Which history? Restoration or vandalism?
The oldest boat still extant in Australia recently returned to its original home, Tasmania. It had been languishing in a boatyard in New South Wales. A Tasmanian maritime expert confirmed the boat as the Admiral, built of huon pine in 1865 and originally used to ferry dignitaries across the Derwent River in Hobart. The boat was subsequently altered (lengthened) and operated as a waterman’s boat, steam launch and fishing boat, renamed the Myra.
The Myra Restoration Group intends to restore the boat and ‘have her looking glorious like she used to 131 years ago’. I couldn’t find an image online of the boat as it is now, but in the TV news coverage over the weekend, it looked magnificent: wonderful old timbers, the shape of the original boat evident among the newer boards – the layers of the boat’s history writ clear.
But why the fascination with 131 years ago? The Group’s spokesperson says, ‘Because that’s where the history is, the history’s not in the Myra’ – a statement I find ludicrous and quite perplexing. The history is in the Myra, as much as it is in the Admiral. Let me illustrate this with another example.
Some years ago I visited an old powder magazine in country Victoria, built in the nineteenth century when the first waves of pioneers came to Gippsland and somewhere was needed to store explosives. It didn’t serve that function for long and in due course was converted into a house. The inhabitants bludgeoned out another door in the middle of the far wall of several layers of solid brick and a ramshackle group of wooden dwellings grew up around the magazine. Inside they painted the walls several times over the course of eighty years or more – the magazine inhabited from the early part of the century up until the 1970s. Old photographs, part of the current historic display, dated naturally not back to the mid-1800s when the magazine was built but to around the 1920s. They were intriguing and I began imagining as I stood there in the dim, faintly damp, empty building, what it would have been like to grow up in such an unusual house. There was evidence that at one time briars and blackberry bushes grew right up to the walls and threatened to overrun everything. It would have been like living in a forest, like being permanently on holiday in a very strange caravan. I could still see the black smudge of smoke on the ceiling over the section where the stove had been (it seemed, from the photograph), and the particular aqua paint that Mrs (perhaps) had preferred, possibly a thirties or even fifties tone. The volunteer from the local history society told me that the society would soon be restoring the magazine to its original state. The door would be bricked in and the walls would be stripped of all their paint, back to the original colours of the brickwork, and then painted over again to imitate how they think it would have been. All the vegetation had been stripped away, revealing the magazine in its starkness – how it might have looked for the first few years of its long life. How I would have liked to stumble on the old building when it was newly abandoned.
But don’t you think, I asked the volunteer, that you are destroying the whole fabric of the building, the evidence of its long life as a home, by scrubbing out the stains and correcting the lapses in taste, turning it into an historic marker? A marker of which and whose history? I was met with a befuddled look.
Often when you go to ‘significant’ and historic houses, they have been refurnished and furbished according to the style in old black and white photographs, gleanings from contemporary magazines and catalogues perhaps, not necessarily even of the particular interiors, but general interiors of the time pinpointed as salutary for the house. In a house built in the 1880s then, the suitably trained historic houses curator will determine that in the 100-year plus history of this house 1886 or 1895 was when it was at its peak and is what deserves preserving in amber.
This is not the case, thankfully, at the Susannah Place Museum in the Rocks in Sydney, a group of four terrace houses continuously occupied by working class families from 1844 to 1990. Apart from the recreation of a 1915-era corner store in one of the houses, which leaves me unmoved, the other houses have pretty much been left as they were – some of the layers of history scraped back to older times, but all happily co-existing, the spectrum laid bare, no one time privileged over another.
How I wish the powder magazine had been left this way, and that the Myra would be left as she is – preserved, not ‘restored’ – for the kind of restoration which privileges the original to me is vandalism, pure and simple.
Yes the wonderful thing about history and memories is all the layers. I think I began to start appreciating that when I was travelling in the UK in 1990. Their cathedrals are a great example, bearing the badges and scars of the historical, political and social forces that shape and continue to shape the buildings. That appreciation was also helped by some wonderful volunteer guides who were able to bring the layers to life.
Cheers
Jo
Helen
Rock paintings are/were continuously re-painted to keep them looking ‘good’. Some things are good left as they are, however conserving them for the future can be good too.
Just a thought. I’m not sure that showing derelict working-class houses is particularly nice, when huge amounts of money has been spent on certain NSW Historic Houses in the Eastern Suburbs - obviously ‘not’ where working class people lived.
It seems to me that you are asking for a new aesthetic to replace the old ‘rest oration’ model. What a good idea. Why not a complex response to any historical artefact? The piece of land on which I live has been ‘owned’ by 5 historical groups (aboriginal, squatter, selector, sports ground,quarter acre blocker). The restoration model often does not work.
And usually the so-called restoration amounts to something akin to plastic surgery in grand old Hollywood ladies who end up looking like plastic versions of themselves. I applaud the Susannah Place Museum folk who peeled back the layers…like a giant book with a tale to tell and I wish I could get that same decor in my cottage, tags and all!
Remember the Post Office at Walhalla. The peeled back wallpaper showed each change of style in the house history until purchased by the Trust. Some people loved the really original aspect and others were disappointed by the dingy look. I rather liked the good sticks in each room used to whack snakes.
Hi helen , well its ok with me for the Mauritius meet up , cheers ;)