ABSTRACT
Activities associated with conservation have been enabled by a broad public and professional recognition that cities and some of their existing environments held sufficient explicit or assumed value to justify their retention for the future. Chapter 2 considers the politicians, architects, planners, historians, aesthetes, civic boosters, and activists who valorised landmark buildings and structures, typically for historic and aesthetic reasons, during the early decades of the twentieth century. Their primary accomplishment was to overcome the nineteenth-century, settler-colonial perception that Australian cities inherently lacked significance, due to an assumed absence of an urban antiquity comparable to Europe. The professionalising fields of architecture and planning engaged with questions of history and legacy; even if, typically, the determination was that few existing sites required safeguarding against modernisation and utilitarian imperatives. By the interwar period, nevertheless, some sites and areas justified conservation for their instructive, affirmative, aesthetic, and functional potential, while also offering an appreciated historical, picturesque and civic aspect to cities.
