The trolls, the trails and the grass at Heatherton Park

Heatherton Park is the City of Kingston’s own reserve on Ireland Road in Clayton South, and the council’s page for it describes a large grassed space beside the Spring Valley golf course, walking trails, and a troll themed playground that the council also calls Monster Park.

The playground is the heart of the park for children, and the council says a horde of trolls lives there alongside an array of play: slides and swings, a flying fox, monkey bars, mirrors, and poles and ladders among the climbing frames.

The council’s page gives the park’s address as 1 Ireland Road, Clayton South 3169, so the park is named Heatherton while standing in Clayton South, the suburb beside it.

The two suburbs are not alike in size. At the 2021 Census the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 2,826 people in Heatherton, where the median age was 41, and 13,381 people in Clayton South, where the median age was 34.

The name is older than the boundary between them. Kingston’s local history records that the district was first called Kingstown and then Kingston, and that it became Heatherton because a post office in western Victoria already used the Kingston name, with the local postmistress suggesting Heatherton for the heath that grew across the land.

Kingston puts the park in Karkarook Ward, and the council’s ward profile describes that ward as home to Karkarook Park, the north western end of the Sandbelt Parklands project, which is the Chain of Parks under its other name, and of the South East green wedge.

The local history of the area records that Clarinda, Oakleigh South and Clayton South, with the neighbourhood of Westall inside Clayton South, form the City of Kingston’s northernmost suburbs, in the south east of Melbourne.

The ground under the park was a tip. The council’s Q4 2023-24 performance report, writing in April to June 2024 about the Heatherton Park and Spring Road Reserve masterplans, calls both reserves former landfill sites that now give the community open space, green ground and better habitat for wildlife.

The Kingston Green Wedge Management Plan 2023 explains what that ground has been through: the old sand quarries and landfill sites have little value for other uses because of the digging and the pollution left in places, and many of them are part way through rehabilitation, capped, watched for pollution and grassed over.

The cap shapes what the park can be. The council says a capped landfill cannot take just anything: waste settling inside the fill makes the surface uneven, so heavy paving and buildings are out, and the capping puts limits on what can be built there.

Trees are the clearest example. The management plan says that because of those limits, deep-rooted trees have been planted only around the edge of these sites, and on the few sites whose caps were designed to carry them.

The council measures the wait in decades: from the day a tip closes, it can take 10 to 40 years before the site is safe for a park, and clearly longer before it is safe for built facilities.

The council still rates a park the right answer for ground like this: an excellent purpose for a remediated landfill, it says, and many of Kingston’s parks, and many across Melbourne, began as tips.

The plan for the park is written in the council’s own reporting. In the record of what it has done for the chain since its first Green Wedge Management Plan, the 2023 plan lists masterplans begun for three sites: Spring Road, Heatherton Park and Deals Road.

In April to June 2024 the council’s Q4 2023-24 performance report recorded that the two masterplans, for Heatherton Park and for Spring Road Reserve, had begun to be implemented once Council endorsed them, with the works starting in the next financial year.

A year on, the Q4 2024-25 performance report records that planning has started for delivering the two masterplans, and that a draft masterplan for Bald Hill has been prepared for community consultation.

Heatherton Park also has work waiting in the wider chain. The 2023 plan names the sites the state government is to develop under the $25 million it committed to the project in 2018, and among them is the old Henry Street landfill site, which the plan says will link Karkarook Park with the Elder Street South and Victory Road parks the council is working on.

The quarter by quarter record of the Heatherton Park masterplan is set out in the guide to the masterplan in the council’s reports.