Battling Hideous Things: The National Trust of Australia in its first two decades

To celebrate the publication of Values in Cities in paperback, below is a new extract from Chapter 6 of the book on the early decades of the National Trust of Australia.

---

The establishment of the Australian National Trusts during the postwar period, the mid-1940s to mid-1960s, heralded an important milestone for conservation. These state-based bodies promoted historic sites, waged conservation campaigns, acquired properties, and classified buildings, structures, areas, and towns. With minimal resources, the National Trusts were effective in shifting conceptions of the kinds of places which were historically and architecturally important and so might be retained into the future.

The National Trusts were led by prominent figures, whose broadly conservative politics were tempered by a commitment to environmental and heritage issues. There were conflicts within the National Trusts, with differing viewpoints on heritage places offered by the business, legal, and other establishment figures who led them, the architects and historians who advised them, and the membership and communities who engaged with them.

Conservation was perceived as either a pressure valve restraining unbridled development or as a force diametrically opposed to development. The National Trusts aimed to balance the seemingly competing forces of progress, development, and heritage. An unsteady alliance for conservation emerged: between the organisation’s officeholders, who had a broad interest in the built history of the colonial past, and the architects, who valorised stylistically Georgian architecture, which conformed to their mid-century-modern aesthetic tastes.

A Victorian National Trust for Melbourne was first proposed in the 1930s and 40s, by town planner James Barrett, architect Frank Heath, art historian Joseph Burke, and botanist Richard Pescott. State-based National Trusts were then founded in Sydney in 1945, Adelaide in 1955, Melbourne in 1956, Perth in 1959, Launceston and Hobart in 1960, and Brisbane in 1963. Trusts for the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory came last in 1976.

The National Trusts also had regional volunteer branch offices, which pursued local heritage activism, with varying degrees of oversight from the capital cities. An umbrella body, the Australian Council of National Trusts, was formed in 1965.

Women held an especially prominent role in the National Trusts. Conservationist Annie Wyatt was pivotal to the establishment of Australia’s first National Trust in Sydney and architect and planner Margaret Feilman steered the organisation in Perth. Artist Maie Casey, thanks to her important book Early Melbourne Architecture (1953), was the spiritual founder of the Victorian National Trust. The book’s preface, written by Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia Owen Dixon, highlighted Casey’s fresh approach to Melbourne’s architectural history.

Each National Trust had its own structure and character. In 1960, Brian Lewis, the inaugural Chair of Architecture at the University of Melbourne and inaugural President of the National Trust in Melbourne, and Daryl Lindsay, Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, entered correspondence. Both men had been instrumental in establishing the Victorian National Trust. They grumbled about their organisation’s leadership and believed it needed to be nimbler. Lewis wrote to Lindsay about ‘feeling very unhappy about the Trust’s affairs…I don’t think we will gain or retain public support unless we are more lively’. Nevertheless, the National Trusts continued to exercise restraint, a temperate voice.

The National Trusts also believed they had the capacity to strengthen society. Burke said in 1969, ‘The National Trust of Victoria serves beauty not in the groves of the Acadame but in the community at large’. To attract a broader audience, in Melbourne in 1959, a junior group was proposed to give the organisation a ‘safer’ future. It proved to be highly successful. Three years later, the Sun newspaper asked: ‘Why is it that 850 of Melbourne’s younger people choose to spend their leisure hours learning about, and helping maintain, old buildings? In fact they do and they derive a lot of enjoyment from their efforts in so doing’. The Prince of Wales, now Charles III, was an invitee to National Trust and Junior Group activities.

The historic properties held by the National Trusts reflected their interests and priorities, the generosity of their donors, and the dynamics of the real estate market. Financial and property donations received favourable treatment by tax authorities, with the bodies accumulating a few dozen properties each, while struggling to raise operating funds to maintain their endowments. Some of the sites were vernacular – such as the mid-nineteenth-century portable iron houses – while many others were mansions and homesteads such as Como House and Ripponlea Estate.

Conservation attracted media coverage. In 1958, Walkabout, a popular travel magazine, published a special feature on the National Trusts. We see, above, St Malo, a cottage on the Paramatta River in Hunter’s Hill, Sydney, which would be demolished three years later for a freeway expansion. St Malo’s columns, pictured too, had been moved from Burdekin House, demolished a couple of decades earlier in central Sydney. The columns are in the Sydney Living Museums store today. Meanwhile, in 1963, a painting by Cedric Flower of the mansion Lindesay, located at Sydney’s Darling Point, graced the front cover of Women’s Weekly, as part of a fundraising drive.

A 30-minute teleplay was broadcast by ABC Radio in 1959. The play conjured the “evil” Indigenous dreamtime spirit Bunyip in the guise of ‘Gentility, Efficiency and Progress’; with the National Trust fighting the ‘hideous things [that] have been done, in the cities and in the countryside’ in order to protect ‘Australia’s heritage of lovely buildings’. A television series called Australian Heritage was made between 1965 and 1975. Episodes included ‘Buildings in Jeopardy’, ‘Early Melbourne Mansions’, ‘Colonial Brisbane’, ‘The Rocks’, ‘North Adelaide’, ‘Colonial Perth’, ‘Elizabeth Farm’ and ‘La Trobe Cottage’. It was sponsored by the Australian Petroleum Corporation; a fossil fuel interest binding itself to cultural and heritage activities.

To publicise its brand-new classification register, the Victorian National Trust held an exhibition of photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1958. It was curated by architectural historian David Saunders and photographer Mark Strizic. The exhibition included public buildings, Old Melbourne Gaol, Parliament House (1856, 1929), Treasury Building (1862), Royal Mint (1872), Customs House (1876), Government House (1876), Royal Exhibition Building, churches, St James Old Cathedral (1851) and St Patrick’s Cathedral (1858–97), elaborate residences, Toorak House (1849) and Como House (1847), and a selection of regional buildings. Over the next decade or so, the remit of the National Trusts continued to expand to include a greater breadth of nineteenth-century sites and some twentieth-century sites, along with industrial archaeology and Indigenous artefacts. Saunders went on to write innovative heritage listing procedures, which were adopted across Australia.

During the postwar period, the National Trust were synonymous with conservation: in terms of not only advocacy, education, and property custodianship, but also principles, practices, and regulation. The National Trusts depended on their members, benefactors, and expert committees for their strength. Support came from the cultural and social elites – who funded activities, offered expertise, and provided access to elected officials, public servants, and property owners – and the expanding middle class, who signed on as members, visited properties and exhibitions, and attended community protests. After all, amid an economic boom, suburban expansion, and stable employment, Australians more than ever before had the time, money, and interest to invest in heritage.

Ultimately, the National Trust’s moral case for heritage would only be sufficient to ensure the conservation of the most exceptional heritage places. They lacked the capacity to force property owners to conserve heritage places. Consequently, in the 1960s, they campaigned for stronger heritage legislation, which would be enacted from the 1970s onwards. These new heritage laws combined with an expanding heritage industry to result in the replacement of the National Trusts by authorities and heritage professionals as the leaders on conservation matters.

Nevertheless, National Trust approaches and classification lists informed the post-1970s heritage landscape. The National Trust would remain Australia’s most enduring cultural heritage voluntary organisation.

---

Edited book extract from James Lesh, Values in Cities: Urban Heritage in Twentieth Century Australia. Routledge, 2022.

Dr James Lesh is the founding director of conservation practice Heritage Workshop, which provides boutique heritage strategy and advice. He is a prominent conservation industry thought-leader and has published widely on the practice, theory and history of cultural heritage. He holds a PhD in history and heritage from Melbourne University and has researched and lectured at Melbourne, Sydney and Deakin Universities and King’s College London.

Continue reading: Values in Cities: Urban Heritage in Twentieth-Century Australia.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.