Victorian Sites
Royal Park, Melbourne
THE ROYAL PARK COMPETITION
published Landscape Australia 2/1985
images >>
In 1984 a competition was conducted by the Melbourne City Council, in conjunction with the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, for the drawing up of a Master Plan for the redevelopment of Royal Park, Melbourne; a park of some 180 hectares situated only three kilometres from the heart of the Melbourne Central Business District. From the 45 entries received, four finalists were selected, from whom the winner was finally chosen.
The finalists, who subsequently went on to develop their schemes with a view to winning the $13 000 prize money, were: Green, Dale and Wright (a new landscape architecture practice Grahame Shaw and Partners (includes Dennis Ward and Debbie Matthews); Loder and Bayly Pty Ltd with Urban Initiatives Pty Ltd (includes Mick Safstrom and Bruce Echberg) and the eventual winners of the competition, Laceworks Landscape Collaborative (Brian Stafford and Ron ones, both Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology lecturers in landscape architecture
The Winning Concept for Royal Park
The following is an abbreviated version of the final report by Laceworks Landscape Collaborative.
Principles
A landscape grows and changes. The Park, as part of the environment supporting a changing community, should provide an enduring framework for gradually evolving activities and elements of the landscape.
The Park can never be finished - it should be an established structure, but it cannot become a design which is completed and fixed in detail.
The vitality of the design is dependent on the relationship of the principles of the design to the management and maintenance of the Park.
Significance
The Park should evoke a previous, regional character of land and space, using important existing qualities of the landscape.
Fragments of Royal Park remain which express the essential qualities of a particular Australian landscape that confronted the first European settlers in what was then known as the District of Port Phillip.
The design should express the particular character of this place and be a living landscape; a landscape which includes earth and sky, distant views and indistinct boundaries, living and dying plants and freely thinking people. Such a relationship should not be limited to a particular time, but should be as significant today as in the time of Burke and Wills, who set out from this place in 1861.
Context
The metropolitan area should be united by re-creating a continuity of landscape through the City of Melbourne and inner suburbs.
The City of Melbourne is now dominated by streets. The linkage relies on automotive transport, which achieves this at great cost. To extend each person's reach through the city without dependence on machines and to provide sustaining and enriching environments which are accessible to all the city's population - these aims must be deliberately provided for in the development of each part of the city, not left to chance as a hoped-for by-product of other ambitions.
With these ends in view there should be park extensions, even if only narrow corridors, linking all Melbourne's parks and gardens. The interior structure of Royal Park should be part of this system.
Design
The design should be principally an editing or clarification of the landscape, rather than obvious development or the addition of new things.
Royal Park's expanses, though they are not the bush, contrast with the stylised planting of urban gardens. It is a bold expression of the earth itself within the built fabric of the city.
The aim of the design is to preserve and to enhance the existing valued character of Royal Park and not to impose alien styles or objects. The designer's hand will not be apparent in the form of the Park, which should seem spontaneous and casual.
This does not mean that no design is required. `Nature' will not suddenly revive in the city to create a beautiful park.
Expression
The design should symbolically link the park to the other parks and gardens of the city and should express Royal Park's essential individual qualities.
Consistency in basic form of expression of landscape character should exist in Melbourne's parks and gardens. Differing details should be used only to reinforce the differences in character of each place, and should be applied with restraint.
Parks and gardens in a city are engineered, built and cultivated out of necessity, in a manner which cannot leave them natural or transform them into natural landscapes. A park may provide some senses of natural or pastoral character, but not all. Essential characteristics - of space, uncontrived vegetation and unobtrusive building - must be stressed. Inessential elements must not be faked to create a Disneyland version of nature.
Earthworks, paths and pavements, furnishings and facilities should appear simple and light, inconspicuous on the land and among the spaces and vegetation, to avoid compromising the open unstructured appearance of the Park.
Purpose
A park is for persons rather than machinery, for individual public activity rather than restricted private institutions, and for psychological recreation as well as physical exercise.
The Park gives release from the workaday world. This is not by substituting one structure for another. It is an absence of things; a setting for spontaneous recreation in games and in wandering; an opportunity not to think, but to imagine.
Subtlety and a lack of florid attractions in the environment provide the most effective imaginative stimulus. To supply too much is to restrict. Subtle variations in spaces, and freedom from offending interruption, are all that should be provided.
Royal Park should be a place where exertion can be a delight, where exercise can contribute to refreshment of mind, whether in sport or an unhurried walk to work.
Activities
Royal Park provides a specific setting for activities which are of enduring importance to the community, and satisfactory provision for these is its primary purpose.
The Park's uses include basic social activities of local neighbourhoods, the city and the metropolis. Principally, these are:
- play
- passive recreation
- organised amateur sports
- the Zoological Gardens
The specific requirements of each should be fully provided for.
Other activities exist which are a diversion from the purpose of the Park, and some of these can be located elsewhere without a decrease in the service to the community. Some of these activities interfere with more valued park use. They should be suppressed.
Affirmation
The landscape should be expressive of the community's activities and attitudes in the Park.
Within the context of a culture, specific landscapes have pecific associations with activities and ideas.
The form of Royal Park should reflect the community's landscape associations, giving the Park greater meaning, so that it is not only used by people, but becomes part of their lives.
Site and Design
Spaces: Unlike other Melbourne parks, Royal Park looks upward and outwards. It is a large landscape revealing a vast sky; this spacious quality, which is so important to this place, should be enhanced. Simple massed plantings in the lower perimeter areas, leaving the hilltops clear, would screen the nearby buildings and clutter to create a clear foreground for the distant views.
This landscape's weakness is that the simple open spaces cannot absorb many objects without appearing cluttered. Because of this, the MacArthur pavilion and other objects including trees on the hills and ridge crests should be removed, and the sites carefully repaired.
The perimeter areas of the Park, loosely enclosed by trees, provide a foil for the ranks of street trees. Some of these partial enclosures are an enlivening contrast to the open landscape of the Park. However, most of these spaces are rudely defined. Unattractive things dominate, particularly around the north entrance of the Zoo.
Earthworks, screens and plantings should be used to balance and simplify the spaces, framing pleasant enclosures.
Planting: Planting patterns also affect the landscape space, the two most conspicuous patterns being:
- Avenues along streets
- Planting around sports ovals.
Although both are formed from rows of trees, the effect is different in each. Avenues define dividing lines and direct attention along those lines, through the Park into the nearby city. This is a city pattern, and continuing it into the Park conflicts with the desirable sense of remoteness from the city that the Park provides.
Sports oval plantings mark areas within the Park. If graded as a level surface, the planting fits a ground form which defines a separate area. Such areas are identified with recreation, as a major feature of Melbourne's urban landscape. Avenue plantings within the open areas of the Park should be removed, as a pattern incompatible with the Park's spacious character, excepting where near structures.
Oval plantings should remain and in some places be improved, as they are complementary to the expanse of the Park and a symbol of recreation places.
Irregular plantings, not seen as simple or geometric patterns, frame a general area rather than defming direction or enclosure. This effect suits the Park, emphasising its major quality of space, in an apparently natural manner.
In many places small isolated clumps of a single species may become spots of unwanted attention, such as artificial arrangements of garden beds and shrubberies. Particularly in exposed areas, plants should not be conspicuously cultivated. Small enclosed spaces tolerate more specific patterns.
Where there are to be defined spaces, as at Zoo entrances, plantings should form a deliberate point of emphasis, but this effect should be used rarely.
The vegetation of Royal Park should express the ephemeral qualities of atmosphere, time, the land and the character of the historic landscapes of the area - open grassland, woodlands and pockets of wetlands.
The popular identification of plants as exotic or native is important in a park which is to evoke images of a natural landscape. Even Australian plants which are exotic in appearance should be avoided as being out of character with the Park. `Apparently native vegetation supports the intention of the Park, apparently foreign plants deny it'.
More flexibility in plant selection, beyond the limited range of the indigenous flora of the site, is appropriate. The plantings should seem natural to the place, but do not need to be limited to indigenous species.
The indigenous species which are used should be re-established from local seed sources, as some, particularly Eucalyptus camaldulensis, vary considerably from place to place.
The plantings are now a jumble. There is as much noise in the appearance of the vegetation as in the traffic through the Park. Plants with strong, regular forms obtrude on the open hilltops. These include deciduous trees, conifers, palms and some broadleaved evergreens. The eucalypts, however, with their irregular branching patterns blend together and their open crowns echo the openness of the Park.
The horticultural clutter should be culled, selectively removing deciduous trees, pines, palms, cypress, tristanias, figs and some other species from the open and higher ground. This should be a gradual process as new plantings of appropriate species are established. The aim is to create a coherent, informal pattern of dominant eucalypts in a naturalistic woodland, crowned with the hill covered in native grasses -
Sweeping like waves of light and shade over the whole breadth of (the) land ... a sea of grass, which yields and undulates under the wind like water ... (Henry David Thoreau)
Native grasslands uncontaminated by exotic weeds are stable, and require less maintenance and water than introduced grasses.
Although the use of native grasses is still experimental, there is reason for optimism about their use, because of work being done at the National Botanic Gardens at Canberra, by ecologists at Latrobe University, Victoria, and by other groups and individuals.
Areas suitable should be large enough to maintain integrity as a self-regenerating community of plants; free of cast shadows from trees, free of intrusive roots, and isolated from water-borne weed seeds. The latter requirement can be met by choosing an elevated site, maintaining a buffer of native vegetation around the site, or with peripheral drains. Another requirement is a location away from excessive foot traffic, although access should be permitted.
The proposal is to establish such an area of grassland on the large hilltop in Royal Park south, within an encircling footpath.
An irrigation system would help establish new plantings and reduce flammability in high fire risk weather, using small amounts of water. Species of grasses would include: Iba australis, Themeda, Danthonia, Stipa.
This grassland area would be encircled by a woodland buffer zone some 50m wide. Suitable trees would be:
Eucalyptus camaldulensis moister drainage channels
Acacia melanoxylon moister drainage channels
Eucalyptus melliodora drier areas E. leucoxylon drier areas
E. polyanthemos drier areas
Acacia implexa decorative fillers in main tree structure
A. mearnsi decorative fillers in main tree structure
A. pycnantha decorative fillers in main tree structure
Bursaria spinosa prickly deterrents to short-cuts
Acacia verticillata prickly deterrents to short-cuts
A. armata prickly deterrents to short-cuts
Casuarina stricta light contrast in higher areas
Banksia marginata light contrast in higher areas.
The Wetlands
The original gullies and streams of the area have been replaced by storm drains, leading to a decrease in quality, and a rich environment and vegetation have been lost.
Storm water drainage below the Zoo is near the ground surface. This could supply water by gravity flow to ponds on the slightly lower areas to the west. Native wetland plantings would provide an attractive and low-maintenance landscape. Regrading could form shallow depressions on shelves cut into the slopes, creating freshwater pools within enclosed areas.
Traffic Considerations
Royal Park, within 3 km of the Melbourne CBD, is surrounded by major traffic routes, defined as primary and secondary arterial roads. Elliott/MacArthur Road, which bisects the Park, is a primary arterial road. Other smaller roads traverse the Park, and while providing access to park facilities also facilitate through-movement.
Residents in roads bordering the Park prefer to see their roads used less, in favour of Park roads. The writers of this report prefer to see Park activities having absolute priority over vehicular traffic activity. However, constraints on arterial road networks will not allow total elimination of through traffic. It is proposed that the busy Elliott/MacArthur Road
route be depressed for a portion of its length by a cut and cover method. Other means of reducing through traffic in the Park on minor roads are proposed.
Car parking facilities within the Park will be designed to minimise vehicle penetration and pedestrian/vehicle conflict, and to be sympathetic with the landscape.
Attention should be given to the improvement of public transport to the Park at weekends, as well as to the appearance of transport routes and facilities.
Pedestrian and bicycle access and circulation systems will be delineated within the Park, to facilitate movement and to protect the landscape.
Design Development
The design proposals in the foregoing condensed version of the report specify landscape planning and design principles, rather than offer a completed master plan.
The report concludes with a proposed development process, including:
- Publication of master planning principles
- Establishment of Steering Committee
- Identification of principles for design development
- Master plan - preliminary design
- Public consultation on the basis of the preliminary design
- Modification of preliminary master plan and publication of amended master plan
- Detailed design development
- Start of implementation
Further details are given of the proposed sharing of the consultation between consultants and the Melbourne City Council.
images >> << return to project page
