By Adam Carey
Heritage Springs in Pakenham is almost as far from the Paris end of Collins Street as a Melbourne neighbourhood gets, but the two places share one distinguishing feature.
The streets of the outer suburban estate, 60 kilometres south-east of the CBD, are filled with replicas of the century-old lamp posts that line Collins Street’s east end.
Bill and Jillian Ronald with the street lamp they salvaged after it was taken down, and which led to Bill’s ejection from a council meeting.Credit: Penny Stephens
The decorative street lamps were installed by the developer 14 years ago, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to give the new estate a point of distinction.
But the lamp posts have begun to disappear over the past two years, replaced by LED lamp posts with a new and more utilitarian design that locals argue is erasing the estate’s character. Following a short and fiery campaign, the council voted last week to investigate a way to preserve the remaining lamp posts but warned residents there is no guarantee they can be saved.
The decorative lamps are lit by mercury vapour globes, which are subject to an international ban. Residents are urging the council to find a way to replace the globes without removing the beloved lamp post heads.
“They’re absolutely magnificent. I find the light is a lot kinder to the eyes than the new ones, which are quite glary. They are just beautiful lights that make the estate,” said Alison Haddock, a member of the Heritage Springs Residents’ Group.
An example of one of the “shocking” replacement street lamps that have recently been put up around Pakenham.Credit: Penny Stephens
The group’s campaign began just weeks ago, when Bill Ronald, a former mayor of the Cardinia Shire Council, saw an AusNet worker pulling down one of the lamps on his street. The worker told him that all 1900 lamps in the shire were being removed and replaced with new lamps.
“They’re shocking; they have no architectural beauty to them at all, they’re just a square box with a triangle roof,” Ronald said of the replacement lamps.
He salvaged the lamp the worker had taken down and took it to last week’s council meeting, seeking to demonstrate its beauty from the public gallery. Ronald was ejected from the meeting by current mayor Jack Kowarzik for bringing in a “prop”. He left, but not before parading around the chambers with the lamp.
“I thought, I’m not just going to sneak out the back door, I might do a lap of honour around the mayor’s table and get on the video and show everybody the lamp,” Ronald said.
The Cardinia Shire Council has told residents the mercury vapour globes are becoming unserviceable after the international ban in 2013.
The replacement LED lamps are more energy efficient and will be easier to maintain, saving ratepayers money, the council said in a letterbox drop.
But Ronald said the letter did not make it clear that the decorative lamps would be removed. People had assumed it was simply a matter of replacing the globes inside them. Most of the older lamps are already gone.
According to a council report tabled last week, 1220 of the shire’s 1900 mercury vapour lamps have already been replaced, leaving just 680 of the originals standing.
The council’s unanimous vote last week to pause the replacement program does not guarantee the preservation of the surviving lamp posts.
The streets of Heritage Springs are lined with hundreds of street lamps modelled on those found at the Paris end of Collins Street.Credit: Penny Stephens
AusNet told the council the replacement LED lamp posts are the only option it has approved and that it is “unclear whether a solution will be available”.
A potential but unapproved retrofit globe AusNet has identified would “use over twice the energy and increase maintenance costs as opposed to the current approved replacement LED fittings”.
The motion to stop the wholesale removal of the old lamps was moved by councillor Collin Ross, who argued at last week’s meeting that they were worth investing in to preserve the “unique character in the area”.
Ross told the meeting the developer of Heritage Springs had paid a premium fee to the council for the right to install the decorative lights and that council should use the fund to pay for the remaining lamps’ preservation.
“There is a significant amount of money in this fund, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. “I don’t think Pakenham and the Cardinia Shire should turn [this] into a race to the bottom to see if we can put up the cheapest, most economic lights that we possibly can.”
The council’s Decorative Light Poles Reserve fund had $588,662 in it on June 30, the council said.
Jill Ronald, Bill’s wife, said community campaigners had no objection to installing LED globes but argued it is “a false economy of climate environmental justice” to replace the entire lamp head.
“Think of all the resources that have been wasted by replacing these lamp heads when they could have spent that money certifying these [retrofit] globes so we didn’t have to replace the lamp heads.”
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