‘Open slather’ for developers is bad news for heritage, Hawthorn campaigners say

Rotherwood, a block of flats on Riversdale Road in Camberwell, does not look like the front line of the battle over heritage within the state electorate of Hawthorn.

But the nine flats in this three-level brick block – which has been empty for a year and will face the wrecking ball in 2023 if it all goes to plan for the developer – are just that.

Heritage advocates Christina Branagan (left) and Sandra Alexander at the Rotherwood Flats in Camberwell.Credit: Simon Schluter

Developer Mimmo Scrimizzi disputes whether the 1939 block is truly a heritage property. His company has applied to replace the flats with 15 luxury apartments. “It’s gonna look better than the shit that’s there,” says Scrimizzi.

The apartments certainly have no heritage protection – something that heritage activists Christina Branagan and Sandra Alexander say is all too common for similar buildings all over Hawthorn, Camberwell, Surrey Hills and Canterbury – the suburbs that make up this ultra-marginal electorate that Labor won by just 330 votes at the last state election.

Heritage has long been one of the most contested spaces in Melbourne’s inner east and was an area that the former MP for Hawthorn, Ted Baillieu, an architect, and the premier between 2010 and 2013, inhabited with ease.

At this election, only one candidate in Hawthorn – Liberal John Pesutto – has made heritage protection a core issue. Pesutto wants to bring in mandatory height limits, create far stronger protection from demolition for pre-1930 buildings, and to make it harder to cut down trees.

An artist’s impression of the plan for 570 Riversdale Road, Hawthorn.Credit: 570 Riversdale Road Pty Ltd

Labor MP John Kennedy said there needed to be “a fair balance between sustainable development ... and retaining our local heritage buildings”.

“My office has received mixed correspondence on the matter,” Kennedy said. “Some feel the current heritage protections needs strengthening while others feel the opposite”.

When asked about heritage, teal candidate Melissa Lowe attacked the Liberal Party and its leader, former planning minister Matthew Guy. Lowe says new buildings have poor energy efficiency standards and no requirement for electric vehicle charging.

The number of apartments in this electorate grew dramatically in the last decade – to 42 per cent of all dwellings in the electorate. Advocates for medium-density housing say new apartments are a net positive for the community because it creates cheaper housing for more. And heritage activists are often dismissed as NIMBYs – Not In My Backyard advocates – who, having bought into the area long ago, want to pull up the drawbridge now so others can’t buy a smaller property.

But Branagan says developers all too often do what they want because the rules that are meant to protect significant buildings do not work.

“The heritage regulations are broken,” says Branagan, whose Boroondara Heritage Group for Advocacy and Protection has campaigned – with little success – to get heritage laws strengthened.

Too often, Branagan says, the community works with the local council to prove that either individual houses or precincts are deserving of protection, only for the request to fall on deaf ears once it reaches either the planning department or the planning minister.

Developers often have contempt for locally elected councillors who, in theory as much as in practice, are there to represent the will of locals.

Just ask Scrimizzi, who says he has received correspondence from a Boroondara councillor about the proposal to demolish Rotherwood. “I said to her, ‘How about I come to your place and tell you how to rearrange furniture in your house’.”

Scrimizzi doesn’t think he’ll need to bother dealing with councillors to demolish it and replace it with his $10 million development.

“What I’m replacing is better than what’s there if you look at the plans. And guess what? Town planning at Boroondara agree. The councillors can go to their meeting and do whatever they want.”

For this story, Branagan and Alexander took The Age on a tour of four locations they feel deserve heritage protection. In Wattle Road in Hawthorn, homes more than 100 years old are now regularly being bulldozed.

76 Wattle Road, Hawthorn.Credit: RT Edgar Boroondara

The latest is number 76, an 1880s manor that the state planning department has allowed to be demolished despite requests from Boroondara Council to protect it. The site will be developed into 10 townhouses.

As we walk the street, Branagan and Alexander point to at least 40 houses that are more than 100 years old and that are quintessential old Melbourne, but could be demolished tomorrow if an application was put in.

“It’s simply open slather,” says Branagan, whose group wants heritage regulations changed, and the reinstatement of a planning and heritage inquiry started during the current term of government but not completed.

Next, we visit Roseberry Street, Camberwell, a street of mostly worker’s cottages from the 19th century that locals say deserves protection.

Christina Branagan and Sandra Alexander say the loss of the Rotherwood Flats will reduce the number of affordable homes in the seat of Hawthorn.Credit: Simon Schluter

Finally, we visit a block of Modernist apartments on Cooloongatta Road, Camberwell, also facing demolition. Heritage reports, one by Boroondara Council, and another by heritage experts hired by community members, found the apartments are deserving of being preserved. No protection ever materialised and the Department of Environment, Water, Land and Planning, acting on behalf of the minister, has allowed demolition.

Charles Sowerwine chairs the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’s heritage committee and says there is seldom adequate protection for properties that most Victorians would think have heritage value.

“The worst problems are at the level of local significance,” says Sowerwine. “There are great difficulties with [heritage overlays], with lack of funding for councils to do heritage studies, and with [the state planning tribunal’s] interpretation of heritage.”

Demolition of decades-old apartments also creates another less discussed problem: often they represent some of the Hawthorn electorate’s only affordable housing for those who can’t afford the area’s $2.5 million median house price.

Standing in front of the Riversdale Road apartments, Branagan says the luxury apartments they will be replaced by won’t be affordable – unlike the existing flats.

“We haven’t got enough affordable housing, and we’re allowing apartments like this to end up in landfill,” she says. “Who’s benefiting? Because it isn’t the community.”

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