YARRA BEND PARK

The Yarra Bend Park including all the land, trees, plantings, open parkland, roads and paths, asylum gate pillar, golf club house and course, and all archaeological deposits associated with the former Merri Creek Protectorate Station, Merri Creek Aboriginal School, Native Police Corps Headquarters, the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, Fairhaven Venereal Disease Clinic and Fairlea Women's Prison. 

Yarra Bend Park is of historical and archaeological significance to the State of Victoria. It satisfies the following criterion for inclusion in the Victorian Heritage Register: 

Criterion A 

Importance to the course, or pattern, of Victoria’s cultural history. 

Criterion B 

Possession of uncommon, rare or endangered aspects of Victoria’s cultural history. 

Criterion C 

Potential to yield information that will contribute to an understanding of Victoria’s cultural history. 

Yarra Bend Park is significant at the State level for the following reasons: 

Yarra Bend Park is historically significant for its associations with a number of government initiated and/or operated institutions from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and for its long association with active and passive recreational use. [Criterion A] 

Aboriginal cultural connection pre-existed the formation of Melbourne by tens of thousands of years. Yarra Bend Park is historically significant as a place of contact and interaction between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the formative years of Victoria’s development. This resulted in the establishment of institutions near the confluence of Merri Creek and the Yarra River, including the Merri Creek Protectorate Station, Merri Creek Aboriginal School and Native Police Corps Headquarters. [Criterion A] 

Yarra Bend Park is significant for its associations with Billibellary, Ngurungaeta (leader) of the Woi wurrung (who was buried near the confluence of the Yarra River and Merri Creek in 1846) and Assistant Protector William Thomas. Their mutually respectful relationship, which extended to Billibellary’s son Simon Wonga, was instrumental in the negotiation of land for Aboriginal people, which led to the establishment of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station near Healesville. [Criterion A] 

Yarra Bend Park is significant as the location of Victoria’s first asylum. The Metropolitan Lunatic Asylum, later known as the Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum, was the first asylum established in Victoria in 1848 and was constructed in a ‘village style’. [Criterion A] 

Yarra Bend Park is historically significant for the ongoing development of facilities for active and passive recreational use, including open parkland, walking tracks and sporting grounds. [Criterion A] 

Yarra Bend Park is an uncommon example of an expansive inner-city area which has remained largely undeveloped and retains a high potential for significant archaeological evidence of 

government initiated and/or operated institutions. [Criterion B] 

Yarra Bend Park is archaeologically significant for its potential to contain features, deposits and/or artefacts that relate to various government initiated and/or operated institutions, their 

establishment, use and change over time, and landscape and garden features. As a place of intensive institutional use, Yarra Bend Park has a high potential to contain a well-preserved and distinct historical archaeological landscape, which has high potential to provide information which is not currently understood. [Criterion C]