Concourse Green & Concourse Bushland

* 2017

Consultants’
final version of the Beaumaris

Concourse Streetscape Draft Master Plan
Report, of 18 November 2016, is Item
10.4 on Pages 91-97 of the agenda

of the Bayside

City Council meeting of Tuesday, 23 May
2017 at 7 pm.

BCS

Inc’s petition to Bayside City Council
to KEEP THE CONCOURSE GREEN, GREEN is Item 7.1
on Page 7 of the agenda
of the above meeting, where it is acknowledged
as having gained 861 signatures. Only 20

comments were made on the Council’s
web page on the Concourse Green.

BCS Inc’s concerns
about the Master Plan form part of its
Campaign 2002. Proposals to alter the
Concourse Green represent some $300,000 of the
$1.4 million of precious ratepayers’ money
proposed to be spent. The
Concourse Green, shown below, has long
been a distinctive quarter hectare of
central Beaumaris public open space still
entirely free of paving or gravel – just
grass and its 58
native trees.

Changes sought to other parts of the Concourse
– except as set out below – would likely not
be objected to, although proposals to ‘jazz
up’ presently blank walls could lead to future
unsightly aspects.

Beaumaris
Conservation Society Inc. has the following
major concerns:

• • Devegetation of
    20% of the Concourse Green at
    its north-east corner to replace trees and
    lawn with gravel or paving
    [Land all over
    Beaumaris is being relentlessly paved
    (concreted, covered with bitumen, gravel
    etc), so BCS Inc. strongly opposes any
    more replacement of public lawn or trees
    by other surface treatments, particularly
    in such a prominent and important place.
    
  • Boulders to
    be placed on the 20% of the Green to be
    devegetated – for a so-called ‘Beaumaris
    feel’  [A
    consultancy industry cut-and-paste stock
    artefact that has nothing to do with
    Beaumaris, given that sandy Beaumaris has
    no natural boulders at all].
  • Needless
    paths – 2 parallel diagonal gratuitous
    wavy paths (seeP. 4) joined to a north-south path
    along the eastern edge would trisect, and
    much reduce, the present substantial
    quarter hectare (2,625 square metres)
    swathe of grass and trees. [That would nastily
    fragment the lawn into three insignificant
    patches of some 600 square metres each,
    and would make the entire Concourse Green
    seem much smaller. Walking on mown grass
    is neither unpleasant nor dangerous and –
    in contrast to the consultants’ claim – is
    still a ‘Beaumaris feel’].
  • Proposed
    ‘uplighting’ of trees at night is opposed.
    
    [Trees’ natural condition is a 50% cycle
    of darkness, and there is quite enough
    stray ambient light pollution there
    already to enable their evening character
    to be discerned. Bird and microbat
    habitat, and neighbours’ evening amenity
    also need to be protected].
  • One or
    more vulgar entrance gimmicks reminiscent
    of the approachesto some hick town in the mid-west of
    the USA
    

• Failure of
  proposed new planting to be wholly
  indigenous, but to include cultivars and
  other non-indigenous plants, including an
  east coast rainforest species, Tristaniopsislaurina (à la the current
  much-objected-to Victorian School Building
  Authority example!)

The Concourse Bushland	The Concourse Green

TO

ENLARGE, CLICK ON A PHOTO
BELOW OF TATTY ASPECTS THAT BLIGHT THE
CONCOURSE GREEN & SHOULD GO.

Tawdry commercialism frames the Green	Disfiguring re-use of an obsolete sign	Gratuitous propaganda on the Green
Garish, brightly illuminated, needless sign clashes with Concourse Green’s qualities.	Graffiti next to a succession of opportunistic real estate agent’s signs	Twee Council sign in 1990s style since abandoned in many other sites.
Estate agents have enjoyed cheap publicity – to the Concourse Green’s disadvantage – since at least 2003.	Estate agent’s signs recently imposed on the Concourse Green	The Concourse Green in 2002, with less of the clutter that has accreted since

South entrance to the Concourse from Reserve Rd: Remove tatty signage disfiguring it, but please DO NOT add a touted ‘Entrance Column’, or other such gimmicky structure.	A rare day, on 27 October 2016, when the south entrance is not disfigured with one or more estate agents’ signs. They mar the Green’s corner, & have been overstaying, since at least 2003.

BCS Inc.
notes that the Green continually has a
disfiguring collection of real estate
agents’ signs
(as easily discerned by far
the largest   print usually
being reserved for their firm’s names) that

ostensibly – but in small print
– advertise current functions and events,
and keep advertising them, sometimes for
over a month after they have occurred. There
appear to be too many signs, present for too
many days of the year, for the exemption in
Clause

52.05.4 of the Bayside Planning Scheme
to apply, so the prohibition in Clause 52.05-10,
Category 4, Section 3 might apply, but it is
not yet being enforced. A less disfiguring
site for these estate agents’ signs is
needed.

Bayside
Council’s Master Plan needs to avoid the
‘consultant’ mentality and tone of Utopia,
and ably mocked in Leunig’s ‘land

of Knodd’.

* 2014 See a
quadricopter view of the Beaumaris

Concourse Car Show. This brief event
worked well, and left no lasting effect
behind it.

* 2010 Concourse

Bushland’s rezoning to Public Park
& Recreation Zone was in the Victoria
Government Gazette on 11
February 2010.

*
2009 The Planning
Minister rezoned the Concourse Bushland after Bayside City Council
unanimously adopted a staff report  for that.

* 2008 BCS
Inc. letter
to Bayside Council
was responded to by Council seeking Concourse
Bushland as a Public Park
& Recreation Zone.

* 2005 Special Meeting
of Bayside
Council resolved

to seek a skateboard ramp site not on Concourse Green.
See 2006 Concourse Plan.

* 2004

Cr Ken Beadle, a BCS
Inc. member, successfully proposed the
rezoning of the Concourse Green to Public Park
& Recreation Zone.

* 2004 A
public petition
– with 1,140 signatures – convinced Bayside City
Council to abandon its planned skateboard
ramp on the Concourse
Green.

* 2004
BCS Inc. call
for protest at Bayside
Council plan for a CONCRETE SKATEBOARD RAMP on

the Concourse Green.

* 2003
BCS Inc. letter
to councillors successfully sought rezoning
of the Concourse Green, and raised the Concourse
Bushland issue.

* 2002 A public petition to Bayside City Council,
with 970 signatures, and a parking survey,
started by Rose Allaway,
successfully opposed using any of the quarter
hectare Concourse Green for
a CAR PARK.
The proposal by a group of Concourse shopkeepers
was for 58% of the Councourse Green to be
converted into a car park.

* The
prelude to and genesis of the Concourse is seen in
the 1944
bushfire map and 1951
and 1963
aerial photographs of its location.