Yarra Flats

Yarra Flats, comprising 85 hectares of woodland, wetland and riparian habitats, is of significance. It includes scar trees, remnants of the gardens of nearby estates, and bluestone water diversion channels which are the remnants of Chinese market gardens in the area.

How is it significant?

Yarra Flats is of historic, indigenous, aesthetic, and social value to to the City of Banyule.

Why is it significant?

Yarra Flats is of local historic and aesthetic significance as part of two major 1840s estates in Eaglemont - Charterisville and Hartlands. Remnant plantings such as hawthorn hedgerows, oaks and cypresses, and bluestone water channels demonstrate the succession of land use from the earliest estates of Charterisville and Hartlands with their garden settings, through to grazing, agriculture and market gardening. This succession of land use, and the juxtapostion and diversity of landscapes which has resulted, has produced a broader landscape of considerable aesthetic appeal.

Yarra Flats is of local (potentially state) significance for its close association with the Heidelberg School of artists and the development of Impressionist art in Australia. Yarra Flats was the inspirational, immediate landscape of the longest surviving artists's camp of the Heidelberg School of artists. A number of other sites, including Yarra Glen, the Dandenongs, Box Hill and Eltham were associated with the Heidelberg School of artists. However it was at the artists' camp in Heidelberg (from which the movement took its name), conducting art classes and painting the natural beauty of the Yarra Flats landscape, that artists including Streeton, Davies, Withers, Condor and Roberts carved out the Heidelberg School's reputation which is second to none to this day.(Criterion H,A)

Yarra Flats is of local significance for its association with the Wurundjeri people. It contains a number of scar trees, and has been included in the 2004 Aboriginal Heritage Study.

Yarra Flats, as the place associated with a active community (the Riverlands Conservation Society) dedicated to its revegetation for 40 years, is of social significance. (Criterion G)

Group

Parks, Gardens and Trees

Category

Other - Parks, Gardens & Trees