Journal of Architectural Conservation
Volume 13, Issue 1, March 2007
The National Trust in Australia
Origins, Risk and Key Advocacy Challenges
Jacqui Goddard and Alice Yates
Paper Summary
In Australia there are eight National Trusts. Each State and Territory has a fully autonomous National Trust with a loose alliance through the Australian Council of National Trusts, which is currently based in Canberra. The first in Australia, and third in the world, was the New South Wales (NSW) Trust, founded in 1945 by Annie Wyatt.1 It was called then, and still is, The National Trust of Australia (NSW), clearly indicating the founder’s intent for the rest of the nation.
Annie Wyatt’s vision of an organization safeguarding Australia’s natural landscapes and historic buildings for future generations predates any planning legislation to protect them. This paper sheds light on the role that the National Trust takes in Australia as a whole. It explores the public attitudes to conservation and heritage the Trusts face today (with particular emphasis on NSW as the first of the Australian family of National Trusts), and makes comparison to the Trusts in the United Kingdom and the US.
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Figure 2 Sydney Sandstone: the Chief Secretary’s Building, Sydney, NSW, Australia. Built between 1873 and 1878. Designed by James Barnet (1827–1904) and subsequently by Walter Liberty Vernon (1846–1914).
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Jacqui Goddard
Jacqui Goddard is Conservation Director of the National Trust of Australia (NSW). She has worked as an architect in both Australia and Scotland, predominantly in the fields of conservation and repair and adaptive reuse of buildings. She was a senior lecturer and postgraduate course leader in Architecture at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen from 1994 to January 2001. Jacqui teaches design, adaptive reuse and building conservation on a part-time basis at UTS and UNSW in Sydney.
Alice Yates MSc, MA (Hons)
After working as a conservation officer for the National Trust of Australia (NSW) for two years, Alice Yates has returned to the UK and is working for the Wilton’s Music Hall Trust in the East End of London, which aims to secure the future of Wilton’s, the world’s only surviving grand music hall. She worked previously for WMF in Britain and SAVE Britain’s Heritage and holds a postgraduate MSc in Historic Conservation and a MA (Hons) in Architectural History.
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