ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the adaptive re-use of heritage sites with a ‘difficult’ history into places that are now embraced by their communities and foster creativity. It examines two case studies of institutions established in colonial Australia to incarcerate ‘lunatics’, and women deemed destitute or ‘wayward’, to explore how these places of notoriety and shame have been transformed by the practice of heritage conservations into exemplars of community arts programming and commercial activity.
The first example is the convict-built Lunatic Asylum and Invalid Depot, which opened in 1864 in the port of Fremantle, Western Australia. It was subsequently used as a home for destitute women, a military depot for US troops during World War II, and a school. The building is an outstanding example of Australian Gothic architecture. Following a campaign to prevent its demolition, the building was re-purposed as the Fremantle Arts Centre in 1973 and funded by the state government to support artistic activity. In the second example, the Abbotsford Convent in inner Melbourne comprises several buildings on a site established in 1863 by the Catholic Sisters of the Good Shepherd to accommodate impoverished women. It was the most important Catholic institution complex in the state of Victoria, with significant medieval French ecclesiastic architecture and historic gardens. In the 1970s the buildings were sold, and after a long community campaign to ‘save’ the site from redevelopment, the state government intervened. In 2004 the Abbotsford Convent was established as an arts and cultural hub.
Both the Fremantle Arts Centre and the Abbotsford Convent have been closely aligned with the recent cultural and urban regeneration and gentrification in their respective neighbourhoods. They provide models of heritage conservation and management that encourage community use of heritage buildings, and seek to both acknowledge and reconcile such adaptive re-use with the colonial past. This chapter situates both sites within global frameworks and national histories of colonialism and incarceration. It reflects on how the histories of ‘difficult’ places and community aspirations for heritage conservation are realized within the contemporary social, political and economic realities of a postcolonial nation.
