Jane LENNON
The changing rural landscape is a result of both economic and technological change in remote rural Australia. Wool is no longer king and hence the once vast sheep stations with their associated range of buildings, structures, ways of life and people employed there are no longer. Cattle are managed differently too quad bikes, helicopters and road trains have replaced horses on the long drives, but not everywhere, and horse use for close work in yards is still preferred.
It is 15 years since Australia ICOMOS published Pastoral Technology and the National Estate, by Peter Forrest and Meredith Walker but still no official response to survey and identification, despite the National Trust putting rural places on its Endangered List in 2002 and the problem of total loss of the evidence for rural heritage places being raised in each Commonwealth State of Environment report from 1996 on.
There has been limited response by individual States; Queensland Heritage Council acted on my 2003 report Rural Heritage Places Issues, by appointing a heritage advisor, Andrew Ladlay, who is also speaking at this conference on his experiences. In addition, the Queensland department is slowly conducting a state-wide survey to identify places to add to the QHC register, but of course remote places feature lowest in priority.
There have been many small regional projects of recording aspects of pastoral industry or of those involved by a range of professionals from archaeologists, like Rodney Harrison with his studies of shared attachments to places in the NSW pastoral industry to photographers documenting the detailed daily life of cattlemen on Cape York.
There has also been an explosion of published histories of places now forgotten and physically faded or fading into the landscape. While our book, Pastoral Australia- Fortunes, Failures and Hard Yakka, An historical overview 1788-1967, is another one it aims to provide a nation- wide context in which to select a more encompassing representation of heritage items and places in our pastoral industry not just the grand homesteads arranged like villages in the wide landscape, but the usual and unusual, the once common and now forgotten features.
With a cooperative national heritage agenda, it is time again in an election year to call for coordinated action for survey and recording what is left. Not everything can be saved but as we have said before a bold vision is called for in these days of rapid physical change fires and floods dramatically wiping out what neglect, creeping weed invasion or salt attack had left scarred and abandoned.
Models of how to conduct these surveys have been put forward since 1995. The records of these surveys linked to pastoral archives and Picture Australia should then be lodged in our National Library of Australia for future generations to see the extent of settlement by pastoralism across this continent.
Politicians have been offered comparisons of the nation-building components of recording places of redundant technology and lost heritage as was done in the USA in the 1930s New Deal programs of HABS and HAER.
The sorts of places now disappearing are included in my slide show.