Associate Professor David JONES
In 1991, the National Trust of NSW classified the Regeneration Reserves surrounding the city of Broken Hill as comprising an essential cultural heritage asset of the City of Broken Hill.
This tract of land, and its proponents, Albert and Margaret Morris, are now recognised as the pioneers of arid zone revegetation science in Australia. What they created at Broken Hill is a unique revegetation ‘greenbelt’ of national ecological, landscape architectural and town planning significance.
The Morris’ led the advancement of arid zone botanical investigation and taxonomic inquiry, propagation innovation, and revegetation science in the 1920s-40s in Australia and applied this spatially. Their research and practical applications in crafting the Regeneration Reserves around Broken Hill, demonstrated the need for landscape harmonisation to occur to reduce erosion and the onslaught of dust damage to human and mining activities alike. This pioneering research and practice informs and underpins nearly all arid zone mine reclamation and revegetation works in Australia today.
This paper reviews the historical evolution of this cultural landscape, its integral importance to the cultural heritage of the City of Broken Hill and its mining legacy, and its contributory position in the pending National Heritage List.