What is a community? A case study in heritage action
This post is courtesy of Ella Birt, our student intern from Australian Catholic University. Ella is doing her history honours year and completing her internship with us this semester as well as her honours thesis, which she written about here.
“a community or cultural group is a group of people who share a common interest, including an experience, purpose, belief system, culture, ethnicity or values. The members are connected through a common interest or cause and may live or meet in the same locality, or were once located together and are now geographically dispersed, or may have never met in person (for example are a virtual group and interact online)”
What if that community is built through the process of trying to protect something for heritage?
History At Work was approached by the Save the Beaconsfield Reservoir Action Group to advise on the significance and potential nomination of the decommissioned Beaconsfield Reservoir to the Victorian Heritage Register. In 2020 Melbourne Water decided to remove the reservoir wall and partially drain the Beaconsfield Reservoir to comply with new standards set by the Australian National Committee on Large Dams (ANCOLD). In light of this, residents of the area started the Save the Beaconsfield Reservoir Action Group (SBRAG). Members of the group shared personal histories of sunny childhood days swimming and biking, environmental concerns for the birds that could be dislodged, local accounts of nearby gold panning, and they worry that a potential water source for fighting bushfires could disappear. These conversations illuminated the group's passion for saving the reservoir.
Oral historian Alessandro Portelli notes that "… what is really important is that memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings." In every telling of every story - a member's mother sitting by the aqueduct watching the kids play, someone searching for mussels along the damn wall with his brother - new meanings were created and embedded for the group members. This grew only stronger as new members joined, bringing with them a lifetime of stories of the reservoir, interlinked with each other's until a community was built based on decades of memory.
There are protections in heritage planning for places that are significant for distinct communities, this community - today surpassing 700 members as the image from their facebook page reveals - had only recently been created partially due to the threat to the social memory of this place. Other reasons for joining the group include concerns for the environment, local wildlife, the desire to make the place and surrounding land more accessible, and its potential for water provision in the event of a fire.
Regardless of the outcome for this reservoir, the community that came together to save it are significant for their dedication and their wealth of interwoven memories and meanings tied to the place.
