Coburn Collection – Ballarat Heritage Festival

For more than 30 years, a remarkable legacy lay forgotten in a shed roof, bundled in garbage bags and packed into dozens of cardboard tubes. Inside was a rare and extensive archive of architectural drawings by one of Ballarat’s finest interwar architects, Herbert Leslie Coburn (1891–1956).

With the help of dedicated volunteers from the Ballarat Branch of the National Trust, the fragile drawings were carefully unrolled and flattened after decades in storage. This painstaking work prepared the collection for digitisation, ensuring that this important piece of Ballarat’s heritage would be preserved. The dusty, brittle and torn pages revealed a magical window into the city’s architectural past.

The Coburn Collection, now digitised by the City of Ballarat, showcases the full breadth of Coburn’s design talent, from modest homes to grand two‑storey residences, as well as elegant commercial and civic buildings. The collection invites you to follow Coburn’s creative journey, from rough pencil sketches through to exquisite final watercolour renderings, in addition to his architectural medal, survey equipment and sketch books.

Among the drawings is a particularly fascinating discovery: Coburn’s ambitious proposal for a new civic centre, spanning two entire blocks of Sturt Street and incorporating a Town Hall and art gallery.