By Cara Waters
The City of Melbourne is considering lighting up Royal Park at night due to safety concerns, but experts say “dark parks” are important for wildlife and residents.
The 181-hectare expanse of public land in Parkville, just north of the city centre, is Melbourne’s last remaining dark park. Safety audits show women in particular sometimes feel unsafe there at night, after Courtney Herron was bashed to death in the park in 2019.
Dr Barry Clark measuring light levels in Royal Park.Credit: Justin McManus
The City of Melbourne is revising its master plan for Royal Park – Melbourne’s largest public park – and is considering installing lighting.
“We have learnt that some people don’t feel safe in Royal Park and that the reasons for this are quite varied,” the council’s discussion paper states. “The safety audits undertaken in the park identified that the lack of lighting reduces accessibility, especially among women, leading to few people using the park during low-light periods. People are less likely to travel through the park after nightfall due to safety concerns.”
Lighting at night is seen as a potential solution, but experts including the Protectors of Public Lands and the Dark Sky Association are concerned about the impact.
“Preservation of Royal Park’s status as Melbourne’s only dark park is of immense importance,” Michael Petit of the Protectors of Public Lands said in the group’s submission to the council’s master plan consultation.
“Plants and animals depend on Earth’s daily cycle of light and dark to govern life-sustaining behaviours such as reproduction, nourishment, sleep and protection from predators,” he said. “Scientific evidence suggests that artificial light at night has negative and deadly effects on many creatures including amphibians, birds, mammals, insects and plants.”
Dr Barry Clark, board member of International Dark Sky Association Victoria, said light pollution had substantially reduced the length of nights and increased the length of days, which affected residents’ sleep and circadian rhythms.
”Light pollution degrades the wonderful natural spectacle of the starry night sky, imposing an aesthetic loss for everyone,” he said.
Clark said the amount of night lighting in public spaces was also contributing to the climate crisis. “At present in Victoria, most of the energy for lighting at night comes from burning brown coal, which is known to be a prolific source of greenhouse gases,” he said.
Royal Park at dusk.
Clark said while people might feel safer with lights at night, artificial light did not have an impact on safety. “There is simply no effect from artificial light at night, one way or another, on the crime rate,” he said.
Kathleen Maltzahn, chief executive of Sexual Assault Services Victoria, said while women had good reason to be scared of being raped and murdered both at home and in public spaces, simply lighting up parks was not the answer.
“We really understand why some women might feel safer with lights, but there are other design things that can be done, and it is in a sense a false comfort to think that lights can keep us safe,” she said.
“We don’t even have a strategy in this state on sexual violence, let alone in design terms.”
Dr Nicole Kalms, an associate professor at Monash University and director of design research group XYX Lab, has undertaken research with women into unsafe “hotspots” in Melbourne’s parks and found that perceptions of urban safety did not correlate with the most brightly lit spaces.
“Women will avoid walking through vast and unoccupied parkland at night no matter how well the space is lit,” she said. “If the lighting design is poor, or overly bright, the research suggests that women feel too visible and at times more unsafe.”
Kalms said women were conscious of the impact of lighting on wildlife and a multifaceted solution was needed, such as using expert designers trained in gender-sensitive design who could consider warm lighting that was activated only when people were nearby.
Councillor Rohan Leppert said the master plan revision was about understanding everything valuable about Royal Park and re-establishing community expectations about how the space will be managed over the next 20 years.
“Everyone deserves to feel safe in our city, no matter where they are or what time of the day,” he said. “Safe movement through Royal Park is one of the key issues we have prompted discussion about, and we will consider community responses carefully.”
The City of Melbourne will consider a draft of the master plan early next year.
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