Heritage

Heritage refers to places, features or objects in both the natural and built environment recognised for their historical, architectural, cultural, aesthetic, scientific and social significance such as buildings, landscapes and archeological sites. Heritage also includes intangible values such as cultural practices, stories, traditions, folklore and other knowledge inherited over generations.

Why is Heritage Important?

Heritage protection through the planning system is important for nurturing community identity, history and traditions. It fosters a sense of place and continuity across generations and offers educational, cultural, economic and environmental benefits by safeguarding special places and stories for future appreciation. 

These are places that are worth keeping because they enrich our lives - by helping us to understand the past; by contributing to the richness of the present environment; and because we expect them to be of value to future generations (The Burra Charter).

What is the Heritage Overlay?

The role of councils is to identify and protect places of local heritage significance through administration of planning schemes. A heritage place can include a building, group of buildings, precinct, structure, tree, garden, space or other element and associated land that has a demonstrated heritage significance and is listed in the Heritage Overlay. The Heritage Overlay is a control applied in Victorian planning schemes to ensure heritage places are conserved and enhanced, and that development does not adversely affect their significance.

You can look up your property on Vicplan to see if it's impacted by a Heritage Overlay in the Hume Planning Scheme or if it is nearby to a place of heritage significance. If you'd like to know whether a potential use or development of a site on or near a heritage place requires a planning permit, please contact Council’s Statutory Planning team on 9205 2200 or visit planning permits.

You can also find out more details about the processes that protect local heritage in the State Government’s Local Heritage Guidelines: Victorian Local Heritage Guidelines.

Hume Heritage Documents

A range of documents have been used to inform the protection and ongoing management of heritage in Hume. The table below outlines these documents and their purpose.

The library below contains heritage documents that are available to download. The search bar can help to locate specific documents in our collection of citations and statements of significance which are large collections with hundreds of files. Using the same naming convention in your search query will give better results (for example "HO1").