The City of Melbourne has ordered that we must immediately paint over the artwork displayed on premises 290 DRUMMOND STREET CARLTON, (our potential site for a community based café) due to an outdated, unclear and imbalanced piece of policy framework; regarding heritage / heritage overlay areas, written by state & local planning councils in 2009.

 Because of this seemingly archaic policy, our heritage color based, contemporary style art piece (loved by the community) will be painted over with a standard miserable ‘suit the street’ dark grey!

The policy framework states its purpose being:  “to ensure that the development does not adversely affect the significance of heritage places.”  I’m not sure how a timely planned out, up-to-date, culturally significant & extremely well executed piece of art, can be deemed to be pillaging, the before painted, worst house in the street, of its historical significance.

If anything this ‘piece’ creates our current history, so when we walk down the street with our grandkids in years to come we can see our own past, instead of holding onto some passé façade; fading into the mix of daunting grey apartment blocks and office buildings filling up this ‘historically significant’ area.’

In closing, History is not stored in the plain layers of paint that cover a building, history is nurtured and flourish’s through the stories from the people of the community, viewed in photos/videos, written in books and told through artworks like this one.

To take this away would be nothing short of a crime when weighed up against the suggested infringements of this planning policy.

We thank you for taking the time to read and sign this petition and hopefully with a successful outcome, we can laugh about it over coffee and some yummy grub at our homely café.

 To show your support visit: 

https://www.facebook.com/savethesteez

Sincerely

Chris Glouftsis

thehomesteez@gmail.com