Page 1351 - Week 05 - Thursday, 26 April 1990
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committee representing key community organisations concerned with our heritage. The committee has representatives from the ACT division of the Australian Railway Historical Society, the Canberra Archeological Society, the ACT branch of the National Trust of Australia, the National Parks Association of the ACT and the ACT Heritage Unit of the Chief Minister's Department.
The committee, assisted by a part-time coordinator, compiles a program of events and activities involving more than 50 community groups and many Federal and ACT government departments and authorities. Extensive Heritage Week activities are also planned in schools and libraries across the Territory.
The organisation of ACT Heritage Week is supported by the ACT Government through a heritage grant from the community development fund. This grant - $18,000 this year - is supplemented by extensive local business sponsorship, both in cash and in kind. This enables the ACT Heritage Week committee to produce a high-quality printed program to distribute throughout the community, to sponsor a display in the Albert Hall each year and to advertise Heritage Week events in the local media.
Mr Speaker, the theme for Heritage Week this year is industrial heritage. A range of activities and events during the week focus on the industrial theme. By recommissioning Locomotive 3016 at the Canberra Railway Museum last Friday, we provided a very fitting beginning to Heritage Week this year, in keeping with the industrial heritage theme.
Despite the apparent youthfulness of Canberra, the ACT contains a rich and varied industrial heritage, relating to both the national capital and earlier rural settlement. Grazing and other rural industries, mining, eucalypt distilling, timber cutting, flour milling and other essential industrial activities took place in this district during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
With the establishment of the national capital, there was an initial focus on gearing up for the provision of essential services, and this meant the construction of a brickworks, power station, water storage reservoirs and pumping stations. All of these are now recognised as part of our inherited assets. These elements of our heritage allow us to understand something of the achievements of earlier generations in adapting existing technologies to industrial activities.
Mr Speaker, there has been an emphasis in recent times on the quality of our environment, on sustainable development and on heritage conservation. Industry has been challenged to be more environmentally responsible. We have been fortunate in the ACT to have been free from the burden of heavy industry and its adverse environmental consequences. Canberra was planned as a garden city right from the
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