Though most listings of the heritage invoke the language of democracy and aspire to
some kind of representativeness, the elitist values of the heritage consultants usually
show through. ‘We want to ensure that examples... of structures and remnants of each
definable social group in each period, representing all important historical trends are
included in the Register’, remarked David Yencken in 1981, though he conceded that ‘the
search for what is representative is far from complete’. The authors of South Australia’s
Heritage, an illustrated listing of that state’s Heritage Register claimed, with more
justification, to include ‘not only architectural masterpieces of the past and present, but
the humble along with the great, the recent with remote’.
One way of attempting to conserve a more democratic heritage is to collect items in
accordance with the main themes of Australian social history, or the social history of a
specific locality. Particular attention would thus be given to the identification of sites or
buildings illustrative of important phases of Australia’s development or of the way of life
of representative groups of people’ including the humble as well as the great and famous.
In such a scheme heritage items would be selected in accordance with a general
understanding of social history rather than the social history being introduced to provide
a background for items collected on an ad hoc basis. Such an approach is more likely to
attract social historians than architects, to whom the individual site or building, and its
architectural quality, are paramount. Even the locals, who may have absorbed something
of the deferential culture of the National Trust, would usually sooner, preserve a local
squatter’s homestead than the soldier settlers’ cottages and derelict mining sites created
by their own forebears.
Creating a more representative heritage, however, is unlikely to satisfy some critics of the
movement. Indeed it is the very tendency of the idea of ‘national heritage’ to subsume
and obliterate sectional relics and loyalties that is at the basis of their objections. Tony
Bennett, for example, draws attention to the ways in which the National Estate and the
National Museum, by incorporating relics of Aboriginal and white Australia, may
unwittingly ‘back project the discourse of multiculturalism into the mists of time’. How
seriously one takes this objection may depend less on the rhetoric of those institutions
than their day to day practice and on how much more seriously one considers the
alienation of those relics from their former custodians implied in the process of
preservation itself.
The democratically-inclined social historian, therefore, will be concerned that heritage is
not only representative of the people, and conserved for the people, but that it should also
be identified and conserved by the people. Although the public is constantly exhorted by
the experts to ‘cherish’ and ‘nurture’ the heritage, the job of identifying, classifying and
ensuring it largely belongs to the coterie of heritage experts— architects, historians,
archaeologists and planners. The heritage business is subject to a constant tension
between the demands for bureaucratic consistency and impersonal expertise, on the one
hand, and for popular participation and local autonomy on the other. Since the days of the
Green Bans, the balance has swung heavily towards the rule of the expert. There is now a
disconcerting gap between the arcane language and specialised concerns of the
professional guardians of the heritage and its lay inheritors. Sometimes, it is true, the
conservation consultant simply offers a scholarly rationale for aesthetic or historical
judgements which the lay person makes more intuitively. But buildings often seem to be
selected in accordance with antiquarian or scholarly criteria unrelated to the concerns of
the public at large. When heritage consultants come to town they always inspect the
buildings, but they do not always consult the locals. There is a danger, therefore, that the
buildings they identify will not necessarily reflect the community’s own sense of its past.
In historic Beechworth its historian Tom Griffiths argues the city-based experts of the
National Trust and the tourists who followed them to the town were often oblivious of the
town’s own sense of identity and community.
Just as the countryside became defined earlier this century as a purely visual
phenomenon — to be viewed but rarely understood — so, too, had the past.
Beechworth’s local past, become a thing to be visited and photographed, but seen
as something quite separate from the people living there. In serving the city so, the
country becomes constrained to be the past. City-dwellers who want to see
‘progress’ where they live, arrive in a country town and lament the careless
destruction of quaint old things. Although they are ready to enter into debates about
how the countryside looks, there is less concern about disappearing lifestyles or
about existing relationships or feelings in that town.
Griffiths may exaggerate the gulf between ‘city’ and ‘country’ attitudes, and
underestimate the degree to which the townsfolk, eager for tourist custom, collude with
the outsiders in the transformation of their town into ‘history’. The locals’ sense of their
past should surely not to be regarded as sacrosanct from the more impersonal, but
illuminating interpretation of the outside heritage expert.