Lesh, James P.

“The National Estate (and the City), 1969–75: A Significant Australian

Heritage Phenomenon.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 2 (2019): 113–
27. [Link]
The National Estate (and the city), 1969–75: a significant Australian heritage
phenomenon
James P. Lesh
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

Introduction
When Australian Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam first employed the term ‘national
estate’ on 2 July 1969 at the University of Sydney’s Great Hall in Camperdown, he
specifically related it to urban preservation (Canberra Times, 3 July 1969; Sydney
Morning Herald (SMH), 3 July 1969). Three months later at Broadmeadows Town Hall
in Melbourne, still on the campaign trail for that year’s federal election, Whitlam (1969,
22) used the evocative line: ‘[The Federal Government] should see itself as the curator
and not the liquidator of the national estate’ (Canberra Times, 16 October 1969). While
this line would become popularised – opening the final report of the Inquiry into the
National Estate of 1973–4 – Whitlam effectively selected the term ‘national estate’ on a
whim. Yet the national estate at once shaped and settled as a lynchpin for regulatory,
management and popular (community) heritage understandings for at least the next
four decades. From Camperdown and Broadmeadows, Whitlam and his inner circle
had initiated a reorientation of Australia’s relationship to its heritage. They raised the
stakes in terms of the preservation of heritage, particularly in cities, making it a federal
government issue and of national concern. Perhaps at no other point in Australian
history had issues around urban or even cultural heritage been elevated to such a
prominent place in the national consciousness. The national estate itself became a
conceptual canvas onto which ambitious meanings were projected by the eventual
Whitlam Government (after the Labor Party’s December 1972 election victory), along
with policymakers, activists and others. To the discomfort of not only laissez-faire
liberals but also the Government’s closest advisors, its reach became potentially
unlimited. In this view, the national estate was unrealisable in practice and, ultimately,
the realists trumped the idealists. Although the national estate fortified the Australian
heritage movement, its nebulousness proved challenging for politicians and
policymakers. It was an inspired yet flawed idea, which nevertheless produced
Australia’s first national heritage regime (c.f., Sonkoly 2017, 4-5, 153).
To historicise the unique phenomenon of the Australian national estate, as well as
the role it played furthering urban heritage preservation, this article traces the term and
its related ideas from its nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century usages in the
United States and Britain. It then considers its reworking by Whitlam and his
governments between 1969 and 1975 and that period’s legacies for national
involvement in urban heritage regulation and management. Methodologically, the
national estate is historicised as producing a heritage regime. It was at once an
ideological and theoretical conception for heritage and also a practical way of
managing and doing heritage, specifically for the Australian historic environment. As an
Australian conception for heritage, it fitted with ‘new nationalism’, the Whitlam
Government’s modernising, progressive and optimistic agenda.
As an expansive, democratic, interventionist, internationalist, and ultimately political
conception for heritage, the national estate’s strengths were also its weaknesses. It
informed the integrated approach to heritage adopted by Australia ICOMOS and the
1979 Burra Charter. Ultimately, its novelty and power to coerce in order to protect
places faded over the following years and decades. While municipal and state
protections for heritage places increased, successive federal governments shied away
from heritage involvement, particularly in cities. Put differently, what difference did the
employment of the term and idea of ‘the national estate’ have for Australian heritage
understandings and management in the early 1970s and subsequently? By the start of
the twenty-first century, though perceptible by 1981, the national estate, subsumed into
the Australian heritage lexicon, no longer meant what Whitlam and his circle had
intended. After contextualising Whitlam’s national estate and its urban origins, the
following sections map the international connections that shaped the 1970’s heritage
moment. This informs the article’s subsequent examination of how the national estate
was appropriated and popularised by heritage activists in Sydney, Perth and
elsewhere. National Estate Inquiry Records from 1973–74 provide a unique, once-off
national snapshot of the state of Australian (urban) preservation at this time.
Meanwhile, to establish an independent federal heritage body, the Australian Heritage
Commission, Canberra politicians and policymakers enfeebled the national estate. By
relating the national estate to the Australian city, and drawing on a range of
underutilised archival sources, I argue that the strengths and weaknesses of the
national estate were apparent by 1975, meaning Australia’s federal heritage
regime was established on shakier foundations than hitherto appreciated.

The National Estate (and the city)

The idea of the national estate has a distinguishably Australian history. It is bound to
the nineteenth-century nation state and colonialism as reworked by British, US and
Australian advocates in the mid-twentieth century. Whitlam and his inner circle
reformulated the national estate, relating it to both built and natural heritage. Following
their election victory the previous December, the Whitlam Government established its
Inquiry into the National Estate in May 1973, which brought the term into national public
discourse.
The Report of the National Estate (RNE 1974) divided the national estate into four
sections or domains of heritage: the built environment, the natural environment,
Aboriginal sites and other special areas, and cultural property (leading to the Piggott
Report into museums). While the built environment incorporated buildings and places,
the natural environment comprised flora and fauna. The act of inquiring into Aboriginal
heritage must be understood in the context of the New Archaeology movement
(Mulvaney 1996). Its object of study was understood as Aboriginal pre-history and its
artefacts. Researchers (Byrne 1996, 97ff; Smith 2000, 111; Ireland 2002, 19–20) have
written about the political, social and cultural implications of examining what was at the
time understood as a fossilised or ossified Indigenous past. These four domains of
heritage made up the national estate: ‘the things that you keep’ (RNE 1974, para. 1.1).
This sketch for the national estate must be contrasted against what it subsequently
represented for Australian heritage. According to public historians Paul Ashton and
Jennifer Cornwall (2006, 56), the national estate effectively settled as meaning heritage
places assessed by the Australian Heritage Commission as being of national
significance, based on aesthetic, historic, scientific or social value, and therefore
entered into the federal Register of the National Estate (RNE 1974, 35, 212–213).
To examine this shift as it applied to a particular domain of heritage, this article
focuses on the relationship between the national estate and cities. Within the rubric of
the national estate, reflecting 1970s terminology, the built environment examined by the
Inquiry included what today is called cultural and urban heritage – itself a multifarious
term that extends from individual buildings to historic landscapes to personal narratives
(Hayden 1995; Fairclough et al. 2008). In the 1970s lexicon, the terms historic,
built/building, heritage preservation and urban preservation constituted a domain of
heritage, a domain that operated in contrast to natural or environmental conservation,
and other separate though overlapping domains of heritage including Indigenous
archaeology and object or artefact management.
The futures of both the national estate and cities were perceived as intimately bound
(Lloyd and Troy 1981; Orchard 1999). As with heritage, the Whitlam Government’s
agenda for cities was without precedent. Its urban and heritage concerns also
overlapped. For urbanist and historian Hugh Stretton (1989, xiii), in public discourse
these policies ‘came to be remembered or slandered – as extravagant follies which had
helped him [Whitlam] fall’. Once the Whitlam Government came to power in December
1972, responsibility for the national estate was shared by Melburnian and Minister for
Environment and Conservation Moss Cass, and Sydneysider Tom Uren, who headed
the new Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD).
Historians and urban researchers have rightly recognised the Whitlam Government
period as a highpoint for both the Australian heritage movement and federal
interventionism in cities (Burton and Dodson 2014; Davison 2016, 214). Although
perceptions of Australian heritage changed over this period, there is a significant earlier
history. From Federation in 1901, in ways typical of many modern nations, the
Australian Federal Government maintained old buildings and other historical assets,
along with Canberra and its environs once it was selected as the national capital in
1913. Under the Australian Constitution, national parks and town planning – loosely,
natural and urban conservation, respectively – were generally the preserve of State
Governments (Boer and Wiffen 2005). From the postwar period, the state-based
National Trusts in Australia’s cities and towns led heritage efforts, and a small cohort of
private and public planners and architects (such as E.H. Farmer in New South Wales
(NSW)) restored buildings and protected sightlines (Jack 1980; Freestone 1995). By
the late 1960s, many inner-suburban resident action groups had been established and
were making their presence felt in the suburbs of the Australian city, and subsequently
in their many submissions to the Inquiry (Howe, Nichols, and Davison 2013, chap. 2). In
response to mass postwar redevelopment, often in inner-suburban Labor
constituencies, these activists demanded heritage protections, and improved local
amenity and greater involvement in shaping their cities (Lloyd and Troy 1981, 27).
The national estate idea therefore rose to prominence in the context of strong urban
heritage activism. Activists’ demands informed the national estate, flowing from the
late1960s-onwards suburban campaign trail to Canberra’s Parliament House and
interwar and postwar office blocks in the early 1970s. As presented by planning
historians Sharon Veale and Robert Freestone’s sketch of the national estate (2012),
the Whitlam Government’s urban and national estate initiatives cannot be disentangled.
This reflected historian Graeme Davison’s argument that the national estate emerged
out of the Whitlam Government’s urban agenda and affirmed heritage as a national
moral issue (Davison and McConville 1991, 3–10, 23–25). In contrast, heritage today
perhaps lacks the universalist moral prerogative it once held, and so its history requires
fresh critical appraisals to reveal its many ideological impulses (Smith 2006, 110;
Gentry 2015). Furthermore, the Australian transition from Whitlam’s national estate
rhetoric as recounted by Veale and Freestone, to realised heritage policy as critiqued
by Ashton and Cornwall (among others), from activism to managerialism, has been
subject to few substantive critical accounts (Bennett 1988, 11–13; Ashton and Cornwall
2006; Witcomb and Gregory 2010, 12, 247ff).
To undertake this investigation necessitates an examination of the Whitlam period,
particularly around the Inquiry, where debates over the national estate occurred.
Despite the national estate’s historical significance and the recent upsurge of interest in
the Whitlam era, many of the national estate records at the National Archives and the
National Library of Australia had not yet been opened by researchers. Moreover, the
international sources that influenced this Australian moment demand further
interrogation. The national estate inquiry, like the Whitlam Government’s Royal
Commission on Human Relationships as studied by historian Michelle Arrow, ‘was
groundbreaking in its scale and scope. . .It served as a place where ordinary
Australians could [critique] existing laws and policies’ (Arrow 2016, 322). It produced
dramatic shifts for the regulation, management and popular understandings of heritage.
For the heritage scholars and practitioners, knowledge of the national estate is
essential for historicising the critical, regulatory and managerial underpinnings of the
field. The national estate is one of Australia’s most significant and unique heritage
ideas.
Interpreting this national historical moment via its diverse archive and the methods of
urban history contributes another dimension. Urban historians are acutely aware of the
disjuncture between ideology and policy, imaginary and reality, and the limitations of
the archival record in historicising lived experiences. After all, cities are powerful social
laboratories where ideas, social processes and practices are at once developed and
implemented, albeit never as straightforwardly as intended (Tilly 1996; Soja 2003). The
national estate similarly reflected such disjunctures. Its archive is partial and its
realisation was haphazard. Only by taking a broad approach, accepting that the
national estate’s archive is scattered – fusing personal records and oral histories,
periodicals and policy and inquiry sources – is it possible to historicise at once its
achievements and shortcomings. It is also important to be mindful that any national
estate account is invariably incomplete, arguably like the historical moment itself, cut
short by the dismissal of the Whitlam Government by Governor General John Kerr in
November 1975. This article therefore casts a fresh light on how we understand
Australian heritage, including its theoretical basis and management approaches, via the
national estate conception.

Distinguishing the national estate

The Australian national estate only ever had an approximate relationship to the
international English- language meaning of the term. The Australian Oxford Dictionary
(2004a) defines it as ‘(Aust.) those components of the natural and cultural environment
that have aesthetic, historic, scientific, or social significance to present and future
generations of Australians, regarded collectively’. Outside Australia, the term ‘national
estate’ is absent from specialist or regular dictionaries. Drawing from the Federal
Government Legislation Australian Heritage Commission Act (1975), this definition
resonates with notions of heritage management. Only in Australian English dictionaries
does the term ‘national estate’ appear, revealing the unique place the term holds in
Australia’s history of heritage preservation. Whitlam effectively introduced the national
estate into Australian public discourse (White 1981, 169).
To legitimise this fresh approach to heritage, his government, along with the Inquiry
and other policymakers, repurposed various genealogies of the term to elevate its
apparent loftiness and import. Such an approach reflected the general mood, a period
which witnessed the increased exposure, activism, regulation, professionalisation,
corporatisation and theorisation of heritage, not only in Australia but also across
Western countries. For historian and geographer David Lowenthal (1976, 1985, 114–
116), who from the early 1970s visited and wrote on Australia, new-world countries felt
uneasy about the significance of their heritage. At that time, they tended to rewrite their
heritage narratives with reference to traditions elsewhere, particularly Europe, or by
appealing to primordial events closer to home, such as Indigenous artefacts. Despite
his advancement of the myth of Australia being a new nation (in contrast to its now-
recognised deep Indigenous history), Lowenthal’s point was evidenced in the framing
of the Australian national estate in global terms, while at the same time locally
orientating the assessment of heritage significance.
Such disquiet simultaneously inflected the direction of the national estate and had to
be reconciled with Whitlam’s new nationalism. After 23 years of successive
conservative Federal Liberal Governments, with the coming of Labor’s Whitlam to the
national stage in the 1960s, the national outlook was seemingly optimistic. In the words
of Donald Horne, this was a ‘time of hope’ (Horne 1980). Amid this new nationalism,
Whitlam developed his economic, social and cultural initiatives, including the pursuit of
natural and cultural heritage. Perceptions around the term heritage were, however,
already mixed. Often considered a conservative or elitist concern, it did not necessarily
reflect the Whitlam’s progressive and modernising agenda (Davison 1991, 19). Whitlam
(1974) sought to debunk the notion ‘that conservation is a “middle-class” issue’ or
exclusive ‘preserve of the privileged’. Rather, Whitlam conjured the national estate and
heritage as being a progressive matter, belonging to everybody, not necessarily tied to
traditional architectural or historical canons, and a matter of the future. This rhetoric
fitted with his idea of new nationalism and its forward-looking orientation. Employing
yardsticks closer to home also meant vernacular Australian spaces, like the inner
suburbs, were newly perceived as being valuable and justifying targeted federal and
municipal statutory protection.
Inquiry committee member and first chairman of the Australian Heritage
Commission, David Yencken (1981) wrote how the term national estate ‘gave a special
freshness and flavour to the tired, hackneyed heritage alternative’. Educated at the
University of Cambridge, Yencken was a founder of Melbourne’s Merchant Builders
(which was notable for its relatively affordable architecturally designed project homes).
Still, ‘heritage’ was a more common term for the preservation of places. On the one
hand, the national estate sought to capture the unbridled excitement of the period: ‘the
zeitgeist’ (Veale and Freestone 2012, 13). Yet, as historians James Curran and Stuart
Ward (2010, 6–7, 61ff) have suggested, this new nationalism was equally sanguine:
hopeful, yet inflicted with national anxieties about Australia’s place in the world. On the
other hand, then, the national estate embodied these ambivalences, particularly with
how it was framed in public discourse, at the moments when Whitlam and others
suggested its apparent longevity by referencing international authorities, while also
positing it as a homegrown concern. The Whitlam Government pursued two national
estate initiatives. Uren established a national estate division within his new urban
department, which issued grants that funded some early heritage studies. This
programme was criticised externally as well as from within his department as lacking
robustness, (Lloyd and Troy 1981, 182–183). The second initiative was the Inquiry,
which Uren (1973) and Cass jointly announced on 21 May 1973 (despite some
animosity between them). This inquiry brought pressing issues around heritage to the
forefront of national agenda, reflected in the desire of its committee to have it upgraded
to a Royal Commission. Its report, popularly called the Hope Report after inquiry
chairman Robert Hope of the NSW Supreme Court, was released in late 1974. Other
committee members included the conservationists Milo Dunphy, Judith-Wright
McKinney, Len Webb and Keith Vallance. Expertise on the built environment lay with
Sydneysider Reg Walker, director of the NSW National Trust, the urbane Melburnian
Yencken, and the trailblazing Adelaide architecture lecturer Judith Brine. Every
appointee to the Inquiry was known for their commitment to heritage.
The Whitlam Government was sympathetic to the concerns of the Australian heritage
and environmental movements, even though its record had been overshadowed by its
damming of Lake Pedder in Tasmania and its more celebrated social reforms (Hutton
and Connors 1999, 134– 135). Whitlam’s policy positions (1972) were more visionary
than those offered by the Liberal Party at the time. His urban and heritage policies
intersected in terms of the national estate, which equally incorporated nascent
discussions about urban sustainability and participatory urbanism (Mulligan and Hill
2001, 265; Freestone 2014, 24–27). The national estate therefore fused overlapping
yet distinguishable realms of heritage, including the tangible and intangible, the cultural
and ecological, and natural conservation and built-environment preservation practices.
Taking its cues from the Whitlam Government, the Inquiry report adopted an
adversarial posture. The Draft Report of early 1974 opened with the title ‘Findings and
Recommendations’, followed by the emphasised statement: ‘The Australian
Government has inherited a National Estate which has been downgraded, disregarded
and neglected’. This powerful, critical summation was part of the Inquiry’s effort to
inspire decisive and meaningful heritage efforts at all levels of government and among
the wider community. The report also touched on broader themes including the scope
of the national estate, sustainability, property rights and the role of government. Uren’s
department circulated this draft report across federal and state governments and
agencies, reflecting a general acceptance of the findings. In the published report of late
1974, however, the ‘downgraded, disregarded and neglected’ assessment was buried
in the conclusion of the report on page 334. Otherwise, the draft and final reports were
practically identical.
Corresponding to a transition for the Australian national estate, the final report
instead opened with the following three framing quotations (emphasised in original):

‘The economic case for an orderly and far-sightedly managed national estate is so
overwhelming that one really need not speak of national pride or the need for
beauty.’
Clough Williams-Ellis (1943)

‘. . .we must expand the conception of conservation to meet the imperious

problems of the new age. We must develop new instruments of foresight and
protection and nurture in order to recover the relationship between man and
nature and make sure that the national estate we pass on to our multiplying
descendants is green and flourishing.’
Kennedy (1963)

‘[The Australian Government] should see itself as the curator and not the liquidator of
the national estate.’

Whitlam (1969)
This new opening better typified the Whitlam Government’s optimism than the earlier
critical appraisal. It appealed to US President John F. Kennedy, British architect Clough
Williams-Ellis and Whitlam himself in its framing. On 19 September 1974, Uren tabled
the report in Parliament, incorporating a reference to Whitlam’s ‘curator and not
liquidator’ line in his House of Representatives speech (1974a). In addition to the
previously distributed draft, 500 glossy, illu strated and bound copies of the final report
were professionally printed. But where did this new opening come from?
These quotations were selected by public servants as part of preparing the report for
publication (Inquiry records). In a somewhat sloppy effort, the year of the Whitlam
quotation was attributed to 1970 rather than its first usage in 1969, and the Williams-
Ellis quotation was dated to 1943 instead of 1931. Someone at Uren’s department even
jotted down their confusion in the margins of a circulated document about ‘what all this
means!’ (Inquiry records n.d.), namely, the relationship between these quotations and
the national estate. Hope (n.d., 1) was not especially familiar with Williams-Ellis.
Yencken (2002) similarly was uncertain about why Williams-Ellis – a man he later
described as ‘crazy’ – appeared in the report. He assumed a link between Kennedy’s
and Williams-Ellis’ national estates, a connection which has not been, and possibly
cannot be, substantiated. The links between the Australian national estate and these
British and US sources were, in effect, constituted in the process of preparing the
report for publication, in order to produce foundational myths for the new heritage
regime.
These quotations, moreover, have distorted understandings of this historical moment
and therefore the national estate in theoretical, policy and popular perspective. The
extent to which Kennedy and Williams-Ellis impacted Whitlam, Uren, the Inquiry and
then the Australian Heritage Commission in formulating the national estate has been
exaggerated. This matters because the Williams-Ellis, Kennedy and Whitlam framing
for an Australian national estate and therefore heritage did not end with the published
report. Rather, these quotations were reprinted in publications produced by heritage
policymakers, consultants and activists, to contextualise and conceptualise what
heritage meant in Australia, a practice that continued into the twenty-first century
(Curriculum Development Centre and Australian Heritage Commission 1980; Australian
Council of National Trusts 1990; Australian Heritage Commission 2002, 8; National
Estate 2004b; Wikipedia entry at 25 January 2018). These quotations were consciously
alluring, proposing progressive heritage futures, as advocated by the Whitlam
Government, the Inquiry, and heritage activists. Problematically, however, this
downplays that the national estate was an Australian and specifically Whitlam creation.
The report proposed origins for the national estate where they only tentatively existed.
Such an approach serves to reproduce at once the optimism and anxieties of the
period and obscures the Australian national estate’s inventiveness and possibilities as
well as its limitations and vicissitudes at the time and over subsequent decades.

Mapping the national estate

By exploring its Australian and international genealogies, the inventiveness of the
national estate becomes apparent. It most explicitly responded to calls from heritage
activists for greater government involvement in heritage. Whitlam later reflected (1985,
546–47) that he ‘picked up the term “national estate” from President Kennedy’. His then
chief of staff and speechwriter, Race Matthews, originally suggested the term to him. In
email correspondence, Matthews told me that Whitlam ‘loved it’. Intriguingly, Matthews
(1993, 9) has described the policy making process of Whitlam’s office: ‘a Whitlam line
on many key topics was likely to have been laid down in earlier speeches, which had
the status of revealed truth, and would only with extreme difficulty be changed’. One
such line of ‘revealed truth’ was the national estate with its ‘curator not liquidator’
provocation. With this in mind and also drawing from the Inquiry report, three sources
for Whitlam’s national estate demand investigation: its historical usage in the English-
speaking world; its subsequent employment in twentieth-century Britain by Williams-
Ellis; and its adoption in the US by Kennedy.
Across the English-speaking world the term national estate was used in the
nineteenth century to refer to property possessed by a nation or a colony. Historian and
lawyer Tim Bonyhady (1997,
147) suggested that a national estate was practically synonymous with crown property,
land or possessions as endowed with national (or colonial) importance, such as a
‘national’ gallery or a ‘national’ park. Along with Britain, a national estate was also often
identified in British colonies such as Ireland, India and Australia. On 30 September
1882, for instance, a correspondent for The Times asked from Sydney, ‘are we acting
as wise trustees of a great national estate and what are we laying for the future?’. In a
colonial context, a national estate was dependent on the dispossession of Indigenous
peoples. Assuming terra nullius, the Cyclopedia of Victoria, issued in 1903, had an
entry for the national estate: ‘in order to ascertain how much of it has been alienated,
and how much remains in the hands of the Crown’ (Smith 1903, 1, 223). Similar usage
for the term – related to land use though not heritage – continued in Australia until the
1960s (e.g., Canberra Times, 10 August 1960, 2 April 1966). Based on ideas of shared
interest in property, bound to ideologies of material progress, oriented towards the
future, governments were positioned as custodians of the national estate on behalf of
the people. Definitely problematic, this was nevertheless a potentially radical concept
given its socialist inflection.
Williams-Ellis, alternatively, employed the term in interwar Britain in ways that
clashed with those progressive tendencies. The precise quotation selected to furnish
the 1974 inquiry report was drawn from his recent autobiography (Williams-Ellis 1971,
124). Williams-Ellis had paraphrased his article published as ‘Design for England’ in the
Manchester Guardian on 18 April 1931. An architect known for devising the Italianate
village of Portmeirion in North Wales, Williams-Ellis promoted a particular kind of anti-
modernism and anti-urbanism. He sought an imagined and nostalgic rural ideal
England. British Historians have argued that Williams-Ellis’ ideology was authoritarian,
elitist, nostalgic, ahistorical, and advanced damaging forms of nationalism and
Englishness (Chase 1989, 143–144; Mandler 1997, 172). His national estate evoked
his personal aesthetic ideal, and his rendering of the term failed to catch on in Britain.
Moreover, Williams-Ellis pontificated on Australian urban heritage. In Sydney in 1947
he quipped to a reporter, ‘By God, what a site! By man, what a mess!’ (Williams-Ellis
1949, 30). It might be considered an embarrassment that Williams-Ellis featured so
prominently as part of the national estate, given how dismissive he was of the
Australian city and his narrow view of modernity, beauty and history, which were
basically antithetical to Whitlam’s new nationalism and 1970s Australia.
The ties between the Australian and US notions of a national estate were less
tenuous. Whitlam’s urban advisor Patrick Troy sought deeper national estate
genealogies from the US. He found them in Johnson’s ‘new frontier’ and Kennedy’s
‘new society’ politics (Lloyd and Troy 1981, 17). Unlike Britain and similar to Australia,
the US had an abundance of public land, a frontier, which had given impetus to
conservation and ‘national estate politics’ from the 1930s (Merrill 2002, 165). For
Roosevelt, the national estate was about prudent environmental management,
particularly in the Western states (Roosevelt 1937). In 1963 Kennedy introduced the
environmental consciousness raising The Quiet Crisis, written by his Secretary of the
Interior Stewart Udall. The quotation that appeared in the Inquiry report was drawn from
that introduction (Kennedy 1963). Johnson did not use the term national estate but did
have a conservationist agenda (Daynes and Sussman 2010, 56ff). He increased
federal investment in cities, which included funding for heritage preservation (Wilson,
Glickman, and Lynn 2015, chaps. 10, 11, 12). In the US, the national estate therefore
represented the potentialities of under-utilised land, albeit mindfully, irrespective of
whether it was publicly or privately owned. Aside from Roosevelt’s and then Kennedy’s
passing use, the notion of a national estate adjusted for cultural heritage never gained
momentum in the US.
Once Whitlam and Matthews had settled on the national estate line, Troy had to
make it work for policy purposes. Matthews or Troy were the likely author of the ‘curator
not liquidator’ phrase. Employing the national estate was an odd choice, given that
what the Australian national estate came to evoke was already understood as natural
conservation and built environment preservation, and broadly heritage. The idea of a
national estate itself still resonated with its earlier (progressive albeit colonial)
connotations. When Kennedy and Johnson spoke of environmental conservation and
historic preservation, they were eliciting two distinct fields of heritage practice, and the
latter (cultural heritage) was not incorporated within the US conception of its national
estate (United States Conference of Mayors 1966). Australia’s national estate revealed
the potential for policymakers to reshape language and productively mistranslate ideas
across borders, as evidenced by the later claims that the nascent Australian heritage
regime utilised as its model Williams-Ellis’ or Kennedy’s national estate.
As advisor to Whitlam and Uren, Troy merged these various strands within the rubric
of the Australian national estate. Davison (2016, 214) attributes the ‘increased impetus’
of Troy and other policymakers ‘to conserve liveable historic precincts through the
National Estate’ in part to Stretton and his ‘eloquent advocacy’ in his ground-breaking
Ideas for Australian Cities of 1971. Although the first edition of this urban treatise made
no mention of a national estate (and subsequent editions used the terms national
estate and heritage interchangeably), Stretton’s social-democratic rendering of
preservation – that sophisticated and equitable urban planning must incorporate
heritage principles – provided another political motivation. Therefore, Williams-Ellis’
national estate had little relevance, given Whitlam’s ambition to democratise heritage
by expanding its remit and overcoming its elitist connotations. The US exemplars were
somewhat more relevant. From 1969, however ambiguous, the Australian national
estate had become a unique, hybrid and home-grown conception for heritage.
Locating the national estate
The national estate advanced a broad remit for Australian heritage. Yet it eluded
precise definition, never identifying what must be preserved, not suggesting an agreed
language for heritage, and offering no process or threshold for determining levels of
historical or architectural, local or national significance. Such issues would become the
focus of the nascent heritage industry over the coming decades, but Australian federal
government policymakers immediately identified the apparent failure of national estate
advocates to produce an implementable policy. The national estate’s open-endedness
was an example of a strength and a weakness: it encouraged activism and expanded
the remit of heritage preservation thereby promoting heritage innovation (such as the
Burra Charter 1979; James Kerr’s The Conservation Plan 1982, which made practical
steps towards resolving some of those issues). But it also presented challenges for
heritage policymaking, assessments and property owners. In practice, the national
estate was located at specific places, often those that were under threat of degradation
or demolition. The potential scope and reach of the national estate might be read via
the specific places identified by Whitlam, Uren and heritage activists.
On the campaign trail between 1969 and 1973, Whitlam moulded the national estate
with practical examples, guided by where he delivered his speech. The Little Desert
featured in his speech at Broadmeadows in 1969 because it was subject to a
development proposal that had become mired in Victorian state politics (Robin 1998).
His frequent references to the Great Barrier Reef were a result of the prominent place it
held in the advocacy of the conservation movement (Bowen 2002, chap. 19). Whitlam’s
1969 national estate most closely resembled the US conception, whereby cities
impacted the national estate, but seemingly only insofar as their pollution and unbridled
growth intruded on natural environments. During these early days, therefore, Whitlam
(1968, 1970) was inconsistent about whether urban heritage was included in his
national estate (Hocking 2008, 1, 48–50).
At first, Whitlam’s national estate also failed to capture the public imagination, in part
because of its interventionist tendencies. In newspaper accounts of Whitlam’s
Broadmeadows and Sydney Great Hall speeches – the latter of which included the
evocative ‘curator not liquidator’ line – only the Canberra Times reported the term on 3
July and 16 October 1969. Rather, he was criticised for this initiative. On 7 July 1969,
the Sydney Morning Herald censured Whitlam for ‘believ[ing] that public servants in
Canberra can plan Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane better than the poor, ignorant
peasants who live there’. This comment reflected the broader backlash against urban
planning of the late 1960s in its unbridled postwar pursuit of scientific, rationalist and
technocratic utopias at the expense of actuallyexisting communities and cities. As a
committed Fabian socialist, Uren (1971) took these kinds of criticism in his stride,
holding the view that postwar urban planning missteps should not be directly tied to its
interventionist tendences. He favoured targeted and respresentive regulation for
heritage, even if that meant disrupting private property rights, a position antithetical to
laissez-faire, free-market ideology.
Once Uren related the national estate to urban heritage during the 1973 election
campaign, entering the term into inner-suburban discourse, it was popularly adopted. An
advocate for heritage, Uren had two priorities: inner-city urban preservation and the
Sydney Harbour foreshore, corresponding in his mind to ‘things created by people and
nature’ respectively (Uren 1994, 271). At public rallies on Sydney’s streets, Uren
identified, among other places, the Rocks in Sydney as a part of the national estate
(SMH, 5 June 1973). Subject to a proposed comprehensive redevelopment scheme by
the NSW Askin Liberal Government, heritage activists were campaigning to preserve
this area, which led to the union movement’s imposition of ‘green bans’ on the
neighbourhood to prevent demolitions (Burgmann and Burgmann 2017, chap. 11).
Associating the national estate with this heritage flashpoint hastened the term’s
adoption, including by prominent unionist Jack Mundey (SMH, 9 January 1974). Such
efforts in Sydney transformed the national estate into a popular concern.
After Labor won the December 1973 election, Uren sought to translate the
momentum generated by the incoming Whitlam Government and its national estate into
policy and so preservation outcomes by establishing its national estate inquiry. After
Uren conjured the national estate as ‘the landscape of the lower Blue Mountains, the
foreshores of Sydney Harbour, that clump of lemon- scented gums, spotted gums,
between Appin and Campbelltown’, Whitlam reportedly replied, ‘My god Tom, we’ve got
to have something more definitive than that!’ (Uren 1996, pt. 4). The newly- proposed
inquiry was equally about defining the national estate as it was transforming the
national estate from campaign rhetoric into realised heritage policy. Reflecting the
Whitlam Government’s desire to give people a greater say in shaping their
environment, a prototypical instance of participatory urbanism, part of the Inquiry’s
remit was to take submissions. After advertising in newspapers, it received some 650
of them. Over 200 submissions related to urban heritage, and were written by local,
state and federal governments and agencies, professional organisations, residential
action groups and National Trusts, academics and others.
Submission authors projected onto the national estate their desires about the kinds
of places that they believed must be preserved for posterity. Intersecting with heritage
flashpoints, submissions identified many places by name, from the Palace Hotel in
Perth to late-nineteenth-century inner- suburban Carlton in Melbourne, from the
colonial-era Rocks in Sydney to ANZAC Square in Brisbane, built in the 1930s as a
memorial to the Great War. In Perth, for instance, the Palace Guards, which were
seeking to prevent the Commonwealth Bank’s demolition of the 1897 Palace Hotel on
St Georges Terrace, employed the ‘national estate’ in its advocacy and ephemera, and
received statements of support from the Inquiry (‘Palace Hotel File,’ 1969–88).
Counting the National Trusts’ classification lists, the Inquiry was presented with
thousands of potential heritage places. Every kind of heritage value might be read into
this substantial archive: conventional values such as aesthetic, historic, scientific and
social; critical values such as gender, race, class, sexuality and age; places
representing residential, industrial, government, commercial, spiritual and other
themes; privately and publicly owned; and much more. Hope wrote (1974, 25) that ‘The
concept of a “National Estate” is not difficult to grasp, although there are many different
views as to what falls within it’. From the perspective of heritage activists, the national
estate’s reach was practically unlimited. By appealing to intuition, Hope acknowledged
the challenge of precisely defining the national estate, an issue which the Inquiry left
unresolved.

Affirming the national estate

The Inquiry report of 1974 reiterated the expansiveness of the national estate.
Sketching the national estate as ‘the things that you keep’ was consistent with the
rhetoric offered by Whitlam, Uren and their advisors over the past five years. It also
called it an ‘all-embracing concept’, reflecting the breadth of the submissions (RNE
1974, para 1.1, 277). The report offered numerous concrete recommendations,
including the establishment of an independent statutory agency: the National Estate
Commission. It would compile a heritage register of places to ensure their preservation,
possibly bolstered by federal tax incentives, as well as advance Australia’s local,
national and international heritage interests.
As legislation to give effect to the Inquiry’s recommendations was drafted,
policymakers took issue with the very notion of the national estate. Tangibly, between
the draft report of April 1974 and final report of September 1974, the name of the
proposed body changed to a ‘heritage commission’ (Yencken 1974a). On receiving the
draft report, the head of Uren’s department Robert Lansdown and its first assistant
secretary Richard Butler were unimpressed. Lansdown was a committed and
progressive urbanist, whose previous appointment was at Canberra’s National Capital
Authority (Freestone 2010, 33). Both men held the trust of Uren and Whitlam, and
Butler subsequently became Whitlam’s private secretary (Uren 1994, 259; Hocking
2014, 2, 387, 452).
From their offices in Canberra, a memo exchanged between Lansdown and Butler
on 19 April 1974 reshaped the emerging Australian heritage regime. Butler first
provided his assessment of the report, ‘[it contains] much which is commendable and
interesting [though] it is very uneven in style’, and then made the following comment:
The permanent body recommended is a “National Estate Commission”. This body
is seen as having sweeping powers. It is a resource allocation body, with an
overwhelming majority of non-public servants, which in effect would oversight [sic]
the activities of all Departments and agencies with an interest in the national
estate. I would guess that this would mean in practice every Department in
varying degrees. [Ultimately] there will be some difficulty in identifying which are
not affected. (Uren 1974b; Yencken 1974b)
In Butler’s view, the national estate as envisioned by the Inquiry as well as by Whitlam
and his inner circle, was unworkable. Acknowledging that the Government was
committed to establishing an agency, he suggested its powers should be mostly
symbolic. Lansdown and Butler worked to ensure that ‘any policy speech will avoid
commitments to the type of statutory corporation envisaged by the report’. Whitlam
(and his Government) followed this advice, as evidenced by his press release on 25
April 1974 and a ministerial statement to Parliament by Uren (1974a).
The newly-proposed Heritage Commission was no substitute for the Inquiry-
recommended National Estate Commission. As legislated by the Whitlam Government
and then watered down by the post–1975 Fraser Liberal Government, the Commission
was influencer and educator, as Butler and Lansdown had envisioned. Reflecting his
disquiet, Yencken (1977, 6) wrote how ‘The National Estate is a unity [but] as it is
defined in the Australian Heritage Commission Act, is not such an all-embracing
concept. It is concerned with that part of the whole which should be kept intact’. Over
the coming decade, the Commission still made its voice heard over environmental and
Indigenous land right campaigns (Ashton and Cornwall 2006, 56). It also issued grants,
delivered education programmes and compiled its register. But its remit was far less
radica than what had been invoked over the previous five or so years. With a
weakened Commission, once Uren’s urban department was abolished by the Fraser
Government, successive federal governments again receded from the heritage and the
urban spheres, though never to the extent of the pre–1970s status quo.
Reflecting on the historical moment almost a decade later, Uren made the gulf
between ambition and reality apparent. In 1981, the Australian Heritage Commission
assembled a coffee-table book incorporating its first five years of national estate
registrations. Yencken introduced the book and identified Williams-Ellis and Kennedy
as the sources for the national estate. He neglected to mention the Whitlam
Government in order to present the Commission as apolitical and bipartisan – to the
annoyance of Uren (1981), who received a private apology from Yencken. Uren
reviewed the book in the Sydney Morning Herald, and his sentiments were reflected in
the accompanying cartoon. In this cartoon (Figure 1), The Heritage of Australia is
sketched as an actual book, exaggerated in size, seeming like a brick or even a
skyscraper, dominating an imagined Australian landscape. The book cover displays the
meeting of land and ocean, while the book itself towers over a splattering of heritage
objects: house, church, Indigenous artefact. The ‘Heritage of Australia’ and its national
estate was indeed larger than life.
Legacies and conclusion
The Australian Heritage Commission and its national estate register operated until the
mid-2000s. Referred by the Howard Liberal Government for independent review, the
Productivity Commission (2006), a statutory economic thinktank, found that the
Heritage Commission too heavily curtailed private property rights, restricting
development via prescriptive regulations. Advancing a familiar laissez-faire critique,
emphasising economics and politics over culture and society, it recommended that the
federal government diminish its heritage activities. This marked the beginning of the
end for the national estate, and the Heritage Commission was soon dismantled. The
national estate no longer fitted in with the dominant ideologies of early twenty-first
century Australia.

Figure 1. Matthew Martin, Cartoon: ‘Heritage of Australia’, SMH, 26 September 1981.

For three decades, the national estate had transformed, extended and muddied
Australian heritage understandings. Its early ambitiousness influenced the Heritage
Commission in its assembling of its Register, which retained Whitlam’s term in its title
(as did its grant programme). It listed over 13,000 places in this register, compared to a
couple of hundred places in its replacement, the National Heritage List. The incredible
number and variety of places in the original register reflected a broadening and
popularisation of heritage. At once a strength and weakness, the national estate itself
never defined what to preserve or how to preserve it. The reasons for this were varied,
ranging from politics to constitutionality, but ultimately, at no stage was an
implementable national estate rendered. It was, however, intended as more than a
‘national significance’ threshold, with the new Australian heritage regime carrying some
of its ideas forward. For instance, individuals and organisations could straightforwardly
nominate places for potential inclusion in the register, reiterating the concept’s
democratic intentions and suggesting that the new federal heritage regime had a
community orientation. Lowenthal affirmed these national heritage characteristics in
1990 when he observed that Australians seemingly found as much significance in their
local as their national heritage, embracing the everyday and vernacular, the diverse
and obscure (Lowenthal 1990, 48–49).
The national estate bolstered Australian heritage regulatory and also management
processes. Its grants assisted the academic, consultant and government careers of
many of today’s heritage luminaries (Department of Home Affairs 1980). On the
recommendation of the Inquiry, Australia swiftly ratified the UNESCO World Heritage
convention and founded a local ICOMOS chapter, which led to the Burra Charter
(1979) with its express intention of expanding the remit of heritage from the European
monumental fabric-orientated tradition of the Venice Charter to also incorporate the
kinds of heritage values and places found in the Australian context (Lesh 2017).
Yencken (2011) recorded that the national estate was intended to provide a ‘coherent
philosophy’, a unified approach for integrating cultural and natural heritage, as
incorporated into the subsequently-influential Burra Charter.
Suited to the optimism of the Whitlam era and fitting its new nationalism, the national
estate offered a particularly Australian conception for heritage. As with other Whitlam
initiatives, per Curran and Ward (2010, 7), this ‘new orientation [nevertheless]
reveal[ed] a pervasive disorientation’, particularly from the national estate’s past
meaning. This re-invented national estate drew on various strands of earlier thought
around the idea: its relationship to property, its notions of custodianship, its
hopefulness. By extending the national estate beyond land use and environmental
conservation to incorporate cities and Indigenous artefacts, by suggesting that
preservation had to be managed, and by emphasising activism and the disruption of
private property rights, the Whitlam Government conjured a positive mission for
heritage as non-elitist, political, conflictual and interventionist.
Whitlam’s national estate was a highpoint for government and popular involvement in
Australian heritage. It responded to the demands of the Australian heritage movement
– a powerful presence amid the events discussed in this article – which influenced
politicians and urbanists and prepared Inquiry submissions. The coming decades
marked Canberra’s retreat from involvement with Australia’s urban heritage places.
Today, Australia again has no independent national heritage agency. Politically
charged, bound to progressive politics, the national estate had theoretical and practical
consequences for popular, management and regulatory understandings of heritage and
underpinned Australia’s heritage regime for many decades. From rhetoric to
implementation, while the national estate ended as a limited heritage register, it was a
sweeping vision for heritage, one which might still resonate today.
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