Thank you to the National Trust for this wonderful invitation to be here to talk to you today. The honor is mine. Let me add my congratulations to all the nominees today for the awards. I am delighted to be here to bathe in the reflected light of your achievements!

I’d like to start by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the Country we are meeting on today. We recognize their continuing connection to the land and waters and thank them for protecting this coastline and its ecosystems since time immemorial. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people present today.

Unless you’ve been consciously not paying attention (which is entirely possible), I think you’d have to admit, we are living in “a time of energized and rapid change” for all things heritage. I’d like to make the claim today, that in fact history, or rather the way we engage with and understand our history and therefore construct what it is that we mean when we say ‘heritage’, is young once again. The last time was probably it the mid-Victorian Period, where it seems an enthusiasm for revivalist styles was untamable! And we can see what Architectural chaos ensued…! But today, in the words of Page and Mason in their book, Giving Preservation a History, “Heritage is everywhere -in the news, in the movies, in the market-place, in everything from galaxies to genes.”[1]

That should make all of us in this room very busy people. We are stewards of an important dimension of our national (and personal) identity that is in the process of being re-imagined, and that I believe is full of vitality and opportunity. This is indeed a moment of profound importance I suggest, to those of us who are invested in our Australian built, cultural and natural heritage. And that mean all Australians.

To make this point I want to just touch on three areas that are newly intersecting, or perhaps re-connecting, with all things Heritage in a way that I think is both re-energizing the term, as much as creating incredible opportunities for our field and our shared cultural project.

The first is hinted in my introduction; the dawning appreciation of indigenous perspectives of country, of care, of design that embraces a fundamentally different understanding of time and responsibility, that our acknowledgment of country reminds us of. If you think about it, the inclusion of First Australian perspectives in this country’s heritage register, extends our scholarly field of reference from 230 years to more than 80,000 years. That’s a 60,000% increase in the field of scholarly enquiry for us to think about. And while the enormity of this time span is difficult to comprehend, this fact alone should be enough to convince us of what we already know, that there is just so much to gain by embracing our indigenous heritage and all it has to teach us.

Then there is the growing partnership of heritage with the issues of sustainability and the science of climate change. Buckminster Fuller famously once quipped, “We are called to be the architects of the future, not it victims”… how’s that working out?

Sustainability and Heritage are a critical alliance that serves us all, and a potentially super-powered union of voices, that is only recently really beginning to be heard. Being interested in architecture, it is not lost on me that (as if often quoted) “the most sustainable building is the one that is already built”. That quote from Carl Elephante (Past president of the AIA) was empirically supported from a sustainability point of view over a decade ago, by The American National Trust of Historic Preservations’ “green lab” and their report “The Greenest Building” from 2011. But what has been less discussed are the implications for heritage and in my mind the important new partnerships that are required to evolve in this common space. So for the first time, science and the economics of building is telling us that to build a new building is not as good for us as it is to reuse an old one.

The 2021 Pritzker winners, Lacatan and Vassal Architects, have bought this very issue into the brightest spotlight for architecture, through their work in restoration particularly in the realm of social housing, a very challenging area for architectural innovation, on the outskirts of Paris. Their statement that any demolition is effectively evil, while melodramatic for sure, certainly makes the point and inspires, not just rationally, but I think through the strength of its passion and commitment. The climate science was in in the 70’s, the technology ready in the 2000’s, and 20 years later it’s now a question of hearts and culture rather than rationality that seems to be at stake. The change we absolutely need to effect is no longer a rational issue, as much as it is emotional.

And I wonder what new skills an architect needs, to drive change in this space. I certainly see some excellent clues in the nominated projects around us today! Personally, I don’t think its technology… I think maybe it’s the role of the architect once again, to think differently, to articulate new cultural / environmental possibilities and forms as alternatives to the dead end of development we find ourselves in at the moment.

And for Heritage specifically, perhaps while our Burra Charter has served us incredibly well since 1979, perhaps given our current climate, it is time for an update to explicitly connect sustainability and heritage unambiguously within those pages to the advantage of both.

It is this coming together of the absolute need for a far more sustainable approach to our built environment, coupled with a renewed investment in heritage practice and scholarship that I am perhaps most excited by…  what this union will bring for us all, professionals and public alike, is to me the most progressive edge of design at the moment. And I think designers and architects working in this space are only just getting going… and it’s about time because of course, if you take this perspective as I do, that makes our Built Heritage no longer an issue of fussy or contested historic preservation as such, but one of survival.  

The last point to make here is the issue of media and communications that have with few exceptions been only gingerly embraced by the heritage community. There seems to be a “Grand Canyon” of opportunity here. Good scholarship does take time, but with official communication on the defensive and untrusted, and too slow to voice positions and embrace the changes happening around us, there is an organic ground-swell of public voices entering into the fray on social media and public broadcast media of all kinds for perhaps the first time that is really animating this space and these conversations about heritage with a whole new energy. From community groups like Beaumaris Modern to a general surge in “Ruin Porn”, (more tastefully known as beautiful pictures of crumbling buildings) on Instagram, a public fascination with heritage and new ways in which it is being engaged is well and truly on the rise. (…and I wont bore you with the stella ratings for a certain TV show airing on ABC i-view at the moment to make my point!).

What this represents to me, and in fact the reason I was so keen to do Restoration Australia is that it is a way to get a little bit of the potential of design, the understanding of our built environment into the living rooms and conversations of Australians every week. It’s a way to enliven and advocate for our built heritage in an everyday kind of way, not just in a dusty hardcover book kind of way. I want to make heritage and architecture accessible. I can only see enormous benefit in engaging, informing and activating our audience as it were, through extending the invitation to them to be a part of the conversation.

…

If there is the possibility of a silver lining around covid, it has to be how our attention has shifted from small questions, back to the more existential end of the spectrum… questions of how we live, work and socialize together, questioning how brittle they are, as well as how brittle we are as individuals and as a society, all tend to reorient our view to the importance of our histories, big and small. These give us a sense of place, of continuity, of identity of experience and confidence in a world where the future by many scholars estimations has exhausted itself as an idea.

“A sense of Wandering between a moribund past and a future that refuses to arrive” writes emeritus Professor Jane Goodall WSU[2]. Italian theorist Franco Bifo Boradi is more blunt writing of the “end of the future”, and interestingly, his claim is that the idea of the future itself is historic, and was created really in the 1900’s by the futurists in Italy as a response to industrialization. The cultural “idea” of the future was invented in his words.

Byung-Chul Han, in his devastating recent book, The Disappearance of Rituals[3] also makes a compelling if not very sad argument that those religious and secular rituals that have been the bed rock of our communities for centuries are the glue that holds us all together, moving us from the “intellectual rational being” as it were to a sense of lived common understanding, and are all disappearing with the rise of a culture of individualism. He laments the passing of our commonality, the possibility of shared cultural knowledge that is evaporating under the pressures of new spaces of our daily lives, forms of work and communication.

While this is a diabolically entangled web, Han reminds us that to turn away from this moment as “too hard”, would be precisely the wrong thing to do, implicitly challenging us to engage with our lived history, embracing its forms, its perspectives, to see history as young again, celebrating and expanding the very idea of “cultural significance” for a more diverse and inclusive Australia, which to me also means creating a richer, more fulfilling Australia.

So if “the future” as a concept was invented by radicals, aesthetized by artists and architects and marketed by industry for over 100 years, this also gives us pause to consider when was history invented… and there is no way I’m going to venture an opinion on that in this room today!

The point being, that if history and the future are not self-evident, but constructed, then of course, a periodic review and update with new and salient information would seem prudent… and while it is true that history is written by the victors, it is also true that what constitutes a victory is open to continual reinterpretation by the generations that follow… and so here we are today.

The heritage context around us has shifted very dramatically today, and in that sense, I suggest we all need to seize the moment, seize the imagination of a newly emerging audience and general interest, and perhaps promote the reimagination of heritage as a living and breathing question that is personal and far from settled, and is less perhaps about where we’ve come from, and much more about where we are heading.

And as a scholar, of course this is all very exciting. There is just so much scholarship to be done, so much re-discovery to be made, so much understanding and change to comprehend, to celebrate and to share in the coming decades as we reorient towards a richer understanding of heritage in Australia.

I want to impress upon you this strong sense I have that we are at a moment where a different idea of tomorrow is emerging, …not the bright shiny technology/economy/industry will fix it modernism type of future, but something more subtle, more textured and layered, something more challenged perhaps, maybe less rosy but messy and real, …something more human. And I think it is clear to see this moment of change across the intellectual spectrum in the climate debates, the debates of democracy and social order on the world stage, in international politics and of course perhaps most importantly in our own discussions with friends and family.

Ironically, (and I don’t mind a bit of irony from time to time) we need to reframe heritage from a conversation of preservation and yesterday, as for so many Australians, history now is about tomorrow, … aren’t we all so fortunate that history is young again! 

Thank you.

///

[1]

  Randall Mason, and Max Page, Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States. Routledge, 2004, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203644508.

[2] Jane Goodall, The Politics of the Common Good; Dispossession in Australia, (New South Books, UNSW) 2019, P1

[3] Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, Polity Press, 2020