Thursday, 4 August 2022

William ‘Bill’ Chandler

Mr HAMER (Box Hill) (10:05): I rise to mourn the passing of Surrey Hills local William ‘Bill’ Chandler OAM. Bill’s impact on both his profession and our local community was profound. An architect and town planner, Bill was chair of the Victorian state urban arts unit in the mid-1980s and a founding member of Urban Design Forum Australia. In the 1990s Bill was appointed chief planner on the Melbourne Docklands development, and he was the driving force behind the Australian Urban Design Awards. In 2014 Bill received an Order of Australia Medal for services to town planning and urban design, and in the 50 years that he lived in Surrey Hills his contributions were just as significant.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Bill helped establish the Surrey Hills Neighbourhood Centre as a community hub and helped organise the early Surrey Hills festivals, an event which continues to this day. Bill was also a prolific writer and publisher. In January 2020 he achieved a rather unique feat of having different letters published in three metropolitan papers all on the same day. Locally he was the editor of the Surrey Hills Neighbourhood News, which was distributed to over 8000 letterboxes six times a year. In more recent times, when the local Leader paper stopped publishing he helped establish an online publication, Eastsider News, to discuss local community issues. As the current editor said to me this week, ‘Whenever we are confronted with anything that needs a bit of judgement about how to handle it, we ask ourselves, “What would Bill say?”’. Bill had a great wit, a fierce intellect and boundless passion. He was a mentor and friend to many. I extend my sympathies to Ros and his children. Vale, Bill Chandler.