The planning history of the Tullamarine Airport: 1920-1970

© 2015 Dr. Arun ChanduThis thesis documents the social and planning outcomes of an airport at Tullamarine, Melbourne, Australia, between 1920 and 1970. The Tullamarine Airport was Australia’s first purpose built jetport designed with the most modern facilities. High-speed turnouts, aerobridges, a purpose-built freeway and underground hydrant installations were at the forefront of international airport planning. What made Tullamarine’s design truly visionary in a global sense was its ability to expand, and secondly its city-like features, which made it self-sufficient. Tullamarine was not just a staging-place between air and land, but was conceived as a destination in its own right, an attraction to generate income from non-aviation uses. It was also protected from suburbia by a large buffer zone and land-use zoning. While some of these features may have existed at other airports it was Tullamarine that put these many facets together into one major international airport for the first time - a modern day equivalent of the airport-planning concept known as an Airport City. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. The first is to document the aviation history leading to, and including the development of the Tullamarine Airport. The facilities and Airport City nature of Tullamarine are compared and contrasted with major international airports of the 1960s. Tullamarine was the proto-Airport City that delineated the construction of new airports in Australia and New Zealand from the mid-1960s to the current day. The second purpose is to assess the planning and social outcomes of Tullamarine’s construction during the 1960s. Tullamarine’s land-use zoning and buffer zones were designed to protect the airport from encroaching suburbia and suburban dwellers from noise, thus preventing situations seen at older, land-locked pre-war airports such as Essendon in Melbourne and Mascot in Sydney. Zoning and buffer zones were revolutionary to Australian airport planning during the 1960s and these instruments altered the development of the surrounding suburbs. Some large housing projects were prevented, avoiding residential estates from being built close to Tullamarine’s boundaries. Unforeseen loopholes with Victoria’s state planning laws almost saw the construction of a housing development at Tullamarine’s doorstep while state public housing authorities attempted to construct a housing estate under the flightpath of a runway. Tullamarine’s construction also invoked community protest and activism, but overall, its opening was well received by the general public and media as an icon of the jet age and modernist ingenuity