National Trust Heritage Lecture 2000

David Malouf

Tracking changes in the way we use words is also a way of mapping changes in the way we think and see the world, in where we put the emphasis in all that complex business of understanding and feeling and valuing and re-valuing that we call experience. An historian could compose a very rich picture of any period in a society's kaleidoscopic development out of not much more than an analysis of a dozen or so words that were once recherche, specialist or literary words known only to the few, and which for one reason or another become counters in a society's regular day to day exchanges. I'd just ask you to consider the part each of the following words plays in the world we now live in, what they suggest of our ordinary concerns and interests and needs, our fix on the world, our style: plastic, charisma, neurotic, cholesterol, galaxy, antibiotic, ultraviolet, pasta, bistro -- and we might add to these what we are concerned with tonight, heritage. Once a very literary term for what is passed to an individual through the family line, it has become, in popular usage over this last couple of decades, a term for what the social group, the community, sometimes the nation, holds in common; what is passed into our hands from the past to be held in trust for those who come after.

I don't want to spend too much time on semantics or the spelling out of significances, but I would point to some elements in our use of the term, aspects of its meaning that we agree on so generally that we may fail to observe how radical they are, what changes they represent in how we now see the world and our place in it.

One such change is that there should be such a body of shared possessions -- land for example in all its various forms as wetlands, forest, desert, coastal environment; particular buildings, not all of them in public ownership; villages, city precincts, tree plantings, individual artefacts. Another is that the group should feel it has an interest in these things, but also a right in them, that that overrides the rights and interests of their legal possessors. Think of national parks and the number of times that creating them has meant the resuming of private land. Think of the restrictions we put on the use of buildings, and on changes in their fabric, once we have declared them to be part of the national treasury, claimed them as buildings in whose integrity the nation as a whole has a proprietary interest. Think of the restrictions we put on the export of art works and other objects, sporting cups, for example, or medals, that we do not want to pass out of the national domain-- a direct intervention by the group in the owner's right of sale.

And there is something else that follows from all of this. It is that the group's sense of itself as a group may give a special value to the objects it thinks of as being peculiarly its own: buildings that in some way express the nation's style or have a place in its history; cityscapes; particular objects, in our case [like] a van Guerard landscape or Ned Kelly's mask or a cricket-bat [that was] once used by Don Bradman, which would not have the same value elsewhere. These objects give identity to the group, help to define it, give it cultural and social cohesion. We recognise the group and who belongs to it by what we share a feeling for, what we value in common and see as reflecting our particular way of thinking and being, our 'take' on the world. Indeed, until such objects enter our consciousness, are recognise as sites of feeling, and recorded, the group as group may have no awareness of itself, may scarcely, in this sense, we said to exist. Heritage, the recognition of shared experience, of accepted monuments to events and to sentiments, a shared acceptance of guardianship for what the group cares for and is determined to pass on, is essential to the reinforcing of that sense of neighbourliness on which citizenship is based, especially in settler societies like our own, and is one of the more benign ways of defining and arousing a sense of nationhood. Inherent, I'd want to say, in the word heritage as we now use it, is an acceptance, a relatively new one, that much of what we own, even legally, is ours only in part; that others too may have an interest in what we possess, and rights too -- others now but also others who are still to come; that what we inherit is something we are not the absolute possessors of - a gift held in trust for others. This changes absolutely our relationship to the world and our place in it, and changes our place in time as well. It gives the present depth by creating in us a strong sense of the past, of where the things we have charge of come from; and it keeps in mind, in a strong way, our sense of the future, a time in which we also have an interest since it is the continuation of the line that leads through us from the past, and from now to tomorrow and as far forward as we can imagine. The present is no longer seen as erasing and replacing the past. It contains it. The past is what underwrites and identifies it as present, and in the same way the present contains and underwrites the future.

All this, as I have said, is likely to be more important in a place, like our own, that is relatively new - where the landscape has not yet been richly inscribed or where we have not yet fully recognised the fact - than in places where a common heritage offers so much daily evidence of continuity, of the present as a thing of rich layers so deeply embedded in ordinary consciousness that it scarcely needs pointing to; places where the land has been shaped over centuries, by farming methods or ways of fencing and walling, by laws of inheritance, but also by myths, folk tales, tales from history and all the visible signs, even in ruins, of a surviving and readable past.

In such places heritage is for the most part a matter of preserving what is already recognised and known against the natural forces of decay - though I should just add that even in a place like England, large-scale farming methods as developed under the European Economic Community have erased many of the distinguishing features of thousand-year-old landscapes, hedges and walls for instance, and single crops have pushed out most of the native flowers and grasses.

Things here are rather different. Heritage here is not simply a matter of preserving what is already extant and recognised, though that is some of what heritage might do, but of bringing to the surface what is there but has not yet been marked and is still to be recorded. Our past has to be constructed and interpreted. Its significance has to be drawn out as well as preserved. We are still engaged in uncovering the sites of past living, of past industry, that will be significant to us, in identifying the objects that will be points of reference for our identity and for a shared sense of what happened and can be richly recalled: all that past of dense living and feeling that will give the present depth.

Generally speaking, when we hear the word heritage what we think of is either a tract of land that is significant because it is visually spectacular, or because it contains rare plant and animal species, or some example of architecture, a building or group of buildings, that is considered valuable because of its qualities of design or craftmanship, or because the cityscape it belongs to is especially harmonious, or because it occupies a significant site; sometimes, we may value a building even if it has, in itself, no aesthetic qualities, for its rarity as a surviving example, or because of its historical associations. I don't think I need to name such places for you to have any number of them spring clearly to mind.

What I have just been outlining there are the reasons we usually give for preserving in our cities or country towns what we believe is a significant part of the fabric of the past, which is in danger of being torn down because someone wants to develop the site, and replace one building with another more contemporary or easier to maintain, or better adapted to current taste and needs, or simply one that will bring in a larger profit. And when we come to land, we argue its preservation in terms of the uniqueness of its mix of vegetation and animal life, or its being representative as a kind of terrain.

What I want to talk about tonight is something different. Sites we may want to preserve, and for our own good health as a community need to preserve, for which there is no argument in terms of aesthetics, or rarity, or significant previous events or associations; places where there is no existing fabric, or very little; where nothing happened except that a whole lot of living and working and dying was done there; where the site is, from the point of view of landscape, at best undistinguished, but where there is, nevertheless, some remaining evidence of past occupations and use that we do not want to see erased either in fact or from memory. Something we need for the deepening of our sense of where we have come from and where we are.

A few years back, when the notion of a sacred site first came into general awareness, non-indigenous Australians were puzzled, and sometimes downright suspicious, when [some] sites that were claimed as sacred turned out to be places, as far as they could see, that had no distinguishing features, offered nothing, even to the sympathetic eye, that was in any way remarkable, let alone touched with the necessary glow of the sacred.

The idea of a sacred site wasn't altogether unknown to us. Delphi in Greece was such a place, and if you went there you could see why. It was topographically impressive. There were ruins that spoke immediately to the imagination, and if you knew anything of ancient history the place was filled with associations and voices, living ghosts. Even if you didn't, there was something about the site itself that made it a haunted place, a space of spiritual emanations you could actually feel.

When an Aboriginal site had that sort of topographical grandeur, or gave off those emanations, Uluru, for instance, there was no problem. It was the other sites, places where what Aboriginal people saw there was invisible, where what they felt and responded to belonged only to consciousness, to memory, to myth and story, to dance, to song. Those were the sort of sacred sites we could not grasp.

What made such a place sacred was what people knew, or believed, had happened there and was still happening, since much of it belonged to the rich associations that are preserved in remembering. What made it sacred was that all that had happened there, even what was ordinary, had been preserved and kept in mind, was present in the consciousness of those who now lived there, and continued to command their attention and awed reverence. What made the site remarkable could not be seen, but it could not be erased either, because it had its life in memory. It had never been given over to the absolute insignificance of forgetting. It is remembering that is the sacred act, and the fact that a place has been kept alive in the memory of the group is what to that group makes it sacred.

I recall seeing a television documentary a few years ago in which a judge of one of our courts was hearing evidence from a group of Aboriginal people on their claim to a tract of land in Central Australia.

Fifty years before, after an especially brutal massacre, they had been removed from their tribal lands to a place several hundred miles away and their country leased out as a cattle station. They had never been back. What Mr Justice Toohey - seated on a folding stool and wearing a white tennis hat against the fierce Central Australian sun - was taking as formal evidence, was a series of dances performed by women who had never actually seen their home country but, from stories that had been passed down to them, and from facts that were embodied in the steps of the dance, were able to recreate [it] feature by feature -- particular rocky places and springs, particular patches of grassland, and in such detail that Mr Justice Toohey was convinced that the land was part of their continuing consciousness and awarded it back to them.

What I found moving in all this was that that form of evidence which is so different from any evidence, you or I might give, should be allowable on our courts and had won the day. We have reason to be proud of that. But what impressed me even more was that the physical reality of the land should have been so powerfully held in those women's memory, kept so vividly alive in the mind, in the senses, in the traditional ceremonies of those women for whom it was a vital part of existence, that after [so] many years of absence it could be recalled, and their daily life in it presently re-enacted.

Part of what we have come to recognise as an indigenous way of possessing land, and of possessing time too as it is embodied in a knowledge of the land, is this capacity for seeing it as a point of convergence between past and present, for seeing it as layered, a place where all that happened there - actual events but also the myths, stories, songs, dances that grew out of those events, and commemorate them, recreate them through memory - is immediately accessible; a place that is dense with meaning, and dense as well with associations and feeling; a place one possesses, if that is the right word for it, imaginatively, even more than fact, because it is so deeply embedded in your consciousness. It seems to me that what we now understand of how a site is constructed by Aboriginal people, how it is read, how all the levels of it are preserved, has helped us understand how places might come to exist vividly in our own consciousness; how heritage might work to deepen our lives and anchor us more firmly -- I mean through feelings rather than rights in law -- in the places that we are attached to.

Of course it is easy to say that in forty thousand years a place might well become dense in this way. All we have behind us is [just] a couple of centuries. But forty thousand years are just forty thousand years, time itself means nothing. What makes the difference is the remembering, the keeping alive in the memory, of lives lived, stories told; the not allowing the sort of erasures to occur that obliterate lived life and reduce to silence and emptiness a place once noisy with the energy of human activity. A great deal might accrue to a place in a hundred years, even in twenty. What we need to do is learn how better to mark and remember.

But remember what? Preserve what? What are the grounds on which we are to decide, among so many choices, what is worth remembering and what we will allow to be erased or demolished, given over to the developers or to oblivion?

For the most part we have made our choice, in the past, in terms of the qualities I pointed to earlier: uniqueness or rarity, the fact that the piece of land we wanted to set aside, or the building we wanted to preserve, was in some way exemplary, that is, an example of its kind; or because it had aesthetic qualities, of design or craftmanship, that set it above the ordinary. These are value judgements and they imply a hierarchy of values -- of rarity, or beauty, or significance, which gives one thing priority over another. I have no objection to saving what is rare or beautiful or significant -- but I do wonder if that is all we want to argue for, or all that we need to [say].

The things I would want to point to, whose preservation seems to me to be essential to our health and spirit, cannot be argued for on any of the usual grounds. They are not unique or rare: their first quality is their ordinariness. They are not significant, not beautiful. What I am thinking of is the remaining evidence, on the ground or under it, and some of it existing now only in memory, of lived life, of earlier habitation and long hours spent at work, of spilled sweat and blood; the evidence, none of it remarkable, of use that gives the most ordinary sites their layered history, makes them rich in associations, fully occupied and inhabited, if only by ghosts; most of all what makes us think of them as fully humanised. I've written about a place, an imaginary one, in just those terms in a recent story - "Jacko's Reach."

What we are doing when we acknowledge the full history of such places is making them real to ourselves, embedding them in our consciousness, making them places fully possessed in the mind and imagination, loved places that we live in, in spirit as well as in fact. This is important work. It brings us home to place. It finds a place for us in time. It is the sort of heritage we live in daily, since the layering in time is within us, and as we acknowledge that we come, proportionally, into our fullest possession of the land.

I would like to pay tribute, in this regard, to the work that has been done on the Olympic Games site at Homebush to preserve the signs of previous use and to incorporate a memory and evidence of them in the present one. Homebush offers as useful and as topical an example as anyone could wish of the sort of heritage issues I want to take up here.

As you'll know, Homebush has a long history of occupation and use and an unusually varied one.

The Blaxland family had a colonial property in the area, and there is a surviving Georgian villa, Newington, that was later used successively as a boarding school, a Benevolent asylum for aged women, a state hospital, and since the late 1960s has been part of Silverwater Prison. The Blaxlands used their land for cattle, for logging, for coal mining exploration, and some of it was laid out as pans for supplying Sydney with salt. From 1882 part of the land was used by the Royal Marine Garrison for the establishment of a powder magazine, some of whose bunkers survive. At Homebush, Darcy Wentworth created a horse stud, and his son, William Charles Wentworth, built a racetrack there for the Sydney Turf Club, which was in use till 1859, when racing operations were transferred to Randwick. From 1907 till 1988 Homebush was the site of the State Abattoir, the second largest as it happens in the world, with a whole complex of Federation style administrative buildings, gardens, and of course stock yards and killing sheds. The Olympic Stadium is on the site of the abattoir saleyard, the administrative buildings have been kept and restored.

From the early nineteen hundreds part of the Homebush site was the State brickworks and after the second world war two large pits were dug to provide clay for Sydney's postwar building boom. One of the pits has been integrated into the parklands as a habitat for the Green and Golden Bell Frog.

The point is that none of the existing fabric on the site, except perhaps for Newington, and, at a pinch, the Federation buildings of the abattoir, could be argued for on aesthetic grounds, and little of the rest, except for W.C. Wentworth's racetrack is historically significant. A lot else that went on there is frankly rather grubby, just the sort of thing we might want to forget, to erase from memory -- killing sheds, clay pits, dumps, in later years, for industrial and other waste.

But the place is a rich one, just the same, in its varieties of use and is layered with just the sort of human activity and endeavour, of lives lived in a daily way. Think of all that herding and selecting and killing at the abattoir, which at its peak employed sixteen hundred workers; think of the clerks and typists in administration -- there are evocative pictures of some of them in picnic groups on the lawns, just out of sight of the killing sheds -- this is just the sort of dailyness and lived life that gives human depth to a place, and which we ought to value precisely because it is ordinary, ordinary like our own, and because it provides us with a sense of continuity in which we can, in the most ordinary way, find a home.

Another such site is the South Bank in Brisbane, a place I feel especially close to because I grew up there.

It was always an area of play, some of it not quite reputable. The Cremorne Theatre was for fifty years or more Brisbane's chief vaudeville house. Part of the Tivoli circuit, it was where I first saw Roy Rene and Bob Dyer and Will and Nancy Hayes, and my favourite of all comedians Sid Beck. The Trocadero, close by in Melbourne Street, was Brisbane's main palais de dance till Cloudland was built in the early 40s, and its great Big Band centre. There was also the Blue Moon Skating Rink, and a dozen old fashioned verandahed pubs, the liveliest of which after the war was Manhattan Gardens. Later, when the whole area was levelled for the Brisbane Expo, a good many of the pubs were preserved and incorporated into the site and have survived into the new one.

The present precinct makes a real attempt to establish a continuity with the previous one. A maritime museum recalls the wharves to the west of the bridge. Some of the Expo site and its pavilions have been transformed into pleasure gardens and greenhouses. Theatres, one of them called the Cremorne, and an opera and concert hall, establish a link with earlier playhouses. The previous mix of high and low culture has been kept, as if high and low were actually -- as they are, of course -- continuous and can be set side by side so that people can shift, as we all like to do, between them.

This is an extraordinarily rich site both in what it offers the visitors in the way of mixed entertainment -- a swimming strand, arenas for pop music, a library, art gallery, several museums, a theatre complex, restaurants, pubs, garden walks -- and what it tempts us to discover of a continuing history. It is a place where citizens are encouraged to pursue their own interests but also to respect the interests of others. Its diversity encourages us to recognise and value diversity. It is a place where the past, very lightly, lives through into the present and new forms of play remember the old ones. It says a good deal for our growing sophistication in these matters that the designers and planners of the site have left room for history, for traces of a century and a half of previous use to shape the site and to be themselves either preserved in the fabric or in other ways recorded and commemorated. In doing all this it deliberately avoids making judgements about what kind of activity in the past, high or low, deserves to be recalled, deliberately mixes the two, allowing one sort of entertainment to exist, freely, in the same space as another. In this way it is gently educative, a place that in its very form inspires neighbourliness and tolerance, an easy mixing, and in a light way deepens our awareness of the city's past by establishing a clear line of continuity within change. In all of these ways it seems to me to be exemplary.

Not all planners and managers of new sites are so sympathetic to previous use. Peter Read in his moving book, Returning to Nothing, The Meaning of Lost Places -- a work that explores the grief, the sense of deep loss people feel when they are separated, rather like those aborigines who were giving evidence before Mr Justice Toohey, from a familiar and loved place -- Peter Read, offers a very disturbing example of a deliberate official erasure, not just of a piece of history but since all history is, when we get down to it, a matter of specific lives, of a whole century of family life and work, of human occupation and activity in the high plains and valleys of the Snowy Mountains.

This was pastoral country. Several generations of pastoralists and farmers had lived and worked here, on stations called Glencoe, Orroral, Gudgeby, Honeysuckle, Nass, leaving evidence of human habitation and industry in the form of homesteads, stockyards, cattle huts, graves. But when the National Parks and Wildlife Service established Namadgi National Park there, in the late seventies, its notion of wilderness as a place untouched by human habitation or the works of men, an area entirely natural, meant that more than a century of white men's presence had deliberately to be erased. From now on the only human users of this country were to be campers and bushwalkers. None of the buildings in the valleys, none of the evidence of human presence and endeavour, of family life, was thought worthy of preservation -- as on strictly heritage lines it wasn't since it had no architectural value, wasn't an example of anything significant, except presence itself and living. All the existing fabric was demolished or allowed to decay or be vandalised, and a whole swathe of history, of our history, was made nothing of. But at a cost. At the cost of something that was unique only in being itself, in being part of what happened, and was done, that might need to be kept in mind, remembered.

Peter Read is very good on the kind of thinking about wilderness, but also about heritage in general, that values only what is rare, or what is an exemplum, a good example of something, rather than what, as a repository of past living, is just itself. We can easily, in choosing only what is significant, miss what is most humanly valuable but also necessary to the wholeness of things, thinning out what is messily there in favour of an abstract notion of what we believe ought to be there; making a choice in favour of beauty, of wilderness, or historical importance, and thereby depriving ourselves of a real past that is dense with ordinary life and living like our own. How can we expect people not to devalue what is ordinary and unremarkable in the present, in their own lives and in the lives of their neighbours, if we do not value these things as they come down to us from the past, if we collude in their removal or erasure on the grounds that they have nothing to say to us, add nothing to the world we ourselves move in, and do not deserve to be preserved.

This is not a plea for no discrimination at all in what we might want to preserve, but for some wider definition of what is worth saving, some wider definition of heritage that might recognise the undistinguished and ordinary as also giving richness to a site, as having a value quite different from what is rare, or aesthetically significant, or is associated with a significant historical event. Most of the present is made up of the ordinary and undistinguished. That is its richness. Shouldn't we see the past as being made up of the same wonderfully rich but unremarkable stuff?

In fact ordinary men and women understand this quite well and make their own choices. Peter Read, in his chapter on the rebuilding of Darwin after the cyclone, has an illuminating account of the resistance of Darwin people to the plans devised by experts in Canberra to resite and rebuild their city. What they wanted preserved was a place they were attached to as a site of memories, of affections, of tragic loss and death. This was personal but it was also communal. They wanted to go on living beside their old neighbours in a place where their lives would be continuous with what went before, a place with a past that continued to exist in their consciousness and their affections as well as in geography; a place that was dense with associations the planners could know nothing of and which was easier to return to, and richer to live in, because living had already opened a space there and written on it, filled it with occasions and events. Those Darwin people too were the keepers and makers of heritage, and we need to be aware that there are people out there who understand what heritage is even if it is a term they would not use -- but in ways we have not listened to, or not hard enough, or taken fully into account.

What I am making a plea for here is particularly, the thing that is valuable simply in itself, the many things of this sort that, added one to another, laid down one above the other, make the sort of richness, richness of awareness, that we need if our lives are to have solidity and depth.

For the writer, particularity is everything. The specific, the thing in itself, is his only concern; lovely irrelevancies, as Nabokov put it, are what give the novel, for example, the feel of real life, and it is through them, through the hold they take on our senses, the way they touch our imagination, that we enter the world of a novel and make it our own. In older places, it is writing, as much as anything - the naming and dramatisation of places in poems and novels, the retelling of what happened there in local history or local lore - that makes the places people live in real to them. Some of our finest books, Thomas Welsby's Recollections of Moreton Bay or Eric Roll's A Million Wild Acres, to name just two, celebrate places in the sort of detail, with the sort of loving devotion to the specific, that makes them live in our minds with the same density with which they are alive in fact -- but only because the writer has made us see and feel it.

The identification of surviving fabric from the past, the careful preservation of buildings, cityscapes, small towns, tree-plantings, gardens -- this is one part of heritage, the visible part. It is easy to argue for, though the argument as we know, does not always win. What I am arguing for is something that is not visible, or rather can only be seen when we recreate it in the sort of vivid detail that makes it real to the imagination, to the spirit of remembering.

Making places live in this way, through an archaeology of remembering, through imagination in the recreation of the specific, the lovely irrelevancy of daily living, is a large part, especially in new places like our own, of what writing is for. I discovered early, and in the usual way (that is by accident) when I wrote my first novel, Johnno, that it is only when a place appears at last in a book, with all that immediate appeal to the senses and living detail that writing can create, that it becomes real to people -- even to the people who actually live there: most of all, and most surprisingly, it seems, to them. Later, in 12 Edmonstone Street, I carried out my own bit of archaeology on a site that was utterly specific, utterly personal in value, that is, of no significance: a house in South Brisbane that had disappeared in fact but was still alive in the memory of one little person, my self of thirty years before, who had once lived there, and for whom its particular spaces, its particular objects, had been his way into the world. Resurrecting it, detail by detail, making it real in the minds of readers, was, though I didn't know it then, an example of just the sort of remembering, of returning life and density of living to a lost place, that I have been speaking up for tonight; the resurrection of the ordinary and specific, the thing that we look at just in itself and just for itself, the merely personal which, if it can be made personal to others, will give them a sense of the specificity, the density, the significance of their own ordinary past.

Visitors sometimes ask taxi drivers in Brisbane to take them to 12 Edmonstone Street. It has become a bit of a stopping-place on the tourist route. "But there's nothing there" the taxi drivers warn them. (What was there when I last saw the place was a Canon camera warehouse and a bit of desolate yard). But people ask to be taken there just the same. To stare out the window at a place they have read about and which is real to their imagination. That they themselves have made crowded, full of rich associations. Personal. Significant.

The remembering of previous lives, the recreation, in all its density and detail of the previous life of places -- that, as much as the rescue of endangered monuments, outstanding examples, or what is unique or representative -- is the sort of work we must do here. That, in our wider understanding of the term, the one that will have relevance in our sort of place, must be the deeper work of heritage; to pay as much attention to what is ordinary and specific as to what is exemplary and rare. We may need other terms than the ones used in Britain, say, or by that vigilant and sometimes over-zealous organisation the Belli Arti in Italy, for evaluating here what needs to be saved from the process of erasure. The danger here may be less from change and development than from the natural process of forgetting. We may need a more open and active form of marking, of remembering and documenting: the small and specific, all that dense and sometimes muddled and muddling activity that makes up the lived life of a place: the affections, conflicts, forms of industry and forms of play that fill a space with life, even with the life of ghosts. But ghosts whose presence, and hunger for living we can still feel, and whose energy, if we can sense it, will make rich and crowded a place that might otherwise seem empty, whose felt presence will fill with voices a place where otherwise our own might seem brittle and without resonance, and our own lives detached, with no grounding in time or the great continuity of human warmth and presence that is the one true gift of heritage anywhere.