Parklife: Heritage and Place in Parkville
The one-day symposium features local and international speakers and keynotes exploring the role of Parkville as a built environment and cultural environment in Melbourne's institutional, domestic, and Indigenous history.
The values ascribed to streets and landscapes, buildings and places shift over time. Access, interpretation and display have become crucial components in recognising and enacting conservation.
The landscape of Quor-nóng/Royal Park has been inhabited by First Peoples for millennia. Following colonisation, Royal Park was reserved as a public park with neighbourhoods and institutions constructed on its edges. Park Life seeks to interrogate the impact of institutions such as the university, hospitals, a prison, a major park and a zoo, as well as local precincts. Parkville is a suburb of diverse building types surrounding Royal Park, and home to major Melbourne institutions including the symposium host, the University of Melbourne. Parkville has played a pivotal role in Australian understandings of heritage, memory, commemoration, and dwelling.
In 1972, South Parkville was declared Melbourne’s first historic area by the National Trust. This one-day symposium strives to examine how global and national understandings of heritage have been reflected in all parts of Parkville, and what different meanings Parkville has come to take on since that time.