Schools, shops, sporting clubs and community groups filled out the town’s everyday life. Residents had places to work, grow things, meet and belong.
The expanding open-cut mine later led to the town’s closure and removal in the early 1980s. Residents moved elsewhere, and many houses were relocated. Former residents continued to gather at reunions and preserve photographs and records. Homes from Yallourn stood in other towns, still carrying something of the place they came from.
In the Yallourn Botanic Garden mark, a cooling tower becomes the trunk of a tree. The Y opens into a canopy, with bands of colour branching outward from the curved industrial base.
Monash Square sits at its centre. Its outline holds an oval and radiating paths, recalling the layout of the town. White divisions continue through the branches as roads, garden paths and the veins of a leaf. The shape of the planned town becomes the structure of a growing tree.
The B and G stand beside the Y, drawing on the arrangement of initials on a Yallourn sporting jumper. People wore their town’s identity when they represented it on the sporting field. In the Garden’s mark, small leaves grow through those letters.
The Yallourn Botanic Garden carries forward the ambition for industry, nature and human life to flourish together. In its mark, the cooling tower remains at the base of the tree.