Australia’s heritage listing practices only evolved in the mid 1970s having followed the trajectory of certain international developments.  By 1980, an ICOMOS publication noted that the concept of an isolated historic building (or ‘monument’) would need to be replaced by a recognition of the historic building being an intrinsic part of its setting or of a group of buildings belonging to a neighborhood. Out of this developed the notion of ‘conservation areas’ which take in whole neighbourhoods or towns as part a recognition that such area contain intrinsic uniqueness and special qualities making them worthy of protection. The concept of a ‘heritage site’ has expanded to include historic gardens and cultural landscapes. Vernacular and industrial buildings are commonly included in the panoply of heritage types.  A broader range of disciplines contribute to our understanding of cultural heritage.  Listing of heritage items is now an accepted means by communities, governments and corporations to protect endangered historic heritage places against unsympathetic development and change.  This is reflected in the formation of a wide range of official and non-official listing authorities including local, state and nation governments as well the National Trust of Australia.  These in turn are supported by a myriad of concerned historical societies and precinct communities who take an active interest in the likely impact that any new development might have upon them (Rappoport,2010

Nation-wide, Australia has approximately 150,000 listed items including Federal, Territory, State and locally listed items. More than 90% of these is privately owned.

).

The Colonial Period of architecture in Australia came  at the tail end of the fashionable Georgian style of building in England and America. The style was typified by symmetrical facades with the main entry at the centre flanked by either two, three or four sets of subordinate openings arranged on both sides.  Many of the colonial farm houses reveal the symmetry and influence of the Georgian Style.  A prominent feature of the early Australian farm houses is the verandah which usually wrapped itself around the whole house to make access into the bedrooms possible from the outside. Window openings were mainly vertical in the Golden Section (Broadbent,1997) proportion and the use of glazed sash windows is common throughout.  Later, as prosperity prevailed, Regency style decoration was

The verandah is an essential element of the Australian Colonial house circa 1788 to 1840.

 added – mainly to the front door entries which often made use of elliptical forms as opposed to regular arches over the main entry.  This was facilitated by adding a side light on each side of the entry.  Generally, Georgian architecture paid close attention to the human scale.  It preferred simplicity and control as opposed to elaboration and decoration which came in with the Regency Style influences.

The origin of the Australian Verandah House comes from India. English military officers stationed in India as part of the British Empire brought the design with them to Australia. Hence the prevalence of the verandah in many of our earliest Colonial dwellings - 1788 to 1840 and beyond.

Australia’s earliest white settlement took place in NSW which is one of six states in the country. Sydney in NSW is where the first fleet of convicts arrived in 1788 under the stewardship of Governor Phillip who on 26 January 1788, brought with him into Sydney Cove; 751 convicts and their children along with 252 marines and their families. As the colony developed on rather uncertain prospects, eventually a farming community arose and by 1840, it had spread into the hinterland of New South Wales. Agrarian livelihoods were supplemented by imports mainly from India and Indonesia as the British East India Company had several well established trade routes in the region. However, after several waves of convict transportees that arrived in the Colony between 1789 and 1791, the settlers at Sydney Cove were critically short of food. Farms, established with convict labour were unable to meet the demands of the population. Explorers set out to find new land for cultivation. By 1820, farms in Parramatta, Liverpool, Camden, Campbelltown, Richmond, Windsor, Pitt Town and other satellites had opened up for market gardening, viticulture, sheep grazing and wool manufacture. These farms and pastures all depended on an abundant source of free convict labour to survive. Convicts were assigned to farmers under strict conditions known as the Assignment System. Governor Macquarie who was the fifth governor in NSW served from 1810 to 1821. He had a leading role in the social, economic and architectural development of the colony. His term of office coincided with an increase in the number of convicts. His solution was to establish an ambitious programme of public works (new buildings, towns, roads and farms) to help absorb these numbers. He encouraged well-behaved convicts into the wider community through tickets-of-leave. Macquarie is considered to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century. He applied his experience as a British officer in India to the business of domestic and civil construction. It was therefore not fortuitous that the so called ‘verandah house’ based on the Indian prototype became the standard for domestic farm buildings.

In the age of corporatisation, the public realm has shrunk.  The public realm comprises public goods  like hospitals, education, the Internet, public parks and heritage.  Most governments in the developed world today are ruled under a neo-liberal agenda  This means that public infrastructure provisioning is rolled out by corporations on behalf of governments.  It is called PPPs – Public Private Partnerships. These partnerships are responsible for building our schools, our rail, our roads, our sewerage treatment works and many other forms of infrastructure.  The government relies upon such corporations to deliver public sector provisioning.  The government itself does not produce so much as facilitate the production of these goods.  However, the corporations that deliver the goods are bound by shareholder interests.  This makes these corporations more answerable to profit than it does to the needs of the common man. Heritage places can be defined as both public and private assets. A little known fact is that more than 90% of the listed stock in Australia is privately owned, yet it is regulated by government agencies. The listing of heritage buildings is motivated by the public’s concern for the preservation and conservation of important heritage places. However, there is also the privately owned component. Our heritage management systems in Australia do not acknowledge the private burden of heritage that is carried by owners. The burden is constituted by the cost of maintenance as well as the loss of potential to re-develop land under a heritage listing. The system has no built-in mechanism to address this.  Listing agencies naively assume that listing of itself is sufficient to control the heritage  asset insofar as the public interest is concerned.  However, there is little control in the post-listing episode.  There is very little policing.  There is hardly any financial support for owners and thus, in consequence, there is little interest by developers in utilising the stock for adaptive re-use purposes.  This situation gives rise to a negative perception of heritage. Yet with careful analysis and proper reasoning, it is possible to revamp our heritage management policies to embrace the needs of private owners and developers without compromising the innate significance of the stock.  Rappoport is committed to formulating such policies and is devoted to the resolution of balancing the needs of private owners with that of the public interest concern.

Heritage policies need to be crafted in order to better address the needs of private owners. The system needs to be revamped to make it worthwhile for owners, developers and incoming purchasers. Their needs are required to inform heritage policies for the future because the current system is alienating and dis-incentivising.

The NSW heritage management system is devoid of incentives making it worthwhile for owners, developers and incoming purchasers to embrace its spiritual and significance values. The system barely acknowledges that owners become the de facto curators of the stock. They get no acknowledgement never mind financial assistance. When they go to Council to seek information about making changes to their listed buildings, they are invariably met with opprobrium and distrust. This is not good for heritage. It alienates owners and developers from the stock. The trend needs to be radically reversed. Rappoport stands for a complete overhaul of the NSW Heritage Management System. Government agencies now have to start working creatively in search of affordable solutions for owners and not complicate processes unnecessarily.

Certainty in cultural heritage designation i.e. the listing of heritage properties is fraught with doubt.  Notwithstanding, there is an assumption in society that public goods such as heritage need to be protected by governments otherwise, left purely to private market forces, such goods would simply perish.  Eventually, all funding is derived from private individuals.  This gives rise to the notion of consumer sovereignty. Good governance is a measure of the extent to which the aspirations of citizens  are either taken up or ignored by governments. Peacock proposes a ‘voucher scheme’ offered to households or associations of households through the medium of public financing. He argues that ultimately spending on heritage will follow market oriented models including national lotteries to support expenditure on public goods.

Cooke proposes that “individuals, communities, non-governmental organizations, regional and local authorities all play a role and share responsibility in protecting heritage.  Without the cooperation and active involvement of all concerned, there is little chance of success”.  He demonstrates that compensation paid to private owners of heritage is positive for the reason that it promotes economic efficiency, reduces reliance upon regulation and is equitable.  It is negative for the reason that it encourages rent seeking (non-mutually beneficial transactions) and opportunistic behaviour such as surreptitious betterment; that it is difficult to quantify and administer and; that it amounts to a cost burden upon the community.  Over reliance upon heritage regulation without compensation alienates owners and discourages investment in the sector leading ultimately to a decline the stock of heritage buildings. Paul Rappoport 3 March 2011

In the age of ‘neo-liberalism, governments in developed countries have moved progressively away from the ‘welfare state model’ towards more economic rationalist approaches .  This shift embodies a corporatized view of the world – one in which governments no longer deliver services and infrastructure directly.  Instead, they rely upon their delivery via partnerships with corporate entities through public tender processes.  Thus, the role of governments is no longer to provide infrastructure and services so much as to facilitate their delivery through corporate entities.  This phenomenon has resulted in a dependency by government upon developers to cost -effectively deliver those services.  Cost effectiveness implies that governments have the task of removing any obstacles that may stand in the way of prompt and efficient service.  Certainly, this is the trend in both the UK and Australia.  It has become known as PPPs – public private partnerships. This system works almost to perfection because it has the ability to stamp out inefficiencies and cost distortions as well as giving governments control over public service and infrastructure provisioning.  In the case of Australia’ development model, virtually all services and infrastructure such as housing, roads, rail and maintenance  are delivered in this fashion.  

Owners of heritage buildings are saddled with high maintenance costs. Listing authorities do not factor this in when deciding to list a property. Rappoport believes that it is essential to asceratin both the immediate capital costs of urgent repairs as well as ongoing maintenance costs. Owners cannot be expected to meet all these costs. The community gets the benefit of the listing without any costs to it. Governments are backwards in coming forwards with grants and financial assistance. In the end - who pays for heritage?

The dual nature of a listed heritage property’s value gave rise in the 1970s to the phenomenon of heritage listing. Conceived as a means of protecting historic places, the lists were drawn up by cultural heritage professionals. However, the lists were not indexed to any cost implications for owners. Instead, the identification of heritage places was required to meet cultural significance benchmarks only – historic, aesthetic, associational, technical and social significance. The schism between a heritage building’s real estate value and its cultural value allowed the heritage lists to grow independently of any information concerning the property’s owner, his financial position or future costs of maintenance generated by the listing. Unwittingly, this process engendered a contingent of disaffected owners who express resentment at the double bind of heritage listing which is seen by them as not only limiting future development upon their properties but imposing even more costs as a result of the listing – more costs because of a requirement to maintain the asset. The dual nature of a listed heritage property’s value gave rise in the 1970s to the phenomenon of heritage listing. Conceived as a means of protecting historic places, the lists were drawn up by cultural heritage professionals. However, the lists were not indexed to any cost implications for owners. Instead, the identification of heritage places was required to meet cultural significance benchmarks only – historic, aesthetic, associational, technical and social significance. The schism between a heritage building’s real estate value and its cultural value allowed the heritage lists to grow independently of any information concerning the property’s owner, his financial position or future costs of maintenance generated by the listing. Unwittingly, this process engendered a contingent of disaffected owners who express resentment at the double bind of heritage listing which is seen by them as not only limiting future development upon their properties but imposing even more costs as a result of the listing – more costs because of a requirement to maintain the asset. Paul Rappoport 2 March 2011

The economic benefits of cultural heritage are manifest in many forms such as tourism, sustained real estate values and a burgeoning domestic construction and maintenance industry in most of Australia’s historic centres.  The value of a heritage property can be assessed in one of two ways.  Firstly; its existence value i.e. by the simple fact that it exists as an historical marker of a previous era and secondly, its economic value based on real estate market prices.  This duality forms the basis of much debate in society because although privately owned, there is a public good component to all heritage listed buildings and places in society.   Nasser explains that conservation has three interrelated objectives; physical, spatial, and social. Physically, it is linked to building preservation.  Spatially, it is linked to townscape as a holistic entity and socially, it is concerned with users, the local community and urban population. She argues that the social dimension is the most difficult to define because factors of selection, restriction and expansion, efficient use, and viability are product focused concerns that treat physical attributes and their commercial potential in higher order that the needs of  users, residents, property owners, and those who depend upon conserved heritage environments for their livelihoods.