Sydney, The Place Where Heritage Has Become A Dirty Word
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday April 6, 2001
Our Lord Mayor believes in conservation where and when it suits him, writes Camille Scaysbrook.
It was extremely heartening to see a full house at Sydney's Town Hall on Wednesday night for a forum on Sydney's recent urban development. Only a few years ago, barely a soul would have bothered to turn up. That was of course before the Toaster.
The organisers of this talk correctly judged the prevailing attitude towards overdevelopment in the city. Residents feel increasingly alienated from the decisions about our urban environment. One day, telltale wire fences appear around a quiet street; the next, yet another block of pseudo-Federation cardboard boxes appears in their place. Our urban environment is suffering at the hands of greedy developers, and the traditional avenues of resistance such as local councils and the Land and Environment Court are evidently powerless. How can the average Sydneysider influence the decisions made about local land and heritage? Is it possible to stand up to the developers who seem to make these decisions for us?
Sydney belongs to the people of Sydney. This should be an obvious point, yet it bears repeating. Ultimately, a city is a stage on which our lives are set, and the positive or negative impact of our surroundings on our lives cannot be underestimated. However, we can be forgiven for feeling that we have no control over these surroundings and never will when we see the attitudes of our Lord Mayor.
According to Frank Sartor, there is a time and place for preservation, yet it is not for the ``Heritage Mafia", also known as the National Trust, to decide. Sartor's enormous lack of respect for this organisation is well known: his description of sensitive morons tying bunny-rugs around their ears to dull the shriek of modern life is a typical one.
Heritage means legacy, inheritance, birthright. We are fighting not only for a beautiful and significant city for ourselves, but also for our descendants. This involves preserving not only what we find valuable today but attempting to ascertain what parts of our world would, if they were gone, be missed by future generations.
There was a time when The Rocks, Sydney's most significant historical precinct, was going to be the next Toaster. It was only through the foresight of Jack Mundey and the landmark green bans that this apparently ugly and obsolete area was preserved.
The Lord Mayor spoke of an ``absolute value" accorded to buildings of unquestionable significance. Who or what determines this value? Does this mean that all other buildings are by default granted an equally unequivocal insignificance?
Despite his emphasis on the importance of a city telling the story of its people, apparently no architectural story worth telling was told after 1901. How can we hope for control over our environment when, in the case of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sartor advised that the recommendations of the National Trust an official body of experts assembled specifically to advise on what should be considered significant should be completely ignored? Although the night's discussion focused on possible methods for the inclusion of the common citizen in the development process, there's very little point if the person at the top throws it all out the window.
Sartor demonstrated in a rather facetious verse (please, Frank, the day job beckons) that while he admires the work of Francis Greenway and John Verge, he is not a fan of modernism known in its popular forms as Bauhaus, Art Deco and International Style. Like all architectures exhibited in Sydney, modernism imitates or aspires towards architectures perhaps more appropriate to other nations. Yet, unlike the myriad older and equally derivative styles that Sartor so admires, it is not allowed a look-in. Why? Because Sartor doesn't like it. It is not a coincidence that modernism is manifested most impressively in the contentious MCA building, an edifice whose demise he is heralding.
Heritage is not about disliking new buildings. Nor is it, as the Lord Mayor characterises, a mindless conspiracy to gather every old building and rope it off for the sake of it. Heritage is in the end a simple concern for the quality of our built environment.
Given Sartor's narrow-mindedness, and the fact that Railway Square (the only government-developed site discussed) scored the biggest groans of the night, maybe it's time to crawl into my 10-storey imitation Tuscan villa and give up. I'd rather wrap my bunny-rug around me than a poorly made fake Hermes scarf currently the only alternative.
Readers are invited to submit Hecklers to sbaldwin@mail.fairfax.com.au
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald