Tara Murray
A community group wants Brimbank council’s heritage advisory committee to consider submitting a proposal for Albion and a group of similar cities to be World Heritage listed.
The Albion and Ardeer Community Club has submitted questions to the last two council meetings about the matter.
The council has previously looked at having Albion alone heritage listed, but the club says they believe the history of Albion and other cities with similar history to be significant enough to be looked at as a collective.
Just 20 sites in Australia are listed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation World Heritage list including the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru.
The club’s Neil Head said Albion is one of just a few original garden cities in existence in Australia, hence the significance of the area.
Mr Head said garden cities were popular in England, with that form of city then making its way to Australia.
The garden city movement was a method of urban planning in which self-contained communities were built surrounded by “greenbelts”, containing proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture.
HV McKay set up the garden city of Albion to give somewhere for the local workers to live.
“Albion is a classic example,” Mr Head said.
“They built the factories and then laid out a suburb around them with large areas of open space such as Selwyn Park and the HV McKay Gardens.”
Mr Head said that these areas are very rare in Australia and said grouping these cities together and seeking them to be heritage listed would ensure the historical features of these cities into the future.
“Collectively these areas are very rare and you might be able to proceed that way,” Mr Head said.
“We want to look at this in partnership with the other garden cities. There were only a few built in the Australia in the 1900s
“There are only a few laid out, there’s one in Sydney and one in Adelaide.”
Brimbank mayor Ranka Rasic said in response to the question, that the council’s heritage advisor would speak about it at the next heritage advisory committee meeting.
“The process to prepare a proposal for UNESCO World Heritage is substantial and the council can confirm that a submission for Albion is not part of the council’s current work program or budget,” she said.”
Mr Head said they had yet to approach the other garden cities about this proposal.
He said the decision to try and instigate this was related to the proposed plans of the Melbourne Airport rail link
“We want the airport folks to be careful with what they are going to install in the middle of a heritage suburb.”
