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Lilydale Cemetery

Location 120 Victoria Road,, LILYDALE VIC 3140 - Property No B5985 File Number B5985 Level State

[1/1] B5985 Lilydale Cemetery

Statement of Significance

What is significant? Lilydale Cemetery is a large, elevated, rectangular cemetery designed in a simple grid system and located on the edge of the township. It contains a notable collection of memorials and funerary art demonstrating a range of styles and the different periods of burial. The two most historically and architecturally important memorials are of the Mitchell family. Dame Nellie Melba's monument is a pedestal designed in a typically restrained style by leading British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. David Mitchell's tomb is of a grander scale. It is a marble Doric temple with four columns with an entablature. The designer is unknown. The plantings and landscape value are also of interest.
How is it significant? The Lilydale Cemetery is significant for architectural, historic and landscape reasons at a state level.
Why is it significant? The Lilydale Cemetery is architecturally and historically significant as an early rural cemetery (1861), which contains the graves of many pioneer families and well-known district people, most notably Dame Nellie Melba, who achieved international renown, and Melba's father David Mitchell, a prominent building contractor, and including the artists Ernest Buckmaster and William Blamire Young. The Melba monument was designed by leading architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, considered the leading English 'Edwardian' architect. It is one of the few examples of Lutyens' work in Australia. The monument of David Mitchell is a stone Doric temple with four columns and entablature.
The Lilydale Cemetery has significant plantings and landscape value. The use of dark evergreen coniferous species with narrow crowns is symbolic with death and nineteenth cemetery landscapes. The Bhutan Cypress, Italian Cypress, Funeral Cypress and Bunya Bunya Pine have grown into fine mature trees and the hill top location displaying the vertical crowns is of great landscape value. The retention of several remnant Blackwoods, also evergreen and dark green foliage, complements the cemetery landscape, and shows the original flora of the site. The shrubbery plantings are typical cemetery species. The English Box hedge and the two clipped Rosemary bushes at the Melba Memorial are a significant component of the 1933 Lutyens designed memorial.
Classified: 27/06/2005