Aminya Reserve
28 Kenmare Street WATSONIA, BANYULE CITY
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Statement of Significance
What is significant?
Aminya Reserve, Watsonia, comprising approximately 0.7 hectares of parkland, including exotic and native trees, and the 1940s Watsonia Community Hall, is significant. Aminya Reserve also contains a second community building which is not significant in its own right.
How is it significant?
Aminya Reserve, Watsonia is of local historic, scientific, aesthetic and social significance to the City of Banyule.
Why is it significant?
Aminya Reserve, Watsonia is historically significant as a remnant section of land once used for farming and subsequently utilised as the site of Watsonia's Community Hall, built in the early 1940s. Its plantings of pine, cypress and a sole remaining fruit tree reinforce this early history. Aminya Reserve is historically significant as the location of Watsonia's Community Hall, one of the suburb's early community facilities. Gate pillars and boundary pine planting along Lambourn Road and Kenmare Street date back to this construction. (Criterion A)
Aminya Reserve is socially significant both as a passive recreation ground for the local community, and as a focus for community activities centred around the Watsonia Community Hall and the Watsonia Community Centre / Neighbourhood House. (Criterion G)
Aminya Reserve is aesthetically significant for its rich landscape featuring exotic and native tree plantings of mixed ages, remnant and regenerating indigenous trees, and grassy fields. This is further reinforced by the built landscape offering examples of 1940s public, and 1970s residential, building types. (Criterion E)
Aminya Reserve is scientifically significant for its remnant Swamp Gum specimens, and for its regenerating population of this species, indigenous to the site. (Criterion F)-
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Aminya Reserve - Physical Description 1
Aminya Reserve is a rectangular site of 0.7 hectares. The Reserve can be divided into two areas. The northern section contains the Watsonia Community Hall, two parking areas and the Watsonia Community Centre, also called Watsonia Neighbourhood House. The latter includes a fenced rear garden area. A children's playground is located between the two community buildings.
Watsonia Hall is an interwar building that exudes an industrial 'feel' in its limited decoration and general uniformity of the materials used. The building is of single-storey, clinker brick construction. Its front facade is compact with very limited decoration aside from a low rectangular parapet, behind which a corrugated iron hipped roof rises. The rear section of the building has an unusual roof form, with a small gabled roof on the south west corner of the building, and a section of flat roof on the south east. It is possible that the rear of the building is an addition. A series of large, metal-framed, multi-paned windows appear along the length of the building. The Hall is sited facing the road in the north eastern corner of Aminya Reserve.
The southern section of the Reserve is largely parkland, featuring a variety of landscape examples. A section of cypress planting to the south of the Hall may be the remnant of a windbreak, and a small number of conifers scattered through the Reserve are suggestive of earlier farming activities. An intact boundary planting of Monterey Pine (Pinus radiata) remains along the Lambourn Road frontage - dating back to the construction of the Watsonia Community Hall in the 1940s. A few isolated specimens from this planting, which appears to have continued along Kenmare Street, also remain. Two remnant Photinias (Photinia sp.) near the (original) entry gates to the Hall appear to be survivors from a hedge planted at the entry.
A small number of mature remnant Swamp Gum specimens (Eucalyptus ovata) are likely to be those which appear in a 1931 aerial photograph of the site. Regeneration of this indigenous species was reported in 1999 (Toomey, 1999), and continues today within a fenced area of the Reserve.
Aminya Reserve is well treed and grassed, and also features many fine native trees which have been planted within the last 40 to 50 years. These include Lemon-scented Gum (Corymbia citriodora) and Red Ironbark (Eucalyptus sideroxylon).A single remaining fruit tree was noted in 2009. Adjacent dead trees may have been the fruit trees recorded in the Reserve in 1999.
Heritage Study and Grading
Banyule - Banyule Heritage Review
Author: Context P/L
Year: 2009
Grading: Local
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Former Loyola CollegeNational Trust
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Eucalyptus cornutaNational Trust
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Quercus fagineaNational Trust
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