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Not your house. Not your land.
IPA REVIEW ARTICLE
Normally, if your house is heritage-listed, you have a problem if you want to knock it down, or renovate it. Robert Masters of Gunbower in northern Victoria is happy to leave the home his great-grandfather built in 1863 exactly as it is.
So where is the problem? The problem is Parks Victoria, which is evicting the Masters family from both the 1863 heritage-listed house, and a second 1950s residence.
The houses sit on a two hectare site, named Masters Landing, which was the main port for the local Murray River paddle-steamer trade in the 1860s. While it is true that the properties are on crown land (indeed they are now part of the Gunbower State Forest) it seems a bit late in the piece for Parks Victoria to be enforcing the view that ‘there's no authority for people to occupy public land.'
The very fact that another arm of Government, the Department of Sustainability and Environment, has decided to list the old house on its heritage register, does tend to suggest the family have been good custodians. As Robert Masters says, ‘the old place is still liveable ... we've always looked after it.'
According to the Weekly Times three generations of the Masters family ‘have turned their ancestral home into an oasis surrounded by a lush garden containing 150 rose varieties, ancient fruit trees and neat rows of chook pens and well-maintained buildings' and also raised 28 children in the old house.
There is some dispute about whether a lease signed in 1987 can be extended to the next generation of the Masters family, but any sensible conception of property rights would assess that the Masters have a better claim to the site than Parks Victoria does.
No-one could seriously believe that a Government authority will take better care of the land and historic building, than the Masters family have for the past 146 years.
And as a bonus, letting the Masters stay will also save taxpayers the $30,000 the family have been offered for moving costs.