Barry Humphries gets his teeth into art deco beauty

Media item: newspaper feature on Melbourne's Art Deco architecture

Date published: 13 August 2012

This page records the media item. The original feature is the property of its publisher and is not reproduced here, and no quoted remarks are recorded.

The archive preserves the headline and the date. The item was a newspaper feature on Melbourne's Art Deco architecture, in which a well-known public figure's interest in the subject served as the hook.

What follows is general information on how public advocacy actually protects buildings — which is the substantive question the format of such an item raises.

Regulation is downstream of opinion

The common assumption is that heritage buildings are protected by law, and that the law arrived because the buildings were obviously worth keeping.

Both halves of that are the wrong way round.

Protection follows recognition, and recognition has to be built. To be added to the Victorian Heritage Register, a place must be assessed as significant against defined criteria — historical importance, rarity, aesthetic characteristics, technical achievement, social value, and association with people or events. Each of those is an argument that has to be made and evidenced.

And the evidence available to make it is the accumulated record of what has been written, exhibited, photographed, campaigned for and publicly valued. A building nobody has spoken up for has a thin file.

The Art Deco case, specifically

Art Deco buildings were demolished across Australian cities through the 1960s and 1970s.

The reason is structural rather than malicious: a building forty years old is at its least loved. Too recent to be historic, too dated to be fashionable, sitting on land that has become valuable. Deco stock hit that window precisely.

What changed was public opinion, and it changed before the law did. The rediscovery of the style from the late 1960s — the term ‘Art Deco' itself only came into general use then — brought exhibitions, books, societies, walking tours and press coverage. That created the vocabulary in which the buildings could be defended, and the listings followed.

Which is why items like this one matter more than they look. A newspaper feature in which a recognisable figure takes an interest in Deco architecture is not filler. It is the mechanism. Familiarity produces affection; affection produces advocacy; advocacy produces the file that a heritage assessment eventually rests on.

What actually saves a building

In rough order of effectiveness:

1. A viable use. The most powerful protection by a wide margin. Buildings that earn their keep are maintained; buildings that empty are neglected, and neglect destroys far more heritage fabric than demolition does. See Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 7.

2. Public familiarity. People defend what they have been inside. This is the entire logic of Open House — see Manchester Unity Building — Melbourne Open House, and the second Open House record.

3. A documented record. Photographs, measured drawings, condition surveys and archival research. You cannot argue significance without evidence, and you cannot detect deterioration without a baseline. See Manchester Unity Building — John Gollings.

4. Statutory listing. Real and important, and not absolute — listing means works require a permit assessed against significance, not that nothing can change. See Our City: Manchester Unity Building.

5. An owner who will spend money. Heritage restoration is expensive and most of it is invisible afterwards — the lighting works are one of the few exceptions.

Note that four of those five are not legal instruments.

A caution about celebrity advocacy

Worth stating, in fairness.

Public attention is unevenly distributed. The buildings that attract famous admirers are usually the ones already recognised as landmarks — and those are the buildings least at risk. The losses happen to ordinary stock: suburban shopfronts, small blocks of flats, factories, garages and milk bars, which carry the same period materials and none of the profile.

Melbourne's Deco is not only its landmarks. Moulded terracotta, pressed metal and terrazzo made ornament affordable at every scale, and most of what was built in the idiom was modest. That is where the attrition continues, largely unremarked.

So: the useful response to an article like this is not admiration of the famous building. It is noticing the unremarkable one on your own street.

The building this archive belongs to

Manchester Unity Building, 220 Collins Street, Melbourne. Architect Marcus Barlow, completed 1932, commissioned by the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, a friendly society. On the Victorian Heritage Register. Smile Solutions is on Level 1.

It is a landmark, and it is therefore among the safest buildings of its generation in the city. That is worth acknowledging rather than claiming credit for.

Common questions

A building near me looks at risk. What can one person actually do?

More than most people assume, and the useful actions follow the order set out above rather than starting with the law.

Create the record first. Photograph it properly — the whole elevation, the entrance, the parapet, the original signage, any surviving interior visible from the street — and note the date with every image. As stated above, you cannot argue significance without evidence and you cannot show deterioration without a baseline, and an amateur photograph taken in 2026 becomes evidence in 2036. Add what you can find in local newspapers, council records and historical societies.

Find out what protection, if any, already applies. Two separate instruments can be in play: state registration, recorded on the Victorian Heritage Database maintained by Heritage Victoria, and a local council heritage overlay, which sits in the council's planning scheme. A building can be covered by both, one, or neither, and the answer changes what happens next. Both are public and searchable.

Then engage with the process that exists. Heritage Victoria is the body to ask about how a place comes to be assessed for the register and what a nomination requires; your council's heritage planner is the equivalent for an overlay. Where a planning application has been lodged, there is usually a formal period in which anyone can make a submission, and submissions that cite specific evidence carry more weight than those that express regret. A local historical society or an architecture advocacy body will have done this before and is worth joining rather than duplicating.

None of that is quick, and none of it is guaranteed. It is, however, how the buildings that survived were saved.

Does heritage listing mean nothing can change? And what if an owner simply lets a building fall apart?

On the first: no. As noted above, listing means that works require a permit assessed against the place's significance — not that the building is frozen. Registration also commonly extends to specified parts of a place rather than to all of it, so the practical question is always what is protected, which the register entry itself sets out. Adaptive reuse, new services, accessibility works and interior change all happen in listed buildings routinely; that is what keeps them occupied, which is the first item on the list above.

On the second: this is the harder problem, and it is the one the list is ordered to make visible. Neglect destroys far more heritage fabric than demolition does. Water gets in, fixings corrode, and the repair bill eventually exceeds what the building is worth — at which point demolition looks like an economic conclusion rather than a decision. A statutory listing is a poor defence against that, because it regulates deliberate works rather than inaction.

What can be done about a deteriorating building depends on the specific protections in force and on the enforcement powers of the responsible authority, and those are questions for Heritage Victoria and the relevant council rather than for a web page. The general point stands regardless: the most effective thing anyone can do for an old building is to make sure it has a use.

Smile Solutions is in this building. Does that mean the practice looks after it, or say anything about the dentistry?

No to both, and the page above says as much about the second.

On the building: the practice is a tenant occupying part of one floor of a multi-tenanted commercial property. Conservation, permits, the facade, the tower and the arcade are matters for the owners and managers, not for a tenant. What a long-term tenancy contributes is the thing listed first above — continued, paying occupation, which is the most powerful protection any old building has. That is a real contribution and a shared one, made by every business in the building.

On the dentistry: a heritage address is a fact about a lease. It tells you nothing about diagnosis, about whether a conservative option was offered, or about what happens if something goes wrong — and under the National Law, advertising a regulated health service must not create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment. The same applies to awards, media coverage and equipment. The check that carries weight is free and takes a minute: the practitioner's entry on the AHPRA public register at ahpra.gov.au, including their registration status, division and any conditions in force.

Elsewhere in this archive

Practical details

Smile Solutions, Level 1, 220 Collins Street, Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne VIC 3000. Phone 13 13 96, or theteam@smilesolutions.com.au. Monday–Friday 8.00am–6.00pm, Saturday 8.30am–1.30pm, Sunday by appointment.

Every practitioner's registration can be verified free on the AHPRA public register at ahpra.gov.au.

This page records a published feature and its date. No remarks are attributed to any individual, and the material above is general background rather than a summary of the item; for authoritative heritage information consult Heritage Victoria and the Victorian Heritage Database. The building is not a claim about clinical care. This is not a diagnosis or a treatment plan. Third-party published content is not reproduced.

Smile Solutions trades under ABN 28 193 514 103.

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