Ugly Ducklings

PRU GOWARD AS MINISTER in 2017 sold off the public housing that was the last vestige of the working-class presence in The Rocks. Now the housing stock which she saw as too valuable to be wasted on the poor is winning architectural awards:

Even by the miserable standards of more than a century ago, the Workmen’s Dwellings in Sydney’s The Rocks were considered dark and gloomy.

Now they’re a popular Instagrammable backdrop often used in wedding photos.

The common way of explaining the point of the Heritage Act and our systems of heritage protection is that they're about forcing a compromise: left to the markets and the activity of the State, our most valuable places wouldn't be valued. Listing forces the planning system and the law to consider impact, and thus capital is forced to compromise, and the old is protected. This was after all the logic of the Green Bans, which in the heroic era of conservation really did force rethinking.

But every society has ways to protect the places it collectively values. We didn't need a late-1970s law for that; capital-H Heritage as a system isn't about forcing compromises, but creating value: this formal Heritage is an ideology and a system of protecting wealth, especially wealth in real estate, and ensuring that the most significant places are owned by the right people. Heritage protection doesn't require compromises between capital and memory, not at all, in fact the entry of a place into the heritage system more often prevents other compromises being made, social and economic ones.

The former housing tenants who were evicted in 2017, so that buyers could make a windfall at the expense of the public, know exactly how much protection the Heritage Act gave their historic community, acknowledged significance, and sense of place: none.