Expanding the National Trust’s Register

BY CHARLOTTE ANLEZARK, CONSERVATION OFFICER

An outback cemetery, a navigational obelisk and post-war housing built for refinery employees are among the latest items to be added to the National Trust Register, reflecting the ever-growing diversity of heritage sites now listed in New South Wales.

The National Trust has prepared close to 12,000 heritage listings since establishing its register in 1967. They range from lone graves to expansive landscape conservation areas, individual houses to whole streets and industrial complexes. The aim is to expand the register of culturally significant items every year, focusing particularly on evolving contemporary heritage or items endangered by development or environmental risks.

The purpose of listing an item is first and foremost for its protection. The main threats to heritage in 2023 are demolition and neglect, insensitive development and environmental risks such as climate change. Listing an item with the National Trust serves as an early, non-statutory warning that it should be conserved, and has often led to legislated heritage protection by gathering important evidence for the historical record, which is ready to hand when challenges arise. Listing can aid campaigns to save items from destruction, encourage adaptive reuse, or attract funding for appropriate conservation.

Here are some recent additions that reflect the diversity of culturally significant places across our State.

The Gold Commissioner’s House is located in the historic village of Sofala, often described as Australia’s oldest surviving goldrush town. On the banks of the Turon River near Bathurst, the town exploded into existence after gold was discovered in 1851. Both home and workplace for the local gold commissioner, the Victorian-style house was built the same year, making it one of the first buildings in the village. A two-storey dwelling constructed of local stringybark, it features twelve-pane windows and remains substantially intact after more than 170 years, adding significantly to the heritage streetscape of the village.

One of five cemeteries added to the register in 2022, the Dromore Cemetery comprises just one burial. The grave may initially appear quite humble, but its lone white marble headstone serves as an important marker for early European history in the remote Central Darling Shire and one of the first commercial enterprises on the Wilcannia-Ivanhoe stock route. Located 100 metres off the Cobb Highway, about 80 kilometres from Ivanhoe, the gravestone identifies the burial place of Charles Hillier. It is also the only tangible reminder of a store and post office branch that once stood nearby, at a watering point on the stock route known as Twelve-Mile Tank. Sent by his employer to establish the business, Charles had been there less than three months when he died in September 1880, at the age of 62. His grave is the earliest recorded European burial site in the area. Given its isolated location, those who grieved Charles’s death must have gone to substantial lengths to give him a proper memorial.

The listing of six obelisks in the Eastern Suburbs and Lower North Shore provides a rare insight into the history of navigation at the entrance to Sydney Harbour. While contemporary travellers can use satellite navigation systems and the later lighthouses to guide their journeys, the captains and crews of ships entering the harbour in the 1800s had no such luxury, with the treacherous headlands bringing many to grief. Constructed between 1830 and the late 1850s, the obelisks at East Parsley Bay, West Parsley Bay, Green Point, Obelisk Bay and North Head were developed to guide ships safely into the harbour and prevent them being wrecked along the Sow and Pigs Reef on the eastern side of the main shipping channel between Middle Head and South Head.

A small group of modernist houses are an example of the more contemporary listings now found on the register. Located at the site of the former Australian Oil Refinery in Kurnell, the six houses are seminal early works of the distinguished architect Harry Seidler. With the transport industry booming after the Second World War, Caltex made a controversial purchase of swampland in Kurnell, clearing native vegetation to construct an oil refinery. Seidler was commissioned to design a group of dwellings as part of the industrial complex to allow technical staff to be housed on site. The National Trust listing card notes that the earlymodern houses would have been considered daring and futuristic when they were built in 1955, reflecting the bold character of midcentury design. The low-scale group displays the architect’s keen interest in simple, open floorplans and flat- roofed forms, using a limited palette of materials and large areas of glass to create spatial continuity between the interior and exterior.

If you would like to research a listed property, help update the information for your property, or suggest a property for future listing, contact the National Trust’s advocacy team at advocacy@nationaltrust.com.au

If you own a house or building in NSW that is listed by the National Trust, you can apply for a plaque to denote your home's heritage status. Contact the National Trust’s archives team at archives@ nationaltrust.com.au