Locals, academics and Moreland Council have slammed plans to demolish the notorious H Division of the former Pentridge Prison.
They said if the developer, Shayher Group, razed the 19th-century bluestone block infamous for its brutality, it would erase a vital part of Melbourne’s social history.
The block, on the north side of the sprawling Coburg site, is on the Victorian Heritage Register as of state significance and is classified by the National Trust.
Land owner Shayher has applied to Heritage Victoria for permits to demolish H Division, and the adjacent rock-breaking yards, to build a service road and a seven-storey apartment block. Heritage Victoria is expected to rule on the applications next month.
Until 1994, when maximum security moved to Barwon Prison, H Division housed the state’s worst prisoners including Hoddle Street mass murderer Julian Knight, hitman Christopher Dale Flannery and Russell Street bomber Stan Taylor.
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In his book Chopper, From the Inside, standover man Mark ”Chopper” Read said H Division in the 1970s was ”a blood-soaked mental hospital of violence and more violence”.
The late Pentridge chaplain John Brosnan said it was a place that turned bicycle thieves into killers. His successor, Father Peter Norden, said it was a ”dungeon of brutality and degradation”. Until the 1970s, prisoners broke rocks as part of hard-labour sentences.
Shayher’s applications state the demolition of H Division would be ”a loss from a heritage perspective”, but invoke a Heritage Act clause that refusing the applications would ”affect the reasonable or economic use of the registered place, or cause undue financial hardship to the owner”.
Shayher spokesman Robert Larocca said: ”The protection of Pentridge’s unique heritage requires development of the site and we are working with Heritage Victoria to ensure an appropriate balance is struck.”
But RMIT University planning academic Michael Buxton said ”just because it’s in the way of someone making a lot of money is no reason to demolish it”. ”It should definitely be retained. It has such historic connection to the state as a place of incarceration,” he said.
Moreland mayor Lambros Tapinos urged Planning Minister Matthew Guy and Heritage Victoria to reject the demolition.
Victoria University arts lecturer and Coburg resident Michael Hamel-Green, who was a Pentridge probation officer in 1967, said of the demolition bid it was ”shocking that it should even be contemplated”.
