If we have persuaded you in some way through our submission that collections are holistically to be regarded as part of the understanding of heritage places, then I think you will appreciate that it's important for us to stress to you that those moveable collections associated with a place are fragile.  Sometimes the collections may appear to be fixed, and I refer particularly to the sort of industrial installations that survive at mining sites and milling sites, but unfortunately those sites often have a very low level of scrutiny or surveillance by their managers and people can arrive with spanners or appropriate tools and actually effectively demolish parts of that equipment.  I can't understand their motives.  Sometimes it may be malicious, sometimes it may be opportunistic but, nevertheless, it does happen.

DR BYRON:   A lot of valuable copper.

MS BIRTLEY:   And sometimes there is a resale value associated with that, and

sometimes there is a heritage resale value overseas, particularly for agricultural equipment.

	In concluding the points I'd like to stress or to go back to a point I made earlier.  Thinking about that life cycle of the place, I've referred quite a lot to the collections that relate inside the building or that are found inside or can be thought of as the contents of the building, but just to reinforce once again that the collections associated with heritage places are more complex than that because there are the collections that help us understand those places:  library holdings, archival holdings, municipal holdings, collections of photographs, documents, books, reports and so on.

	What I'm leading up to is to stress to you that there are two sorts of managers of these associated collections.  There are the managers of the libraries, archives, galleries and museums who sit outside the heritage place itself but who nevertheless hold important things for the understanding of the place, and the Collections Council of Australia asks you to acknowledge the important role played by those collecting repositories that help us understand the significance of particular heritage places through what they hold.

	The additional recommendation to you is that we ask you to acknowledge that managers of sites are also frequently collection managers, so the people who are running heritage buildings, heritage places as publicly accessible or as privately‑owned places, as we've touched on before, are also, whether they realise it or not, managing collections, and their responsibilities to Australia's heritage are therefore compounded, because the skills and accountabilities associated with managing collections of moveable objects are slightly different from those associated with managing places.  Therefore there can be needs for training, for professionalisation, for reporting and accountability methods that help guarantee that these people in charge of heritage places are also doing the right thing by heritage collections.

	I notice in the National Trust's submission that they talk about a pressure on heritage places as being the high standards of museums and galleries.  I haven't had a chance to ask them face to face about this, but I wondered whether they are in appreciation of those high standards or whether they are actually also perhaps just feeling a little bit awkward about the additional responsibilities that legitimately high standards associated with the preservation of moveable cultural heritage objects impose on the property managers of the National Trust properties.  

	I think that gives you just a sense of the tension that exists.  It's not an unpleasant tension but it's just one of those dilemmas that exists in the world of heritage, that you can't necessarily win all the battles all the time, and property managers are frequently imposed upon with regard to the dual challenges of

managing both place and objects.

	In conclusion, I'd like to say that the directors and myself as the staff member of the Collections Council of Australia would be very pleased to continue our discussion with you, if appropriate, and at times that suit you, because we feel that there are ways of improving policy and funding arrangements for heritage collections in heritage places, and also for the heritage places that hold significant collections.  We're in the early stages of our own strategic thinking and so I don't really have a lot of "hows", how we would do that, to go into at the moment, but we're working through a process that is sort of in parallel to your development of your report, and so if at a future meeting it were possible to discuss things in more detail, we might be more ready to share with you our thoughts on that.

DR BYRON:   Thank you very much, Margaret.

MR HINTON:   I have couple of comments and a question, Margaret.  Thanks very much for your submission and your presentation this afternoon; very succinct and very pointed.  Thank you very much.  On the point of the terms of reference, I think it's important to record for the transcript and also others here that exclusions from the terms of reference in no way should be taken as an indication of their being assessed as not important.

MS BIRTLEY:   Thank you.

MR HINTON:   And that's a given.

MS BIRTLEY:   Yes.

MR HINTON:   But it's stating the obvious in some ways.  I should add, though, and this is directly related to your first recommendation, that it is likely that our report - I can't put words in the presiding commissioner's mouth ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Yes, you can.

MR HINTON:   - - - will acknowledge that collections are relevant to the significance of heritage places, even though we're not looking at moveable artefacts.  So I give you those words if that's a comfort to you.

MS BIRTLEY:   Thank you.  It is indeed.

MR HINTON:   But I appreciate that in fact you've now pointed your submission to the linkage to our terms of reference, so thank you very much.  My question is more of a detail rather than an overview sort of question.  It relates to your fifth recommendation.  I was a bit puzzled - and you touched on it in your presentation as well - by your reference to the need for improved whole‑of‑government policies to assist private owners of heritage places in retaining research in their associated collections.  When I read that and heard that, I got the impression that you perceived there to be some sort of tension or conflict across portfolios, which would normally be apparent in the minds of anyone making that comment about a need for whole of government, and in fact whole‑of‑government approach is usually very important for public policy more generally, but you didn't identify for me apparent or alleged tensions across portfolios, so if you could elaborate.

MS BIRTLEY:   Thank you for the opportunity to clarify something I meant to say, and that is that - not in all Australian jurisdictions but in several – ‘place’ is dealt with through one portfolio and ‘objects’ are dealt with through a different portfolio, and when that division occurs, objects are usually thought of under the heading of Arts, and place is frequently identified as environment/heritage/sustainable/infrastructure.

	We see that at the Commonwealth level; we see it in the state of Victoria; we see it in this state, in South Australia.  It is not the case I understand in Western Australia, where cultural matters all come together in the one portfolio.  So it's that sense that in some jurisdictions there is a real need to help the environmental people who are thinking about place to work collaboratively with the collections-focused people who might be located in arts, and ditto, vice versa.

MR HINTON:   Thank you for that elaboration, but does that fact of institutional arrangement actually lead to diverse effects or inconsistent treatments, to your knowledge?  It certainly has the potential to do that.

MS BIRTLEY:   It has the potential to do so with private ownership in that an environmental department may be quite happy to look at a place whether it's in private or public ownership, but a granting system with regard to objects may be designed for collections that are publicly accessible and perhaps run in a not‑for‑profit environment, and so the constraints that are often imposed on grants that relate to moveable objects may be rather different from the funding incentives or the programs of assistance that might be available for the built environment.  That has certainly been the case in Victoria in the past.

DR BYRON:   But if you could just flesh that out a little more:  somebody who has for example a heritage‑listed home and would like to develop or add to a collection of objects and documentation about the history of that home you're suggesting should be eligible for assistance to go and add to that private collection or ‑ ‑ ‑

MS BIRTLEY:   Not to add to it, but to perhaps do further research on it, perhaps to document the collection so that the collection can be better accessed or better
understood ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Or registered ‑ ‑ ‑

MS BIRTLEY:   Yes.

DR BYRON:   - - - so that others would even know that it exists?

MS BIRTLEY:   Yes, possibly to prepare the ground for it to be registered.

MR HINTON:   The government might then take it.

MS BIRTLEY:   Yes, that's another issue, I know.

MR HINTON:   That may be the mind‑set.  That is the point I meant.

DR BYRON:   I think Tony is referring to a comment that I made earlier this morning, where we've had examples where people fear if the government found out what was on their property.  In the nature conservation area they talk about "the shoot, shovel and shut‑up syndrome":  if you find a cave painting or a pair of rare birds or an endangered plant, you get rid of it before anybody from the government finds out.  We've been told about people who find Cobb and Co staging posts on their property and will deliberately bulldoze it or burn it before anybody from the government finds out, because they're apprehensive that there's going to be a whole lot of red tape and restrictions and all the rest of it, and so that seems to me to be an incredibly perverse outcome if fear of heritage recognition actually triggers its destruction before anybody else even knows that it was there.

MS BIRTLEY:   The starting point for our thinking is more that sometimes families find that economically they can no longer keep that heritage place in their own hands.  They may find mechanisms for disposing of the heritage place so that it goes on being or becomes more publicly accessible, but they frequently don't think of keeping the collection in the place; or perhaps for economic reasons they can't afford to leave the collection behind and for economic reasons for their own future livelihood they need to dispose of that collection, and lack the incentives to document that collection and preserve it in the place where it is, while it's perhaps migrating from private hands to public hands or from private hands to other private hands.  It would be very useful if there were ways of helping preserve the collections in place.

	There's an example in regional New South Wales last year.  I think the name of the property is Springfield but I'd be uncomfortable for that to not be qualified in the record.  I may not be correct in remembering that.  It was documented in the national press that the family could not afford to keep the property any longer and had
decided to dispose of it, and the contents of the home was acquired by the National Museum of Australia, who went to the property, talked with the owners, gained an oral history about it, documented the collections as they sat in situ, but the minute they leave that place they are changed, and they will never be able to be read again or understood quite in the same way once they are within the National Museum's control.  They will be preserved, which is great, but they can't be understood in quite the same way, and I wonder whether that family would have made a different decision if different mechanisms had been in place for the preservation and the funding of that collection of artefacts.

DR BYRON:   I don't have any questions of clarification at all so thanks very much.

MS BIRTLEY:   Well, thank you once again for the opportunity, and we're very willing to continue discussions should that be convenient to you.

MR HINTON:   Thanks, Margaret, and in that context we should mention that we do have an iterative process as well - that is, we'll be putting a draft report out later this year and that may generate a reaction from you as well, and we'd welcome that further iteration of contact with you as well in the context of the draft report, if you thought that appropriate.

MS BIRTLEY:   We'll look forward to that opportunity as well.  Thank you very much indeed.

DR BYRON:   Thank you.
DR BYRON:   Mr Christopher Beilby is not here?

MR HINTON:   We had one more listed attendee and that person is not here.  We could invite further comment from anyone on the floor.

DR BYRON:   We could.  I said in my opening comments this morning that we always try to give anybody in the room an opportunity to come forward and say their piece, put something on the public record if they wanted to.  Now is such an opportunity.  Going once, going twice!

MS HENDERSON:   Does that include adding to something ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   Certainly if you'd like to elaborate or comment on something that anybody else has said.

MR HINTON:   You need to once again identify yourself, Kelly, for the transcript.

MS HENDERSON:   My name is Kelly Henderson.  I've been racking my brains whilst listening to the previous very good submission about adaptive reuse, and I've thought of an example of adaptive reuse.  The reason I couldn't answer initially is because the Treasury Building was an example of adaptive reuse.  It housed the museum of surveying and land management in one of the portions of the building, and that museum was closed down and the collections were dispersed to several other locations, including a collection that was held by a society, the John McDouall Stuart Society that had to be relocated, and the society had materials donated by descendants of the explorers.  It was on public display in an historic public building that was directly associated with those cultural materials because that was the building that John McDouall Stuart returned to after crossing the continent.

DR BYRON:   Yes, as we heard this morning.

MS HENDERSON:   Yes.  So it's directly, I think, relevant to the previous submission.  But once that had come to mind and I had thought of a successful example of adaptive reuse, and then realised that my shock in not being able to answer was because that adaptive reuse, that successful example, had been destroyed by ‑ ‑ ‑

DR BYRON:   An alternative use.

MS HENDERSON:   - - - an alternative use which claimed to be an adaptive reuse but which didn't conform to the Burra Charter, I thought more about that example.  The example of the Adelaide to Darwin railway is an example of an historic route with cultural artefacts which are spread across the continent.  There are the

horseshoes that were lost, the various supplies and materials that Stuart and his party had to dump so that they could actually move faster or, as they lost horses, that they couldn't carry with them.  They are spread from one side of Australia to the northern coast.

	In the making of the Adelaide to Darwin railway it wasn't clear that there had been an understanding of historic routes as part of Australia's built heritage.  Those routes exist.  People often go out and explore them as part of their journeys.  They want to know where the overland telegraph was.  Well, it followed Stuart's route, and here are the bullock wagons that followed his route, and there doesn't seem to be an understanding or a way of listing something like Stuart's crossing of the continent.  I thought more on that, and I thought, well, in terms of Stuart's earlier journeys, that impinges on another cultural listing, which is his earlier expeditions where he named Mount Finke.

	In terms of the declaration of a wilderness area for the Yellabinna Reserve, which is in the far west of our state, that reserve had to be, I think, assessed by a board before it was recommended to the minister, and they have guidelines that they refer to.  Those guidelines - the basis on which they can make recommendations - do not include economic development or commercial operations of mining leases, but the recommendation that was made that went out for public review was that an area be excluded, I think to the south or west of Mount Finke, because it had potential for mining.  The proposal was that it be subject to a mining lease, so it was excluded from the recommendation for the declaration of a wilderness area.

	Now, between Mount Finke and Fowlers Bay is the part of Stuart's first expedition which extended the boundaries of South Australia by three degrees.  There was a no‑man's‑land between South Australia and Western Australia and his expedition on that trip showed that people could travel through that country.  He described the area and South Australia applied to have its boundary increased.

	That cultural heritage is not protected and the guidelines on which the recommendations were made were specifically not in accordance with what was their area of examination.  They looked outside to the mining lease and said, "Oh, hang on a minute.  We won't list this area and protect it because we can see a mining lease in the offing," and it seems to me that that sort of approach permeates the whole of Australia's heritage management, and that previous speaker reminded me.  Thank you.

MR HINTON:   Thank you very much.

DR BYRON:   In that case, I think we can adjourn the public hearing.  We will resume on Monday morning in Melbourne.  Thank you very much for your

participation, ladies and gentlemen.  It's been very very interesting and very helpful.

AT 4.17 PM THE INQUIRY WAS ADJOURNED UNTIL 
MONDAY, 8 AUGUST 2005

INDEX

		Page

ARTLAB AUSTRALIA:
ANDREW DURHAM		247-260
KEITH FERNANDEZ
JOANNA BARR

ADELAIDE ARCADE PTY LTD:
IAN CONRAD		261-271

KATH CRILLY		272-286

HERITAGE PRESERVATION ASSOCIATION:
SHIRLEY McNAMARA		287-298

TIM SIMPSON		299-310

CULTURAL HERITAGE CENTRE FOR ASIA AND 
THE PACIFIC:
BILL LOGAN		311-325

KELLY HENDERSON		326-336
		351-353

COLLECTIONS COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA:
MARGARET BIRTLEY		337-350