Image: Courtesy of Meat Market
Explore Melbourne’s hidden gems with Open House Melbourne.
One of the city’s most loved events, Open House is annual free event which gives you the chance to get inside buildings not usually open to the public. Each year, over 100 diverse buildings significant to Melbourne’s history are opened up on the last weekend of July.
The Heritage Council is the proud Heritage Partner of Open House Melbourne.
Each year, the most visited buildings are in the Victorian Heritage Register. Visitors to Open House experience how the buildings of our city reflect our culture and reveal stories about the history and development of the city and our state.
In 2020 Open House Melbourne has gone virtual, explore the program here.
Open House Melbourne and the Heritage Council have partnered on a series of videos of prominent Melbournians talking about their favourite buildings, including La Mama Theatre and Hamer Hall. Watch the Melbourne Icons films here.
We have also partnered with Open House to deliver a series of short documentaries on some of Victoria’s most prominent modernist architects and designers. Modern Melbourne highlights the work of Daryl Jackson, Mary Featherston, Peter McIntyre and other greats of the Modernist movement.
Melbourne Design Week 2021
The Heritage Council held a ‘virtual’ event as part of Open House’s Melbourne Design Week Waterfront program in 2021 – celebrating and re-imagining our waterways.
Professor Susan Lawrence led a fascinating talk examining the legacy of Victoria’s goldrush on our rivers and waterways. New research is showing how one hundred years later the environmental disruption of the goldrush continues to shape Victoria’s rivers and floodplains. It has implications for the management of cultural heritage, river remediation programs and debates on how people interact with their environments.
You can find the talk here at ‘Waterfront: Victoria’s Rivers and the Gold Rush’.
This event is part of Waterfront 2021 for Melbourne Design Week, an initiative of the Victorian Government in collaboration with the NGV.
Image: Courtesy of State Library of Victoria, R Daintree, ‘Black Hill Ballarat gold mining’.