Victorian Sites
Royal Park, Melbourne
Landscape Architects :
- Grace Fraser (1977
design for 4 hectare Australian Native Garden)
- Laceworks Landscape
Collaborative (Brian Stafford & Ron Jones – winners
of 1984 design competition)
- Chris
Dance Land Design (1997 Revised Master Plan)
- Rush
Wright Associates (Draft Landscape Master Plan – wetlands)
Year: 1977 - present
Awards:
Details
and History of Royal Park (City of Melbourne)
Overview
Royal Park, Melbourne’s largest park located 3 kilometres
from the CBD, has a long history of European use. Set aside
by La Trobe in the 1830s for recreation, the park was a generous
240 hectares in area. This was later whittled down to its
present size of 180 hectares. The park combines a range of
sporting facilities, areas for passive recreation and is also home
to the Melbourne Zoo. Original plantings included pine species
along with the locally occurring Eucalyptus camaldulensis, (River
Red Gum).
Melbourne City Council gained control of the parkland in 1934. The
overall character of the park has developed over time into an informal
Australian native landscape. Indigenous Eucalyptus species
dominate the plantings along with Casuarina and Allocasuarina species.
In 1977, Grace Fraser, one of the AILA’s initial members
designed the Australian Plant Garden. This four hectare site,
adjacent to Gatehouse St, displays indigenous plants and attracts
a variety of native birds.
Seven years later, Melbourne City Council and the AILA sponsored
a national design competition for a Master Plan for the park, offering
prize money of $13,000. Laceworks Landscape Collaborative,
made up of Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) lecturers
Brian Stafford and Ron Jones were the successful entrants creating
a subtle vision for the park.
The park was to express the character of the landscape first experienced
by European settlers – a spacious landscape which opened
up to the sky. The report accompanying the winning Master
Plan explained the design concept:
The aim is to create a coherent, informal pattern of dominant
eucalypts in a naturalistic woodland, crowned with the hill covered
in native grasses. (Landscape Australia Report 1985,
137)
Stafford and Jones felt that the designer’s role should
be disguised and earthworks and infrastructure should be as simple
as possible to complement the unstructured park character.
In 1997,
Chris Dance Land Design lead a team to provide a Revised Master
Plan and Report on the future development of Royal Park. This
plan draws on the work a decade earlier by Laceworks, aiming to
update the winning Master Plan whilst maintaining its philosophy. (provide
link www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/rsrc/PDFs/Parks/MasterPlans/royalparkmp.pdf). The
report recommends increasing the use of the park by improving visitor
facilities such as picnic areas as well as providing interpretive
signage.
In keeping with greater concern for the care of
urban waterways, plans for development of wetlands within the park
were completed by Rush
Wright Associates in 2003.
Prepared by Edwina Richardson AAILA 2006
REFERENCES
Aitken & Looker (2001) Oxford companion to Australian gardens
(1985) “The Royal Park Competition – A Landscape Australia
Report” Landscape Australia no 2, p 134-140.
Details
and History
of Royal Park (City of Melbourne)
