Lothar BRASSE
This paper will compare the conservation issues of two mining centres that have undergone major social and economic changes, and the effect these changes have had on their cultural heritage.
One is Australia’s Broken Hill, and the other is the coal mining areas around Essen/Gelsenkirchen, at the heart of the fertile Ruhr Valley in Germany.
Broken Hill’s grid-town grew around its mine and was largely responsible for the ‘making’ of the cities of Port Pirie and Whyalla in South Australia. It spawned ‘BHP’ to become BHP Billiton and, as the ‘Big Australian’, the company diversified to steel and armament production. Here we can draw parallels to its German counterpart Krupp, a major steel corporation in Essen, which began over 400 years ago.
Lothar himself was born in Gelsenkirchen in 1950, and in 1961, the year that the Iron Curtain came down and the Berlin wall went up, my family immigrated to South Australia. He had come from the biggest European industrial centre only to spend his first Australian summer holidays in the desert city of Broken Hill, staying with a family at the ‘top end’ of Oxide Street.
Armed with an adventurous sense of curiosity and a borrowed ‘Box Brownie’ camera, he eagerly recorded what made Broken Hill so special through his child’s eye perspective.
His paper will draw on his childhood impressions of his home town and Broken Hill.
It will then examine the relevant importance of the two regions as places of human habitation, as well as their farming, mining and industrial heritage.
It will look at how the Ruhr Valley and in particular the former coal mine ‘Zollverein’ – a former coal mine and now a UNESCO listed site, has met the challenges of de-industrialization and social reform, and how the politics of heritage management was applied there.