Heatherton Park, from sand pit to parkland

Kingston describes itself as home to one of Melbourne’s green wedges, the land set aside around the city for non-urban use. The council puts its green wedge at 2,070 hectares across Heatherton, Clarinda, Dingley Village and Braeside, about 23 per cent of the municipality, and describes the Chain of Parks as the project that will turn more than 300 hectares of it into linked open spaces for the community.

The council says the idea goes back a long way: it was first raised in the early 1970s, and its aim is to bring old landfills back into use as a line of parks.

The state’s page for the same ground, the Sandbelt Parklands, says former landfill sites have been acquired towards a 355-hectare chain of parks, that those sites are managed by qualified contractors under Environment Protection Authority requirements, and that it will take several years to make them safe for public use.

Parts of the chain are open already: the council’s Q4 2024-25 performance report records the Elder Street and Victory Road landfill sites rehabilitated and open to the public as passive open space, and gives the chain as 305 hectares, Karkarook Park at one end and Braeside Park at the other.

Heatherton Park’s address is 1 Ireland Road, Clayton South 3169: the park carries the name of Heatherton, and it stands in the suburb of Clayton South, where the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 13,381 people at the 2021 Census, against 2,826 in the suburb of Heatherton itself. The name itself comes from the heath that covered the district, suggested by a local postmistress.

The council’s page for the park lists shelters and tables, a barbecue, water taps, a half court for basketball, seating, an off lead dog area, accessible paths and a toilet, and describes a playground of slides and swings, a flying fox, monkey bars, mirrors, and poles and ladders among the things to climb.

The ground under the park is the reason the district looks the way it does. Kingston’s green wedge sits on Melbourne’s sandbelt, and the council says the district was mined hard for sand through the 1900s; the holes left behind were then filled as landfills, taking everything from construction waste to household rubbish that decays.

That has changed. The Kingston Green Wedge Management Plan 2023 says the biggest change in the green wedge since 2012 has been the closing of the remaining landfill sites and the start of their decommissioning, and records that Amendment C143 in 2015 rezoned land north of Kingston Road to the Green Wedge A Zone, which stops new waste and resource recovery uses such as landfill from being established.

Time is part of the design. The council’s green wedge page says a closed landfill can take 10 to 40 years before the site is safe for parkland, and clearly longer before anything is built on it, because of the standards the sites are rehabilitated to and the limits the capping puts on construction. The management plan adds that deep-rooted trees have gone only around boundaries and on the few sites with designed caps.

Heatherton Park is one of those former landfill sites: the council’s Q4 2023-24 performance report, describing the Heatherton Park and Spring Road Reserve masterplans, says both are former landfill sites that give the community open space with enhanced biodiversity.

In the record of what the council has done for the chain since its first Green Wedge Management Plan, the 2023 plan lists the masterplans it had begun for Spring Road, Heatherton Park and Deals Road.

1. 2023The Green Wedge Management Plan 2023 lists the masterplans begun for Spring Road, Heatherton Park and Deals Road.
2. April to June 2024The Q4 2023-24 performance report records the masterplans for Heatherton Park and Spring Road Reserve as endorsed, implementation begun, and works to start in the following financial year.
3. April to June 2025The Q4 2024-25 performance report records planning commenced for delivering the Spring Road and Heatherton Park masterplans.

The council’s Q4 2023-24 performance report, for April to June 2024, records the two masterplans, for Heatherton Park and for Spring Road Reserve, as endorsed, with implementation begun and the works to start in the following financial year. The Q4 2024-25 report, a year later, records planning commenced for delivering the two masterplans.