HERITAGE BUILDINGS

Heritage Building

Heritage Building

Introduction

Heritage is a relatively new, catch-all term that in recent times has encompassed both the built and the natural world. The word has gained wide international acceptance and usage since 1972, when UNESCO created the World Cultural and Natural Heritage Convention, which Australia signed in 1974. For some decades now more and more countries have vied with each other to get their built and natural heritage sites on the World Heritage List.

But in another sense, there is nothing new about heritage, not least because almost everything designated to have heritage value is older than the present, from rock art and stone churches to the Great Barrier Reef. And while the European occupation of Australia might be just a tad over 220 years old, archaeologists and anthropologists date indigenous settlement back over forty thousand years.

In the 1950s and 1960s National Trusts in each state had little difficulty in identifying places they considered of state and national significance, from churches and sprawling pastoral mansions to the grand houses of the bourgeoisie in the cities. Likewise National Parks associations found it relatively easy to identify natural environments that could be regarded as 'pristine'.

With the rapid increase in scientific knowledge about ecological management and human impacts and with new techniques to measure both the longevity of Indigenous settlement and the impact of Indigenous land management - from hunting to the use of fire - scholars came to see that very few environments could be regarded as 'untouched' wilderness. In somewhat similar fashion, when scholars from a variety of disciplines came to study a building or a site, they would note changes to both the use of the place and its fabric over time. This meant that simplistic arguments for either built or natural heritage could no longer rest on claims that used words like 'pristine', 'untouched' or even un-altered.

From Convict Structures To Erecting Monuments

For most of the time since Captain Arthur Phillip claimed what we now call 'Australia' for the British Crown, this continent has been regarded and regarded itself as a 'new' society. The early British settlers, from the convicts to the naval and military, came to a landscape not only without conventional buildings but without that hallmark of ownership in Great Britain and Europe, the fence. Here was a fenceless society, one in which Aboriginal tribes clearly congregated in particular places, but as contemporary observers noticed, did not recognize private land ownership, nor did they separate out landscapes by fixed boundaries. They appeared to live and move through the landscape.

Ironically, the early canvas structures that most of the new arrivals first lived in were less resilient than the wide variety of dwelling places created by indigenous people, but few remarked on this at the time. The desire to create, in an orderly manner, European patterns of settlement, saw the early surveyors lay out street plans and building blocks in the port cities and allocate them to a variety of uses, from military barracks and commissariat stores, to stables and ...