What the council’s reports record for Heatherton Park

Heatherton Park’s masterplan belongs to a plan for the whole sandbelt. The Kingston Green Wedge Management Plan 2023 sets out what the council has done for the Chain of Parks since it adopted its first green wedge plan in 2012, and the work it lists includes the masterplans begun for Spring Road, Heatherton Park and Deals Road.

Kingston’s green wedge flyer dates the council’s endorsement of a Chain of Parks Masterplan to March 2020.

The land the chain is built from has been assembled over years. The 2023 plan records the $25 million the State Government committed to the Chain of Parks in 2018, and among the priority sites it lists for the state to acquire is the former Henry Street landfill, which the plan says will connect Karkarook Park with the council’s Elder Street South and Victory Road parks.

The same plan records that in 2022 the state announced it had bought 83 hectares in Heatherton, Clarinda and Clayton South, joined parcels of land inside the Public Acquisition Overlay that once rehabilitated will form part of a chain of parks, trails and open space.

The plan also records that 128.2 hectares of the land at the heart of the chain sits under a Public Acquisition Overlay, the tool by which Parks Victoria buys it.

1. March 2020Kingston’s green wedge flyer dates the council’s endorsement of a Chain of Parks Masterplan to March 2020.
2. 2023The Kingston Green Wedge Management Plan 2023 lists the masterplans begun for Spring Road, Heatherton Park and Deals Road.
3. April 2024Kingston’s page for Spring Road Reserve records that reserve’s masterplan adopted by Council, after community consultation.
4. April to June 2024The Q4 2023-24 performance report records the Heatherton Park and Spring Road Reserve masterplans endorsed by Council with implementation begun, and the works for the enhancements to start in the financial year that followed.
5. April to June 2025The Q4 2024-25 performance report records that planning has started for delivering the two masterplans.

The council’s own record of the plan follows it forward. Its Q4 2023-24 performance report, covering April to June 2024, records the masterplans for Heatherton Park and Spring Road Reserve endorsed by Council with implementation begun, and puts the works for the enhancements in the financial year that followed.

The same report describes the two parks as former landfill sites giving the community valuable recreational space, green open space and enhanced biodiversity.

Spring Road Reserve’s own page records a masterplan adopted by Council in April 2024, after community consultation.

The Q4 2024-25 report, a year later, records that planning has started for delivering the Spring Road and Heatherton Park masterplans, and a draft masterplan for Bald Hill prepared for community consultation.

That report also records that the council has finished studies, paid for by the Victorian Government, into what it costs to keep managing the chain’s state-owned land and the risks that go with it, and that the last 86 hectares of land for the chain were bought by the state in 2022-23, and no more purchases are planned.

A plan for a park on a capped landfill is written to what the ground will allow, and the council’s own documents set that out.

The 2023 plan describes the old quarries and landfill sites as land of low end-use value, disturbed and with pollution levels that vary, and records that many of them are at different stages of rehabilitation through capping, pollution monitoring and grassing.

The same plan records that the limited ways these sites can be used has meant deep-rooted trees have gone in only around the boundaries, and on the small number of sites that carry a designed cap.

Kingston’s green wedge page gives the timescale: a closed landfill can take between 10 and 40 years to become safe as parkland, and much longer to become safe for built facilities, because of the standards the sites are rehabilitated to and the constraints the capping puts on what can go on top of them.

The plan also notes that landfill gas can carry a risk for at least 30 years after a site closes, and that this has to be weighed in every planning exercise.

The council’s green wedge page adds that a former landfill is not ground for constructed or heavily paved surfaces, because the surface turns uneven as the waste settles inside it.

The 2023 plan recommends detailed monitoring for the sites holding the most intact remnant vegetation, and Heatherton Park is one of the sites it names.

Those areas, the plan says, are the backbone for biodiversity and habitat links across the sandbelt open space sites.

Those are the dates the council’s own documents give for this park’s masterplan, and the reports between them record the plan’s progress rather than its contents: what each stage of the work will change, and when it opens, is not among what they say.