Page 3122 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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legislation in a national park is the kind of problem that we are facing. I must say that I have great sympathy there and would like to tie it in with a peculiar view I am now having, especially of the Orroral Valley site but also of Honeysuckle Creek.
We are concerned, are we not, to preserve the past. That past is very significant for the history of the world. We are also concerned to preserve a peculiar kind of past. I wonder whether the Orroral Valley site, when it has been vandalised, stripped and becomes a horrible site, in some weird way should be preserved as an example of how we foul our own nests. That is what it is. With the Honeysuckle Creek site, at least that shell of a building is there.
But I want to argue this point: Unless you can do a Williamsburg, unless you can restore the whole area to the way it was, there are strong arguments for saying that it is not really enough merely to restore the buildings. I now accept the view that perhaps to level it completely and have a cement base is probably the way to go. What is historic about the areas is the technology that was there, and unfortunately that technology has been removed or damaged to a point where there is no use in it. Some of the equipment has gone elsewhere.
We did raise this matter with the American representative of NASA and he assured us that representative forms of the technology are in place in technology museums, especially in the United States. It does not help us; we do not have, in the ACT, examples of what I suppose you would now say was the relatively primitive computer technology that went into those sites and the kind of astronomical ability that was there. Now, even 20 to 25 years later, the kind of technology we have is so much more advanced. We have lost the real historical value of that site, which is in terms of technology.
I accept the problem of the 20 centimetres that Mr Duby raised. We took that advice in relation to archaeological sites, as I recall. Possibly, what you are really thinking of there is preserving a building past rather than a technological past. So, in some ways there is not that importance to preserving the buildings. What we really should have preserved - and the Commonwealth should have preserved, as Mrs Grassby and Mr Stefaniak have noted - was the technological past that was there in the first place. It is not the building which is significant; it is the technology.
I again thank Ron Owens very much for all that he did - and he did it very sensitively. Our secretary has a good sense of the past - indeed, likes to add classical quotations to our reports - and he did have a sense that we were destroying - he did not say this; I am saying this - if you like, Rome; that we were destroying part of our civilisation. That is what we are on about.
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