By NOEL MURPHY
GEELONG’S Johnstone Park has a colourful history as a dam, a swamp full of reeking animal carcasses, the site of ferneries and sunken gardens – it even hosted notorious bushranger Captain Melville’s Christmas Day capture in 1852.
The park changed a mite over the years. Fine architecture has risen above and within it and continues to do so, while subterranean brick-lined tunnels course below its green carpet.
Foliage, trees and plants have come and gone with the passage of time.
Now Geelong heritage buff and councillor Tony Ansett wants restored for the public a forgotten aspect of the park’s elegant past – buried more than 50 years ago: a grand 20-step marble staircase that once served as the Gheringhap St’s entrance to Johnstone Park.
The staircase remains hidden beneath the eastern section of the park, which has been filled and raised to street level, alongside a similarly low ornamental garden now levelled and paved to make a pedestrian concourse beside Geelong Town Hall.
“We need to bring them back,” Cr Ansett said.
“We have to get them out and rein state them, perhaps further west on the path through the park. It’s very steep and needs steps.”
Cr Ansett also wanted to reinstate two Medici urns at the bottom of the stairs, which were gifted to the city then resited within the park.
“The Johnstone Park depression used to be much larger than what it is now. The paving beside city hall used to be a beautiful sunken garden – that’s been filled in, too.”
Cr Ansett, who holds council’s heritage portfolio, has been campaigning for the restoration of lost Geelong historical monuments and icons to places of public prominence.
“We’ve got to bring them back, they’re our heritage.”
