After years in the public eye, Bob Carr is turning his attention to historic buildings – and he says we should be prepared to have a debate.
As New South Wales premier, Carr led the state for more than a decade, serving as its arts minister throughout that time. In July, he was appointed as chair of the federal government’s chief heritage advisory body, the Australian Heritage Council. And last week, he was appointed as chair of Museums of History NSW, the body that oversees the Mint, Hyde Park Barracks, the Justice and Police Museum and the Museum of Sydney, as well as some of Australia’s oldest stately homes, such as Elizabeth Bay House, Vaucluse House and Rouse Hill Estate.
“When it comes to historic buildings – house museums – we should be prepared to have a debate,” Carr says.
“We have to ask, how representative are these samples? How do we regard them as teaching resources? Do we do enough to contextualise them, to avoid romanticising uncritically the post-1788 settlement of Australia?
“We’ve got to ask how we can nurture and curate our stock of historic houses, and [represent] how the servant classes, the farm labourers, the convicts and the First Nations people lived in the same neighbourhood at the same time.”
Carr’s blueprint for how future generations will interpret their country’s history is bold. Having drawn lessons from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello – the estate of the third US president in Charlottesville, Virginia, which Carr has toured twice – he believes it is achievable. Monticello is the only former home of an American president to be granted UN world heritage status. More than 600 men, women and children were enslaved on its 2,000-hectare plantation during Jefferson’s lifetime, and its presentation to the American public today squarely confronts the moral ambiguity of its owner’s legacy.
“Elaborate attention is paid to the fact that the whole house, all the functioning farms, all of Jefferson’s intellectual and political pursuits, were built from the lives of enslaved people,” Carr says. “It can be done without force-feeding a facile, politically correct narrative.”
A scholar of US presidential history for more than five decades, Carr admits that if he was back in his uni days today, he would be questioning the point of it all.
“That the visions of a Jefferson or Lincoln, or the statesmanship of a Dwight D Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan, have all declined into the vulgar, corrupt circus of a Trump presidency, all that rich heritage is now utterly degraded,” he says.
It is a grim pronouncement from someone who, since his retirement from politics, has made history, heritage and legacies his primary focus of interest.
“History is a big part of our civic literacy, our civic IQ,” he says. “If you know where your country came from, you’re better placed to make a decision about where it’s headed. I also think historical awareness feeds a lively – but self-critical – patriotism.”
His new role at Museums of History NSW seems a perfect synthesis of this passion with an almost equal zeal for architecture.
During a recent tour of Sydney Water’s former head office in the heart of Sydney’s CBD – a 1930s landmark building converted into a five-star hotel and placed on the NSW state heritage register in 2002 – Carr was afforded a briefing by the heritage architects charged with preserving the Pitt Street building’s precious art deco interiors.
The former premier is planning to use his influence to get the Australian Institute of Architects onboard and open up an array of Sydney’s buildings dating from the 1920s to the 80s, with accompanying public talks by the architects who designed or restored them.
“It would be a conversation between the indispensable profession and the people who use the environments it creates,” he says.
“I think it would be very exciting if Australians could learn the inside stories of their built environments.”
If history is a nation’s civic IQ, then architecture is its civic soul, Carr says, paraphrasing a quote by the late modernist Chinese-American architect IM Pei.
“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own, we have no soul of our own civilisation.”
