The first of Melbourne’s abandoned hospital is the former Royal Dental Hospital, located opposite the Haymarket roundabout on the corner of Flemington Road and Royal Parade. Opened in 1963, the cream brick and aluminium curtain walled building is a typical example of hospital architecture of the period, despite the plans having been drawn up a decade earlier. Decommissioning of the former Royal Dental Hospital came in 2003, when it moved to a new site on Swanston Street, opposite Melbourne University.

As for the empty building, it remained empty and contaminated with asbestos until December 2008, when the State Government announced they would spend $10.5 million to demolish the building, making way for the Parkville Comprehensive Cancer Centre. Demolition commenced in February 2010 with the building gone by June 2010.

The next hospital in Melbourne to be abandoned was the Royal Women’s. Located on the corner of Swanston and Grattan Street in Carlton, the hospital has operated on this site since 1858, with the main block seen today having admitted their first patients in 1968, with the official opening of the ’3AW Community Service Board Block’ coming in 1972.

Replacement of the Royal Women’s was announced in 2005, with the hospital to be rebuilt down the street on a new site beside the Royal Melbourne Hospital on Flemington Road. The new site opened in 2008, with the former hospital site in Carlton having sat empty since that time, the future of the site being unknown.

2011 saw the creation of Melbourne’s third abandoned hospital: the former Royal Children’s on Flemington Road. Opened on the Parkville site beside Royal Park in 1963, plans for a new hospital on a site next door to the existing one were announced in 2005.

Construction work on the new Royal Children’s commenced in 2007, with the new site opening in late 2011. Currently empty, the majority of the old hospital will be demolished and the site returned to the parklands, the exception being two of the newer buildings – the entrance foyer on Flemington Road, and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute building beside it.

All up, three brand new hospitals have opened in Melbourne in less than a decade, with three old ones having been closed. Initially I thought “why spend millions building replacements for existing hospitals when we can’t even pay nurses properly”, but when I consider the topic it a little more, a 50 year old building was never designed for modern health care practices, and would be rather depressing for patients.

Further reading

• Timelapse of construction at the new Royal Children’s Hospital
• Timelapse of demolition of the former Royal Children’s Hospital

Lion dances.

Firecrackers.

Dragon dances.

And the Dai Loong dragon procession.

However, the more profitable part of the festival are the commercial stalls: some are just selling food or drink, while others are putting on the hard sell. First up is the Commonwealth Bank trying to drum up business from the Chinese community.

An industry that wasn’t around a few years ago was mobile phone carriers: today companies like LycaMobile and Lebara promote their cheap overseas calls to many migrant communities, pitching themselves as a more convenient alternative to prepaid calling cards for those wanting to save their pennies.

As for those people with a bit more money to spend, Melbourne’s property developers are more than happy to speak to you. The most well known is Central Equity: who have spent almost 20 years trying to get Melbourne’s Chinese population to invest in their cookie cutter apartment towers located all over Southbank.

Not to be left out, “Melbourne’s Inner City Apartment Specialists” were also out looking for potential clients.

And down the road another property developer is spruiking their latest apartment complex to potential investors.

During my journey along Russell Street I found another half-dozen property developers drumming up business: since they turn up each year I am assuming they manage to chase up a bit of interest.

It’s been that way for decades, as this 1960 photo of Flinders Street Station from the Herald and Weekly Times collection shows.

How about electrical faults bringing the network to a halt in the middle of peak hour? (The Age, 7 November 2008)

That isn’t new either – including the passengers escaping stranded trains by walking along the tracks. (The Argus 12 March 1954):

And the old chestnut of level crossings delaying motorists? (The Age 29 December 2011)

People have been complaining about that one for years as well. (The Argus 30 March 1950)

So who knows what the next 50 years will bring to Melbourne’s railway network?

Manual checking of tickets dates back to the start of railways, and in the City Loop things were no different. With staff required to sit by the station exit and eyeball the ticket of each passenger who walked past, this photograph from the Weston Langford collection shows the facilities on the northern concourse of Parliament Station in 1985, where passengers were funnelled past a half dozen ticket checking booths.

With the reliance on the Mark I Eyeball, staff were expected to read the fare type and expiry date of each ticket in the seconds it took a passenger to walk past, presumably leaving these manual checks easy to circumvent by those wanting to scam a free ride. The system was also labour intensive at the front end, with passengers needing to line up at the ticket window each morning, asking for their “return to Richmond” or “weekly to the city” tickets, issued on a small piece of date stamped cardboard.

The next advance in public transport ticketing was the magnetic stripe card, where tickets are issued by coin operated vending machines, and checked by automated barriers at the entrance and exit of stations. The London Underground experimented with magnetic stripe ticketing as far back as 1964, and by the 1970s the majority of new metro networks around the world were equipped with similar systems.

Back in Melbourne we were a laggard on the automated ticketing front, with it taking until the mid-1990s introduction of Metcard to give local transport operators a less labour intensive method of collecting fares. The contract for Metcard was signed with ERG Group in 1994, with equipment rolled out between 1996 and 1998, and full revenue operation commencing in May 1998. As for the remaining paper tickets, these hung around for a few more years, the last ones being withdrawn from sale at the start of 2002.

Here we see the Metcard barriers at Flagstaff Station during a lull in passengers in morning peak, with passengers required to insert their tickets into the barriers on entry to the station, as well as on exit.

We now reach the current state of the art in ticketing – the contactless smartcard. Pioneered by Hong Kong’s Octopus card system that was launched in 1997, the 2000s saw an explosion in the number of similar systems being installed around the world. The main advantage of the new technology is that they work through wallets and bags, speeding up the ticket checking process by eliminating the need for tickets to be inserted into barriers or validators.

Melbourne made a start on our smartcard system in 2005 when the Kamco consortium won the contract to develop what became known as the Myki system. Covering both metropolitan Melbourne and country Victoria, work started on the rollout in 2007, with limited public operations starting in 2008. It took until December 2009 for the commencement of Myki operation on suburban trains, with the rollout to the rest of the metropolitan area following six months later, with the end of Metcard sales coming in December 2012.

The third generation of ticket checking in the City Loop is the dedicated Myki barriers that have so far only appeared at a limited number of locations: this example is at Melbourne Central at the Swanston Street end:

The big advantage of these new gates over the previous Metcard barriers is the location of the Myki reader: located on the top of the barrier for maximum convenience, the card reader also has the same screen as seen on every other piece of equipment, allowing passengers to see their balance when touching on or off.

As for the existing Metcard barriers and their slow Myki scanners, there is a reason they are nicknamed “frankbarriers”: they are just an interim step in the rollout, and will be eventually replaced by the proper Myki barriers.

Further reading

• Myki history on Wikipedia: timeline of the development and rollout so far.
• The unofficial Metcard chronology: from 1996 until present.
• Victorian Public Transport Ticketing: everything you ever wanted to know about the systems that preceded Metcard.

From the RACV corporate website:

In accordance with By-Law 6.7 of the Election By-Laws of Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) Ltd, the Returning Officer has declared that the following persons have been elected (in order the candidates were elected):

By Ordinary (Club) and Service Members

Ms S Sheed

Mr J M S Slattery

This result was confirmed by resolution at the Annual General Meeting held on Tuesday 15 November 2011.

As a refresher, the candidates were:

• Suzanna Sheed is a lawyer from Shepparton, an incumbent RACV board member since 2003, and a RACV Club member (8 years) and RACV Service member (35 years).
• Thomas Houlihan is a farm owner and property manager from near Horsham, and a RACV Service member (23 years).
• Marcus Wigan is a transport academic from Melbourne, and doesn’t appear to be a RACV member.
• John Slattery is a farm owner and company director from Geelong, an incumbent RACV board member since 2011, and a RACV Club and Service member.
• John Bailey runs a real estate agency in Wangaratta, and is a RACV Club member and a RACV Service member (26 years).
• Fred Tonelli is an architect and sessional lecture from Melbourne, and a RACV Service member.

So as you can see, the two incumbents have been returned for another year. I wonder what 2012 will hold?

Most people walk right past the building without a second thought, but if you stop and look through the windows, one finds an abandoned foyer covered with years of dust. So how does an entire skyscraper lie empty for over a decade?

Communications House was constructed in 1966 for the Postmaster-General’s Department (PMG), it originally consisted of a single office tower, with curtain walls on three sides, a red brick elevator core on the western face of the building, and a neighbouring building butting up against it from the north. This Wolfgang Sievers photograph shows the William Street frontage of the building soon after completion.

While this photograph from the same set shows the south-west facade, including the elevator core.

At an unknown date a second tower of the same external design was constructed on a site to the west of the first one, with the two towers linked at all levels by a brick skybridge crossing Guests Lane.

With the split of the Postmaster-General’s Department into separate postal and telecommunications departments in 1975, Communications House became the property of the Australian Telecommunications Commission, better known as Telecom Australia, and later Telstra. The telco remained the main tenant of the building until their departure in 1994, having moved to their new 47-storey high office complex on Exhibition and Lonsdale Streets.

Singaporean billionaire Tay Tee Peng purchased the building soon after for $12 million, and then spent $10 million refurbishing it, but with little success in attracting tenants. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s Communications House lay empty, with the next owner being an Asia based investor with the registered company name Memo Corporation, who purchased it at an unknown date.

Of the refurbishment work carried out, tthe most obvious work was the glass foyer facing William Street, which differs to the sparse plaza seen earlier in the 1960s photographs. As for the rest of the work, it did not appear very successful, with work being left half completed.

Down on the ground floor of the Little Bourke Street tower a tea room was established, only to lie abandoned for a number of years.

Next door to that was a site office, featuring a desk with a crappy old IBM computer, and what looks to be a 2001 calendar on the far wall. I hope they haven’t left their lights on for 10 years.

It took until January 2011 for something to finally happen on the site, when it was sold for $45 million to Hengyi Australia, a local subsidiary of a Chinese property developer. Using existing plans developed by Bruce Henderson Architects, the developer plans to convert the building into more than 530 home offices, each between 40 and 70 square metres in size, some with balconies.

With the development known as “The William”, in September 2011 work started the construction of a display suite and sales office inside the William Street foyer, with the rest of the empty lobbing being covered with full height red curtains.

This is what the developers intend the lobby to look like….

And as for the outside:

The architecture geeks are rather happy with the transformation – Communications House is considered one of the ugliest buildings in the Melbourne CBD, so even a refurbishment is something to cheer for.

Further reading

• Sales brochure for ‘The William’
• $200m plan for derelict city site (Herald Sun, November 2011)
• Melbourne office building sold for $45 million (AFR, January 2011)
• Melbourne Ghost Office Sells to Chinese Investor For $45 Million (March 2011)

And over in Adelaide – bus 1337:

Don’t get the joke?

• Melbourne’s train carriages are numbered 1M through 966M, and 1001T through 2572T,
• Bus companies usually number their fleets from #1 upwards,
• Wikipedia has the origins of “Leet”

First off, we have a bus billboard panel promoting NAB’s “honest” credit cards: the message on the side says “An honest credit card wouldn’t buy a concession ticket with a student card from 2002“. Fare evasion has been a big issue in Melbourne for years, and this advertisement piggybacks off the issue in a positive way.

My second example of an advertising message being tailored for the medium is this campaign by Garnier Men’s skin care products, which appears inside trams. Like NAB the advertising agency behind it has taken a playful approach, telling consumers to don’t sweat the small stuff when they encounter one of the small pitfalls encountered in their day to day lives. Unlike NAB, this particular ad condones fare evasion, using the message “5 cents short on your fare: don’t sweat the small stuff“. Somewhat coincidentally there is a Metlink sticker on the window below, with the anti-fare evasion message “No change is no excuse“.

I’ve since been told second hand that the photo above did the rounds of the Metlink offices, resulting in a three way bunfight between Yarra Trams, Metlink and Garnier as to the appropriateness of this onboard advertising campaign. I wonder if Metlink will send NAB and their advertising agency a muffin basket for their more positive message?

Further reading

This isn’t the first example of badly placed adverts on public transport: at Flinders Street Station there have been car advertisements telling train passengers “Always get a seat”, and in The Age advertisements for new train timetables have appeared on the same page of an article detailing who loses out in the said changes.

Located next door to the Myer Emporium on the south-east corner of Elizabeth and Lonsdale Streets, across from St Francis’ Church, the site was originally occupied by a four storey stone building. This photo from the State Library of Victoria dates from 1959, and shows the view east down Lonsdale Street.

Plans for Myer House were floated in the 1970s, with this artists impression dating from 1973 – thiss time we are looking south down Elizabeth Street.

Work started soon after, with this 1975 photo by Wolfgang Sievers showing construction well underway, with the stone coloured concrete cladding moving slowly up the tower.

This undated photo by Jeffery Coles shows the building after it was completed, showing the “M” logo atop the stark white tower, and the “Myer House” lettering on the brown granite podium walls. Back at ground level the shopping arcade was managed by Myer, with a doorway linking it to their adjacent Lonsdale Street department store, and a vehicle ramp descended from Lonsdale Street into a loading dock for the store.

By the time the late 1990s had rolled around Myer had moved out of their namesake building, with their store support offices having to the upper levels of the Lonsdale Street department store building, as well as the Coles Myer “deathstar” on Toorak Road at Tooronga.

With the building otherwise empty the building was sold off, with the new owner converting the office building into an apartment tower by Q4 of 2002 for Somerset Serviced Residences. From the exterior not much changed:

• The outside was painted dark grey with light beige stripes down each corner,
• Small balconies were cut into the eastern and western faces of the tower,
• A third level of carparking was added above the previous upper level deck.

Meanwhile the bland building still dominates Elizabeth Street.

Another decade on and Myer has now completely withdrawn from the city block, having sold the Lonsdale Street building and moved their department store into a refurbished building on Bourke Street. All that will remain of the heritage listed Lonsdale Street store will be the facades on Lonsdale and Little Bourke Streets, with the new owners Colonial First State Global Asset Management currently bulldozing the rest of the block to build a new shopping complex called “The Emporium”.

The demolition job is a story for another day…

First off is a photo from December 1947, showing both office and operational staff heading out of the main gate at knock off time. In the background is the original power station at Yallourn, with an array of short chimneys belching coal dust into the air, in the days when filtration devices were extremely primitive.

Fast forward 60 years, we are at the same location but the scene is very different. The power station was decommissioned in 1989 and was listed on the Victorian Heritage Register in 1994, but due to the amount of asbestos inside it was demolished between 1997 and 1999. All that remains on the site today is the concrete foundations, a gatehouse to nowhere, and the former administration building.

This 1961 photo shows the extent of the original complex at its peak (you can find the full sized version here), with the main gate being to the middle right: before demolition the power station had consisted of four separate units: ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’ and ‘E’, with the ‘A’ station having been demolished a number of years earlier.

As for the administration building, it was built in 1922 in the inter-war Academic Classical style, the two storey “Yallourn Production Centre” building features a portico with giant order Ionic columns, and was designed by the SECV architectural department under the direction of chief architect AR La Gersch. With privatisation of the power station the building was sold in 1996 and is now used as a pub, with the building being listed on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Further reading

• Former Yallourn Power Station Adminstrative Building: entry H1054 on the Victorian Heritage Register.
• Virtual Yallourn: more photos of the old Yallourn power station.