet conservation was not a brand-new endeavour and had a longer history. James Lesh on Australia, John Pendlebury on the United Kingdom and Miles Glendinning’s global account, for instance, demonstrate how sustained interest in conserving buildings dates to at least the eighteenth-century Western Enlightenment.Footnote ³ There has long been an emphasis on individual buildings, landmarks and monuments, especially those associated with the emergent nation-state. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the idea of conserving the historic city more broadly had its advocates.Footnote ⁴ In the 1960s, this evolved into a heritage interest in residential neighbourhoods, particularly in the Anglosphere, where resident amenity groups opposed comprehensive modern renewal of their neighbourhoods.Footnote ⁵

The 1960s to the 1980s have been called ‘the heroic period of conservation’ for the increased frequency and ferocity of heritage campaigns across the world.Footnote ⁶ Australia fits neatly into this chronology, when grassroots activism was especially intense in the inner suburbs and achieved many successes in saving countless buildings and neighbourhoods. This robust heritage social movement has been a focus of historians.Footnote ⁷ In Melbourne, the historiography is particularly strong on heritage disputes over individual CBD sites such as the Rialto Towers, Regent Theatre, Queen Victoria Market and, later, Federation Square.Footnote ⁸ Similarly in Melbourne, the inner-suburbs of Fitzroy as well as Carlton, which neighbours Parkville, for example, have been analysed by historians and geographers.Footnote ⁹ In Sydney, the battles over inner suburbs such as Kelly’s Bush, The Rocks and Paddington have been examined, especially because of their ties to union-supported green-ban advocacy.Footnote ¹⁰ Notably, although Australia is a settler-colonial nation, Indigenous heritage was not of particular concern for the 1970s Australian heritage movement.Footnote ¹¹

The creation of a comprehensive Australian heritage protection system, the blander outcome of the more colourful social activism, has not been deeply examined in the historiography, certainly not in the case of area-based protections.Footnote ¹² With its emphasis on dispute and advocacy, the historiography has not foregrounded the intermeshing of policy and planning, heritage and conservation, and cultural and social change. Historical geographers argue that this speaks to the shying away from history within heritage studies.Footnote ¹³ A notable exception is the important work by John Delafons on the policy history of urban heritage in United Kingdom town planning.Footnote ¹⁴ This article contributes to the historiographical gap by providing an extended, and essential, policy history of urban conservation in Melbourne, using South Parkville as its lynchpin. Australia is notable in the global historiography of the suburbs as being ‘born suburban’, and so is a particularly appropriate context to consider area-based conservation.Footnote ¹⁵

The article uses documentary archival sources and a government digital heritage listing database as the basis for its research. Archives consulted include the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Australia ICOMOS, the National Archives of Australia manuscript collection, the grey literature on urban planning heritage and the National Library of Australia’s digitized newspapers and magazines. In addition to this wide-ranging archival research, the article exploits the digital Victorian Government Heritage Database.Footnote ¹⁶ Data have been extracted from this online database for Parkville, specifically the National Trust and Victorian state datasets.Footnote ¹⁷ These data minutely track the expanding building protections for Parkville from 1958 to 1974 (see Table 1). The various datasets contained within the Victorian Heritage Database, that is state heritage listings, local heritage listings, archaeological listings and community listings, are an underutilized resource for scholarship. This article thus demonstrates the value of this database for historical research, in addition to its insights about heritage policymaking in Melbourne.

Table 1.

National Trust of Australia (Victoria) heritage classifications in Parkville, 1956–75

The background, 1830s–70s

In 1835, Melbourne was established on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung of the East Kulin nations. In close vicinity to the city centre, the area that became known as Parkville by the 1860s was settled early on. Oral histories and early colonial records also evidence that First Peoples camped at Royal Park until their removal to missions and reserves in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ This Indigenous heritage has been acknowledged in post-1970s studies of Royal Park.Footnote ¹⁹

The official territory of Parkville took shape across the nineteenth century. Royal Park was proclaimed as a green space with its royal prefix in 1854. It remains a large green space of 188 hectares or 1.88 square kilometres in the western portion of the neighbourhood. To the east, the University of Melbourne was founded in 1853. Within Royal Park, the Zoological Gardens were allocated in 1861, and the Hay and Corn Market reserved in 1862, eventually becoming the site for the Royal Children’s Hospital in 1951–63. Royal Park was first used by settlers for sheep farming. Its most prominent colonial event was as the departure point for the Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills expedition to ‘discover’ a northward land route across the continent. A cairn memorial for Burke and Wills, who were among the six of the seven members of the expedition party who perished, was erected in 1890. This deliberate act of memorialization embedded settler-colonial, or so-called pioneering, heritage into the physical landscape of Parkville.

In the early settler-colonial city, Parkville was initially wholly intended for parklands rather than housing.Footnote ²⁰ But authorities soon recognized the residential opportunities afforded by this central and green neighbourhood. Sections of South Parkville were subdivided for housing in 1868 and then again in 1875. The buildings were largely a product of the late 1870s to the early 1890s – the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ boom period.Footnote ²¹ The wealth generated at that time, combined with city authorities allotting the area with large blocks, meant that Parkville had substantial residences. The neighbourhood contrasted with the speculative, poor-quality terrace housing of bordering inner suburbs such as CarltonFootnote ²² and North Melbourne. Another attraction of Parkville was its excellent transport connections along Royal Parade, a major boulevard northward from the city centre towards working-class and industrial Brunswick and Coburg. The tramway along Royal Parade and the railway through Royal Park were both laid during the 1880s boom era.

Half a century later, Parkville boasted remarkable residential, institutional and public buildings. By the mid-twentieth century, the quality of its architecture and planning made it an attractive neighbourhood for Melbourne’s growing white-collar professional middle class. Employees in business, health, education and public service took advantage of its proximity to the central city and local healthcare and education institutions. Royal Park hosted the Zoo and Mount Royal Hospital (originally the Royal Park Industrial School). The nearby Queen Victoria Market provided immediate access to food shopping. South Parkville’s tree-lined streets, replete with many well-maintained, cast-iron-laced residences, were ideal for leisurely strolls. Perhaps only East Melbourne offered such excellent amenities with such immediacy to the city centre.

The elite atmosphere and the calm and tranquillity of Parkville was suddenly disrupted by World War II. In 1942, a United States military base was established at Royal Park. It was called Camp Pell after Major Floyd J. Pell, an American airman killed defending Darwin during the Japanese air attack that same year.Footnote ²³ The most notorious American soldier at Camp Pell was serial killer Eddie Leonski, dubbed the Brownout Strangler. In 1942, he murdered three Melbourne women – Ivy McLeod, Pauline Thompson and Gladys Hosking – and was hanged for his crimes that same year.

After the war, the notoriety of Camp Pell only increased when it became temporary accommodation for low-income families from nearby inner-city suburbs. As part of its widespread slum clearance urban renewal efforts, the Housing Commission of Victoria used Camp Pell to house people whose homes had been designated for compulsory acquisition and then demolition for the new high-rise social housing towers constructed nearby in the 1960s.Footnote ²⁴ However, the rundown wooden and rusting metal hut houses and inadequate infrastructure, including roads that turned to mud when it rained, made it unsuitable for residential purposes. Both symbolically and literally, Camp Pell brought to Parkville the challenges faced by nearby suburbs such as Carlton and North Melbourne. The neighbourhood was momentarily imagined as a slum. Camp Pell closed in 1956 as part of the urban blight removed for the Olympics held that year in Melbourne.

Like its demographic and architectural counterpart of East Melbourne, Parkville was not identified for the comprehensive renewal intended for much of the so-called slum inner suburbs of Melbourne. The argument for comprehensive renewal was often made in moral terms, linked to the low-income residents whose futures were envisioned as improved in modern homes. The technical argument was related to the ostensibly unhabitable modest terrace housing. Neither of these arguments readily applied to Parkville, particularly once Camp Pell was shut down. The same features that had motivated nineteenth-century authorities to subdivide the area and then attracted professionals to Parkville meant that it avoided mid-twentieth-century demolitions and clearances.

Parkville was not entirely immune from modernist ambitions to replan and redesign Melbourne. Attempts were made to encroach into Parkville’s green spaces and residential enclaves. The modernist 1954 Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme identified Parkville as suitable for the University of Melbourne’s enlargement, which began in earnest in 1965.Footnote ²⁵ In 1970, University High (founded in 1910) sought to expand towards Storey and Morrah Streets, impacting 89 homes. Although such threats loomed over Parkville, the renewal schemes were never substantively realized, in large part due to successful advocacy by local amenity groups, the quality of the building stock and new planning approaches by the 1970s that abandoned comprehensive renewal. Only Royal Parade was especially impacted by redevelopment. Its older buildings were replaced with modern motels and office blocks. Still, Royal Parade experienced less redevelopment than St Kilda Road, the city’s southbound boulevard.

In response to Melbourne’s post-war transformation and to Parkville’s planned redevelopment schemes, the Parkville Association was founded in 1967.Footnote ²⁶ It followed the East Melbourne Group of 1953 and other similar resident amenity groups established across the inner suburbs of Melbourne in the late 1960s. The leadership and membership of these amenity groups were largely drawn from a new generation of residents who increasingly fled the distant middle-class suburbs and called inner Melbourne home. Labelled in the media as the ‘trendies’ for their hip dress and progressive politics, they were interested in issues such as community-led urban and social planning, environmental and landscape protections and, logically, urban conservation. Founding members of the Parkville Association included scientist Stan Dean, social worker Eric Benjamin and architects Brian and Hilary Lewis and David Saunders. Other key contributors included neuroscientist E. Graeme Robertson, his wife Joan Robertson and planning academic George Tibbits.

In contrast to sections of the city centre and other inner suburbs, Parkville had largely weathered the post-war period physically intact. Some of its residential buildings had deteriorated from lack of maintenance and investment, especially those housing students and lower-income residents. Negative cultural connotations were still unavoidable in Parkville. In the 1960s, popular appreciation of nineteenth-century heritage, including Victorian-era architecture, as found in Parkville, was still in its infancy. New garden suburbs further out from the city centre accessible by motor car had the strongest allure for aspirational Melburnians.Footnote ²⁷ From the 1970s, however, amenity groups such as the Parkville Association were remarkably successful in shifting perceptions about the inner suburbs, particularly in collaboration with the heritage movement, which led to lasting conservation protections.

Post-war heritage movement

The National Trust of Australia (Victoria) was established in Melbourne in 1956 and had an immediate interest in Parkville.Footnote ²⁸ It was modelled after its British and interstate counterparts. The National Trust in Britain, founded in 1895, had accumulated large land holdings and a remarkable number of historic properties. The New South Wales National Trust was established in Sydney in 1945 and the South Australian National Trust in Adelaide in 1955.Footnote ²⁹ Like them, the Victorian National Trust was an elite, not-for-profit membership body that advocated for the conservation of heritage places and acquired and opened historic sites to the public. That said, none of the Australian National Trusts received such substantial land holdings as its British exemplar. Instead, they turned to different advocacy methods, particularly focusing on designation, otherwise called heritage listing or classification, at a time when Australian national, state and local authorities had minimal interest in identifying heritage sites and areas.Footnote ³⁰

Parkville residents contributed to the Victorian National Trust from its beginning, including the creation of its classification register, which was a key function of the National Trusts in Australia. Brian Lewis, the inaugural chair of architecture at the University of Melbourne and a local Parkville resident and founding member of the Parkville Association, was the first chairman of the National Trust. Fellow academic David Saunders, an architectural historian and Parkville Association member, was the Trust’s newsletter editor and exhibition curator. Saunders helped establish the National Trust classification register with the new Survey and Identification Committee. Architect Hilary Lewis later took part in that same committee. She had trained in Britain and worked in the offices of Patrick Abercrombie. Parkville Association founding members E. Graeme and Joan Robertson published books under the auspices of the National Trust. Members of the Parkville Association such as Eric Benjamin assisted the National Trust in identifying heritage places. Later National Trust chairman, lawyer Rodney Davidson, spoke at Parkville Association meetings. Although not Parkville residents, University of Melbourne academic and urban planner George Tibbits and archivist Frank Strahan had an interest in the neighbourhood. The cousins Miles and Nigel Lewis, Hilary and Brian’s son and nephew, respectively, were also contributors to Parkville’s conservation.

The Survey and Identification Committee prepared the classification register for areas including South Parkville. This proto heritage list had no basis in law and so did not produce enforceable protections. Nevertheless, as post-war planning authorities had little interest in heritage places, the National Trust’s register was a strong advocacy tool. At first, the Committee was made up predominantly of architects. They met monthly from late 1956 onwards ‘to identify and classify those buildings of architectural and historic importance’.Footnote ³¹ Many of the meetings were held in Parkville at the University of Melbourne. The Committee drew expertise from its members and sympathetic community advocates, including amenity groups and property owners. Its ambition was to establish a ‘central catalogue’ of historic buildings; to collect ‘basic information’ on those buildings; to offer a ‘ready reference’ catalogue of research data; to assist property owners ‘in preserving buildings’; to facilitate ‘listings of buildings’ under the Victorian Town and Country Planning Act (1944); and to prepare publications for ‘publicising the Trust’s activities’.Footnote ³² Architectural historian and Parkville Association member David Saunders documented a research process for preparing designations. Decisions about heritage places were shaped by the National Trust’s patrician cultural and architectural interests. Even so, by identifying sites of significance, the register provided both moral and practical heft to the conservation cause.

In the 16-year period between 1956 and 1972, the National Trust designated some 2,000 sites across Victoria.Footnote ³³ Records were not precisely kept but still offer a good sense of the National Trust’s post-war heritage interests. Around 240 suburbs and towns had classifications, with about 40 areas accounting for half of the total listings. Central Melbourne was a priority, with more than 70 sites identified. The regional cities and towns of Portland, Port Fairy, Beechworth, Ballarat, Geelong, Echuca, Kyneton and Castlemaine had between 20 and 40 sites each. A similar number of registrations were made for the Melbourne suburbs of East Melbourne, Fitzroy, South Yarra, Kew, Williamstown, Carlton and Hawthorn. All these areas, originating in the early decades of settler colonization, had shared histories. As shown in Table 1, Parkville had some 14 listings, which was a strong number, given that it covered a smaller geographic area than those other suburbs. This meant Parkville ranked around 24 out of the 240 or so suburbs and towns in total number of listings. In the 16 years following 1972, the pace of listings in Parkville then doubled, which was not that different from other areas across the city and state.

In its first decade, the National Trust mainly designated individual buildings and structures from the earlier nineteenth century. Each place was given a level of significance: ranked from ‘A’ for the greatest significance to ‘E’ for unclassifiable. After the 1970s, this transitioned into ‘state’ for the most important, followed by ‘regional’ and then ‘local’ for sites of lesser standing.Footnote ³⁴ The heritage places deemed most important conformed to the architectural sensibilities of the committee members, who found value in aesthetic uniformity, symmetry, order and a muted colour palette.Footnote ³⁵ Buildings that presented with Georgian-era stylistic features were particularly appealing to the National Trust and its expert committee of architects. As Victoria’s nineteenth-century built heritage mostly dated from the later Victorian period, many significant places, by later standards, were given lower rankings or dismissed all together as grotesque or ostentatious, especially High Victorian ornamental architecture and early twentieth-century places.

Across its 14 National Trust designations, Parkville’s heritage places reflected the interests of post-war conservation. Half of the sites were major institutional buildings at the University of Melbourne. A quarter were grand two-storey terrace houses. The designation of Indigenous Chief Derrimut’s grave at the Melbourne General Cemetery, which bordered Parkville, was notable for engaging with First Peoples heritage. Born prior to colonization, in around 1810, Derrimut was a prominent yet controversial Boonwurrung elder, activist and informant.Footnote ³⁶ He warned Melbourne’s early settlers about an imminent attack by Indigenous combatants, which was subsequently averted. He also advocated for the Boonwurrung to remain on their land. He died in 1864 and his gravestone included the inscription: ‘erected by a few colonists to commemorate the noble act of the native Chief Derrimut’.

Up to the early 1970s, National Trust designated sites in Parkville were iconic and monumental, reflecting the accomplishments and progress of the city, state and nation. Biographically, over 90 per cent of the sites were identified as significant for their links to male architects and builders, with more than half born in England prior to 1850 before migrating to Australia. Coded British, colonial, masculine and architectural, this was a typical mix of heritage places for an Australian suburb in the post-war period.

Evolving heritage in Parkville: 1972

In the mid-1960s, the National Trust first turned its attention to identifying historic areas. This reflected a global trend in conservation, whereby the scale of listings expanded from individual exceptional sites to broader towns, neighbourhoods and streets.Footnote ³⁷ The idea of a ‘conservation area’ emerged to address heritage concerns on a broader scale than the individual building or monuments. Concepts such as ‘landscape’ and ‘townscape’ as well as the UNESCO recommendation concerning the Safeguarding of Beauty and Character of Landscapes and Sites (1962) influenced perceptions of the historic environment and generated a consensus that the spatial remit of conservation required expansion. Just as post-war urban renewal emphasized widespread neighbourhood clearances, conservation too widened its remit to embrace entire suburbs.Footnote ³⁸

In Australia, the first application of area-based conservation occurred in regional towns, before soon transitioning to cities and suburbs. The goldrush town of Maldon was the inaugural listing of this kind in Victoria. Hilary Lewis and her son Miles, then an architecture student at the University of Melbourne, were the key proponents. The declaration of Maldon as ‘Victoria’s first “Notable Town”’ was made by the National Trust in 1966.Footnote ³⁹ This declaration, a heritage designation, did not have widespread local support, with residents protesting it as an imposition from Melbourne.Footnote ⁴⁰ Apparently, residents threw rocks at Melbourne visitors conducting local heritage surveys. In 1969, the Echuca historic area, a regional nineteenth-century pastoral and agricultural district, was next designated, with the backing of the local historical society.

Urban conservation areas had previously been identified in Australia before South Parkville’s designation by the National Trust. Interstate, Salamanca Place and Battery Point in Hobart and Paddington in Sydney received heritage planning protections in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively. In Melbourne, from the 1920s, the nineteenth-century parliamentary triangle on Spring Street, the symbolic Flagstaff Hill and the Shrine of Remembrance – a new World War I memorial – had been identified as historically significant.Footnote ⁴¹ But the National Trust’s designation of South Parkville was different than Melbourne’s earlier proto-conservation areas. The South Parkville designation resulted from community support, that is, from the Parkville Association. It also had specific physical boundaries: Royal Parade, Storey Street, Park Drive (South), Flemington Road and Gatehouse Street.

The architecture and planning professions as well as property owners and developers took notice of the National Trust’s designation of South Parkville as a conservation area. In 1974, the Compac Development Corporation had earmarked Deloraine Terrace on Royal Parade for demolition. The National Trust and Parkville Association used the conservation area designation in their successful campaign to have Deloraine protected (Figure 3).Footnote ⁴² And so Compac’s proposed redevelopment of Deloraine Terrace was aborted. After the 1970s, area-based conservation would be characterized by these features: protections at a landscape scale, expert and technical knowledge integrated with grassroots input and an interlocking with design and development activities.

Figure 3.

National Trust registration card, B3500 Deloraine Terrace, 1974. Courtesy of the Victorian National Trust.

In 1972, South Parkville became Melbourne’s first conservation area because of its specific heritage qualities (Figure 4). Previously, a small number of sites in Parkville had been in and of themselves significant enough to justify their designation. But Parkville had not boasted widespread heritage protections beyond the University of Melbourne. It was the sum of South Parkville’s parts – the elite, varied and intact mid-to-late nineteenth-century houses and streetscapes – that justified protection in the view of the National Trust’s conservation area citation for South Parkville. As early as 1959, David Saunders had written about how few buildings in nearby Carlton, for example, justified wholesale preservation, but together reflected ‘an important phase in the development of early Melbourne architecture’.Footnote ⁴³ The same could be said for Parkville. Its perceived architectural authenticity and high degree of physical integrity also contributed to the designation.

Figure 4.

‘Parkville now an historic area’, Melbourne Times, 28 June 1972.

A specific streetscape element admired by the National Trust and the Parkville Association was the original verandas with ornamented cast iron lacing that fronted the residences. Both cast iron and verandas had previously been perceived as aesthetically unappealing and old fashioned. In the mid-1950s in the lead up to the Olympics, both were stripped from many buildings to modernize the city.Footnote ⁴⁴ In response, since at least 1960, E. Graeme Robertson had been a proponent for cast iron conservation, locally and across Australia, hosting talks and publishing photography books on the topic.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1966, the National Trust explicitly endorsed ‘the preservation of buildings ornamented with cast iron in selected small areas in East Melbourne and Carlton and the whole of Parkville’ and established a sub-committee for the purpose of documenting and protecting cast iron heritage.Footnote ⁴⁶ The following year, the National Trust turned its attention to shop verandas, with Saunders and Robertson surveying Carlton (304 verandas), North Melbourne (110 verandas) and Parkville (three verandas). Parkville’s shop verandas were found at 33, 53 and 55 Royal Parade.

Another key factor contributing to Parkville’s conservation was its well-off middle-class residents. Since its establishment, Parkville had been a respectable neighbourhood, a professional enclave of high-income and highly educated people. Parkville was already, effectively, gentrified, in contrast to neighbouring, working-class suburbs. Some residents had visited Europe for travel, work or study, and found Parkville’s urban fabric aesthetically appealing along European lines. A model suburb admired by Parkville’s residents was Chelsea in London.Footnote ⁴⁷ The enthusiasm and capacity of Parkville’s homeowners – as represented by the Parkville Association – to conserve their heritage homes positively contributed to National Trust decision-making, as identified in the heritage citation for South Parkville.

The National Trust circulated the following heritage citation for South Parkville (Figure 1):

South Parkville would be conserved for its aesthetic architectural characteristics, good condition of the residential building stock and the motivation and capacity of residents to conserve it. This citation can also be compared against later conservation principles which valorize authenticity and intactness, but not ongoing conservation and renovation when articulating heritage significance.

The Parkville Association and its hard-working leadership, specifically Eric Benjamin, thus successfully agitated the National Trust for recognition of their area. Both organizations had open communication and shared mutual respect and heritage interests. The advocacy book Parkville, published by Benjamin in 1969, was used as a reference text for designations.Footnote ⁴⁹ The involvement of people like Saunders and the Lewis family also helped. In 1974, Hilary Lewis published the key history text South Parkville. Footnote ⁵⁰ The representation from Parkville to the National Trust came alongside its University of Melbourne and University High campaigns. In fact, Parkville’s successful campaign against University of Melbourne expansion into Parkville set up the battle between the Carlton Association and the University as it turned its sights away from westward Parkville and eastward towards Carlton.Footnote ⁵¹

The Parkville Association’s timing, just before the National Trust was inundated with requests to endorse heritage campaigns and designate sites and areas, was also excellent. From the early 1970s, Melbourne experienced widespread CBD and inner-suburban heritage battles over individual buildings and historic streets. Indeed, the Committee for Urban Action, comprising 10 inner-suburban Melbourne resident groups, was established in 1970.

Faced with growing grassroots activism, in late 1971 the Housing Commission of Victoria abandoned its widespread modernist high-rise renewal agenda.Footnote ⁵² New national, state and local heritage legislation soon followed. In fact, Parkville’s representation to the National Trust came just before the Trust decided to become more discerning about its engagement with community campaigners. In 1971, at the nearby Queen Victoria Market, Benjamin formed the Keep Victoria Market Association, mainly composed of residents from central Melbourne, Carlton, North Melbourne and Parkville. It successfully opposed a major renewal initiative that would have led to the demolition and closure of this historic nineteenth-century market. Despite having some sympathy for the campaign, over the next three years the National Trust refused to unconditionally endorse Keep Victoria Market Association’s conservation campaign, because the site was seen as lacking heritage merit and being too vernacular and functional, at a moment of many similar heated disputes.Footnote ⁵³

Next steps, 1972–85

After the National Trust’s recognition of South Parkville, stronger heritage laws were gradually introduced to Melbourne by the local council and by the Victorian state government. By the early 1970s, the expanding heritage movement – comprising the National Trust, amenity groups, single-site advocacy bodies, construction unions and progressive politicians, architects and planners – believed National Trust designations required legislative underpinning. The underutilized conservation provisions of the Victorian Town and Country Planning Act (1944) were no longer seen as sufficient, as more sites and areas, both the monumental and the less unremarkable, were seen as important by communities and faced development pressures.Footnote ⁵⁴ Appreciation of Victorian-era architecture flourished, including in residential areas such as Parkville. Yet the demolition of valued sites and areas still occurred.Footnote ⁵⁵ On Royal Parade, the ornate Mount Levers mansion (1885) was levelled in 1971.Footnote ⁵⁶ Only stronger heritage laws could prevent unsympathetic property owners, real estate and development interests and government authorities from destroying these heritage places.

In 1969, the National Trust made an initial proposal for state heritage legislation, especially to assist its activities in Maldon and Beechworth. The conservative Victorian Liberal government and its long-standing premier Henry Bolte were sympathetic to the request, but legislation did not eventuate.Footnote ⁵⁷ His conservative successor Rupert Hamer ultimately passed the Historic Buildings Act in 1974.Footnote ⁵⁸ Victoria’s heritage legislation was the first of its kind in Australia, creating a precedent followed by every state and territory over the next two decades. Meanwhile, the progressive Whitlam Labor federal government of Australia initiated the Inquiry into the National Estate in 1973–74, leading to national heritage legislation in 1975.

This national heritage Inquiry received submissions on Parkville.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Parkville Association informed the Inquiry that unsympathetic alterations, the demolition of old buildings for new buildings and motor vehicle traffic threatened the South Parkville historic area.Footnote ⁶⁰ In parallel, the Victorian National Trust told the Inquiry about the financial and volunteer burden it faced in protecting historic towns, along with the urban areas of South Parkville and South Drummond Street in Carlton. It had designated South Drummond Street as Melbourne’s second urban conservation area with the backing of the Carlton Association in 1973.Footnote ⁶¹

The 1970s heritage movement demanded authorities better protect, resource and institutionalize heritage conservation. In 1975, the Whitlam government established the Australian Heritage Commission to provide national leadership and funding programmes.Footnote ⁶² Although it had minimal legal force, the Register of the National Estate, the new federal list, eventually incorporated most of the National Trust’s Parkville listings (Table 1).Footnote ⁶³ Victoria’s new Historic Buildings Preservation Council also used the National Trust’s designations as a template for the new state heritage register. Of the first 350 state registered places in 1974, six designations were in Parkville: four residences and two university colleges.Footnote ⁶⁴ Other National Trust designations were transferred into the state register over the coming years (Table 1).Footnote ⁶⁵ These individual Parkville heritage places were protected into posterity.

South Parkville was, however, still not legally protected as an urban conservation area. The City of Melbourne trailed other capital city municipal authorities such as Hobart and Sydney in introducing stronger local heritage protections. In 1973, as minister for local government, Rupert Hamer amended the new Victorian Town and Country Planning Act 1971 to introduce ‘areas of special significance [providing for] the conservation and enhancement of the character of an area’.Footnote ⁶⁶ This new heritage planning provision was tested for the Melbourne CBD in 1976 and then for the residential areas of South Drummond Street, Carlton and East Melbourne/Jolimont in 1978. In both cases, the protections were applied only on an interim basis, due to conflicts between state and municipal authorities, and resident and non-resident property owners, particularly around questions of development controls and financial compensation.

In 1980, sections of the CBD, along with South Parkville, Drummond Street and East Melbourne, were then proposed for permanent area-based heritage protections. After further years in limbo, it took until the 1982 election of the progressive Cain Labor government and the appointment of architect Evan Walker as planning minister for interim heritage protections to be applied across the municipality. These interim protections were made permanent and then formalized in a planning overlay in 1984–85.Footnote ⁶⁷ Walker’s lieutenant at the Victorian Department of Planning and responsible for implementing these heritage policy directives was David Yencken, who had chaired the Inquiry into the National Estate and then became the first chairman of the Australian Heritage Commission.Footnote ⁶⁸

Meanwhile, in 1980, the National Trust’s new urban conservation committee and the Parkville Association collaborated on a Royal Parade designation. They sought to address unsympathetic redevelopment proposals for the boulevard, which was translated into local and subsequently state heritage protections.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Royal Parade designation supplemented previous efforts in South Parkville, and reflected the growing heritage value across the fuller suburb. That same year, the first permanent local area protections in Melbourne were given by the eastern-suburbs City of Hawthorn to the regal St James Park area.

The delays at the City of Melbourne did not prevent the strengthening of the South Parkville conservation area. During the 1970s, sympathetic local homeowners consulted the National Trust about renovations and alterations to their homes and were provided with advice about the appropriateness of their renovation plans, much of which was ultimately heeded on the ground. Even when its heritage planning measures stalled, from 1975 onwards the City of Melbourne commissioned various conservation studies. In 1979, the consulting partnership of Wendy Jacobs, Nigel Lewis and Elizabeth Vines published the Parkville Historic Area Study (Figure 5).Footnote ⁷⁰ This 216-page (plus appendixes) report surveyed the historic neighbourhood. Their innovative approach had been developed over the previous years, including in the CBD, and provided one-page historical biographies for buildings across the survey area. The data were transferred into building identification forms and burgundy books – the iconic files used internally at the City of Melbourne to manage local heritage from the 1980s into the early twenty-first century.Footnote ⁷¹

Figure 5.

Jacobs Lewis Vines Architects & Conservation Planners, Parkville Historic Area Study (1979). Courtesy of Nigel Lewis.

Such policy documentation and grey literature guided heritage planning decisions in the municipality for the next couple of decades, especially from 1985 when the various urban conservation areas were fully implemented as local heritage planning provisions. Policies and systems were then upgraded and standardized in the 1990s through a statewide planning instrument called the heritage overlay. The documentation and literature assisted architects, planners, builders and residents, whose maintenance and renovation of buildings had to be in keeping with the historic environment, as well as the associated neighbourhood character, design and heritage guidelines.