A CHILTERN resident who spent half his life advocating for the town’s heritage has been give a special posthumous award.
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Rex Fuge has been granted a heritage gold award as part of the 2015 Indigo Heritage Awards.
The award was presented at the discretion of the council’s heritage advisory committee and the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) North East branch.
Its aim was to celebrate and acknowledge Mr Fuge’s enormous contribution “as heritage warrior and advocate, kind and thoughtful friend and mentor to many”.
Mr Fuge died suddenly at his Chiltern home last September, aged 79.
He was most closely with the Chiltern Athenaeum Museum, where he was chairman and chief historian for close to 34 years.
Mr Fuge was a long-time heritage advisory committee member and, in 2005, received a Medal of the Order of Australia for his service to Chiltern, through heritage, tourism groups and local government.
“Heritage and history is something I’ve loved all my life, starting from my own family history to that of Cornishtown and later Chiltern,” he said in 2005.
This was one of several categories announced under the heritage awards.
The Wicked Villa Luxury Accommodation in Rutherglen took out the creative use of a heritage place award for the two-storey villa created out of a century-old derelict red brick building.
The award for a new work or development within a heritage place was taken out by the Nam Shing Lane seven-lot housing subdivision in Beechworth.
The Chiltern Goods Shed took out the award for restoration of a heritage place.
This site has turned a derelict railway goods shed built in 1875 into a multipurpose community building.
The award for specialist heritage trade skills was given to Vincent Webb for the design and construction of the Carringbush homestead at Beechworth’s Baarmutha Winery.
Rutherglen Historical Society research officers David and Martha Valentine took out the open heritage award for their guide to “visiting the Anzacs at rest” in Rutherglen’s Carlyle Cemetery.
The judges said their booklet was “full of facts, figures, maps and anecdotes” about those who served in World War I.
The individual heritage advocacy award was given to Judy Dixon for her “dedication and application” to the Chiltern Athenaeum Museum over more than a decade.
That involved transcribing thousands of pages from the Federal Standard and Ovens and Murray newspapers, and for helping produce books, publications and family histories.