Registered places and objects
This page highlights some of the places and objects included in the Victorian Heritage Register in the last few years.
To see all the registrations please visit the online Victorian Heritage Database. More information about recent registrations in the State register is available from the Heritage Council of Victoria.
Portland Lifeboat
The Portland Lifeboat (1858) is rare as one of only two early Victorian lifeboats remaining that demonstrate the first design and construction of lifeboats in Victoria. It is in largely original condition and retaining original fabric. It is historically significant for its association with the establishment of the Victorian Lifeboat Service.
Buckland River Crossing
The Buckland River Crossing is historically significant as the culmination point of one of the worst race riots in Victoria’s colonial history: the Buckland Valley anti-Chinese riot of 1857. This place is also socially significant for the Chinese community across Victoria as a place of remembrance of the Buckland Valley Riot.
Mount Macedon Survey Cairn
The Mount Macedon Survey Cairn is historically significant as an outstanding example of the type of survey cairns that were key to the Geodetic Survey of Victoria (1858-72), the earliest comprehensive land survey undertaken of Victoria. It is a rare and prominent survivor of over 250 stone survey cairns erected for the Geodetic Survey.
Albanian Mosque, Shepparton
The Albanian Mosque, Shepparton (late 1950s) is the earliest surviving purpose-built mosque in Victoria. It demonstrates the history of Muslim migration during the postwar era and into the twenty-first century. It is culturally significant within Victoria’s Islamic faith communities and is visited by Muslims exploring the history of this religious tradition.
Wombeetch Puyuun Grave Monument and Dawson Family Grave
The Wombeetch Puyuun Grave Monument and Dawson Family Grave (1885) is rare and historically significant for its demonstration of the devastating effect of European colonisation on Aboriginal people from the 1840s. It is important for its association with Wombeetch Puyuun, James Dawson and his daughter, Isabella and is of social significance to Eastern Maar people including the descendants of the Liwura Gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung people.
Moe Court House
The Moe Court House is a fine example of a late twentieth-century court house. It was one of the largest court houses to be built in Victoria in the second half of the twentieth century. It is architecturally significant for its demonstration of a large range of the defining characteristics of Brutalist architecture in Victoria.
Maisie’s Plots
Maisie's Plots were established on the Bogong High Plains by pioneering botanist Maisie Fawcett between 1945 and 1947.
The place is historically significant as one of the longest continual ecological monitoring experiments in Australia and Victoria, and for their association with Maisie Fawcett. The place is scientifically significant for its innovations in the ecological sciences, and socially significant within the Victorian scientific community as place where generations of students and researchers have studied Victoria’s earliest ecological data collection methods.
Lake Wendouree
Lake Wendouree is a recreational lake in Ballarat. Originally a wetland called Yuille's Swamp, it was developed from the 1850s into a popular boating destination with attractive surrounding gardens.
The place is historically significant for its long association with water-based sports and recreation. The shores of Lake Wendouree feature many boatsheds from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when rowing and yachting were highly popular pastimes. The lake was also the only venue in regional Victoria to host events for the 1956 Olympic Games (rowing and canoeing).
Lake Wendouree is also aesthetically significant as a carefully developed landscape which has inspired numerous artworks since the 1870s, particularly painting and photography. It is a visually appealing place, characterised by uninterrupted views across the lake's surface, winding pathways and towering exotic trees.
Actor’s Studio House
The Actor's Studio House is a two-storey corrugated iron building designed by architect Suzanne Dance in 1975 for actor Max Gillies.
It is architecturally significant as a notable example of a fine and early exploration of the corrugated iron revival movement in Victoria. It is historically significant because it was the first building solely designed by a woman architect to be awarded a Royal Australian Institute of Architects (Victorian Chapter) medal for its architectural design in 1980.
Melbourne AIDS Memorial Quilt
The Melbourne AIDS Memorial Quilt is historically significant as one of the most important artefacts of the AIDS crisis in Victoria from the 1980s onwards. Part of the international AIDS memorial quilt movement, it represents a pivotal moment in the history of commemorative textile making in Victoria.
The Quilt represents the community care, volunteerism and political activism associated with the AIDS crisis. It has a strong, special, and continuing association with particular social groups affected by the AIDS crisis and their families.
Lyceum Club
The Lyceum Club is historically significant as the clubrooms of the largest private members club for women in Victoria. The club was designed by architect Edythe Ellison Harvie and built in the late 1950s.
Since its construction the club has been renovated and expanded by women architects. The continuous design input by women designers over decades is rare. The Lyceum Club is also socially significant for its continued association with its members. Members first met in rented clubrooms in 1912, and since this time the club's reach and influence across the state has been vast and intergenerational.
Edith Ingpen House
The Edith Ingpen House is significant as an example of an interwar building. Ingpen designed and built her own isolated weekend retreat in the 1930s. She is important as one of the few women architects practising at the time.
The house demonstrates emerging design such as a flat roof and circular form. It was built using local materials. The circular form of the house is rare for the 1930s and pre-dates the geometric forms that became popular almost 20 years later, by Modernists such as Roy Grounds in the 1950s.
Footscray Psychiatric Centre
The Footscray Psychiatric Centre opened in 1977 as a community mental health centre. The centre represents an important point in Victoria’s history when large psychiatric hospitals closed and new approaches of treating mental illness emerged.
From the outside the dramatic Brutalist-style building appears very mysterious. Inside, its therapy rooms, residential rooms and communal spaces clearly evoke its former use.
There are many 19th-century asylums and mental hospitals already in the Victorian Heritage Register (VHR) but the Footscray Psychiatric Centre is the first place included that captures late 20th-century approaches to the treatment of people experiencing mental illness.
Diesel Locomotive A60
Diesel Locomotive A60 started service as B60 in 1952 named Harold W Clapp. In 1984, it converted to A60 and renamed Sir Harold Clapp.
The B60 was built as part of Operation Phoenix, a post-war recovery program, and was the first mainline diesel locomotive to operate in Victoria. Upgraded to A60 as part of the New Deal for Country Passengers. It was the flagship of the Victorian Railways until the 1980s and even hauled the Royal Train when the Queen visited Victoria in 1954.
Yarra Bend Park
Yarra Bend Park was included in the VHR in 2021. Yarra Bend is important to Victoria's history as a place of contact and interaction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the early years of colonisation.
Institutions were established here near the confluence of Merri Creek and the Yarra River, including the:
- Merri Creek Protectorate Station
- Merri Creek Aboriginal School
- Native Police Corps Headquarters
Yarra Bend Park has associations with Billibellary, Ngurungaeta (leader) of the Woi wurrung and Assistant Protector William Thomas.
Yarra Bend Park is also archaeologically significant for its potential to contain features, deposits and artefacts that relate to various government institutions, including the Yarra Bend Asylum, Victoria’s first mental hospital.
Former Aboriginal Church of Christ
This former church in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy is important to Victoria’s heritage as the place where Pastor Doug Nicholls established the Aboriginal Church of Christ in the 1940s. It was included in the Victorian Heritage Register in 2019.
Pastor (later Sir) Doug Nicholls was a footballer, activist, pastor and later Governor of South Australia. Both he and his wife Gladys were strong campaigners for Aboriginal rights and justice. During the 1940s, when Fitzroy was home to Victoria’s largest Aboriginal community, the church became an important place of worship, community assistance, support and activism for Aboriginal people. Many Aboriginal political and welfare organisations emerged from the people who met at Pastor Doug’s church. It remains a symbol of the Aboriginal rights movement in Victoria.
Page last updated: 06/06/23