Heritage Study
We are undertaking a Heritage Study to identify additional heritage places within Banyule and we would like your help.
We are committed to protect, conserve and enhance places and precincts that contribute to Banyule’s cultural heritage. We want to ensure all heritage places in Banyule are identified and assessed for their heritage significance, to enable their protection through Banyule's Planning Scheme Heritage Overlay.
There are 190 places and precincts protected by the heritage overlay in the Planning Scheme including a chimney in Briar Hill, Viewbank Homestead and the Heidelberg Town Hall in Ivanhoe and we believe with your help, we can find more.
We would like you to identify and nominate additional places that might need the protection of the heritage overlay.
FAQs
The heritage overlay is a planning control within the Banyule Planning Scheme that can be applied to places, properties or precincts that are determined to have heritage significance in order to protect, conserve and enhance them.
The heritage overlay does this through the requirement of a planning permit, when changes are proposed. For example, if a property owner wanted to subdivide, demolish a building, or build an addition to a place with a heritage overlay, they would need to apply for a planning permit.
A heritage place can include a site, area, building, group of buildings, structure, archaeological site, tree, garden, geological formation, fossil site, habitat or other place of natural or cultural significance and its associated land.
No, not all places will be of sufficient heritage value to justify protection.
Nominated places will be assessed by an expert heritage consultant to determine if they meet the threshold required to justify the application of the heritage overlay; the threshold is relatively high.
To be considered for inclusion in the heritage overlay, a heritage place or precinct must meet one or more of the following criteria that assess cultural heritage values:
- It is important to the course or pattern of Banyule’s cultural history.
- It demonstrates rare, uncommon or endangered aspects of Banyule’s cultural heritage.
- It has potential to provide information that will contribute to the understanding of Banyule’s cultural history.
- It is important in demonstrating the principal characteristics of a class of cultural places.
- It is important in exhibiting particular aesthetic characteristics.
- It is important in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technological achievement at a particular period.
- It has a strong or special association with a particular community or cultural group for social, cultural or spiritual reasons.
- It has a special association with the life or works of a person or group of importance in Banyule’s history.
Further information on heritage criteria is available here.
Note: this information is for state level significance but can be adapted as a guide for local level significance.
We will seek to apply the heritage overlay through a planning scheme amendment to nominated places that meet the heritage threshold (as determined by the expert heritage consultant).
Nominate
Nominate a heritage place
Nomination form: Heritage Study
Background
In preparation for the heritage study, a Banyule Thematic Environmental History was prepared and adopted by Council in October 2018.
Heritage themes provide a framework to better understand the historical context of heritage places in Banyule and to assess their significance.
The 12 key themes are:
- Aboriginal Country
- Settling on the land
- Transport and communication
- Developing industries
- Suburban development
- Community and cultural life
- Recreation and sport
- Parks and gardens and the urban landscape
- Defence
- The artistic landscape
- Public health
- Conserving the waterways and bushland
Consider these themes when nominating a heritage place.