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Project Manager's note

Ms Winkworth and Ms Russell have been working on a chapter in Significance 2.0. on levels of significance and thresholds, as raised in the April 2008 Significance 2.0 Workshop.

They have provided this discussion paper to describe where there thinking is up to, and to encourage feedback from those interested in this topic.

We also invite you to read and comment on other papers presented at the Workshop by clicking back from this page.

Please note that the term ‘threshold’ in the following paper is used to signify a level of jurisdictional management responsibility e.g. local, state, national, international. In some locations the term regional is also used to suggest a further level of commonality e.g. the Illawarra region of New South Wales.

For further reading on thresholds and levels of significance click HERE to see the paper in this Significance 2.0 Workshop series titled ‘Significance – theory and practice’ by Meredith Walker.

RoslynRussell
Director, Roslyn Russell Museum Services

KylieWinkworth
Museum and Heritage Consultant

Significance 2.0 will include a new section on assessing national significance. This responds to identified needs for clearer guidance on national significance for the Community Heritage Grants program[1] and for the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act (1986), which oversees the import and export of significant movable cultural heritage.

The authors have given careful consideration to the concept of levels of significance in theory and practice, both for collections and as it works for place-based heritage. For a number reasons they have focussed on national significance, as well as touching on international significance as it pertains to UNESCO’s Memory of the World register for documentary heritage.

There are constraints on the time and level of consultation for the development of Significance 2.0 which means that it is not feasible to go beyond criteria for national significance.

Moreover there is no clear demand for thresholds apart from national significance. At a 2007 Department of Environment and Heritage workshop in Canberra, there was no call for thresholds for state or local significance. In practice most single items assessments are for the most significant items in a collection. In instances where items and collections are assessed for inclusion in state heritage registers, these use the place-based criteria and thresholds, not the assessment method and criteria outlined in Significance.

Most importantly, there are considerable practical and methodological issues in replicating the system of levels of significance along the lines of the way place based heritage systems are organised, that is in levels that correspond to levels of national, state and local government.

Assessment processes for the built or natural environment frequently consider and rank places according to national, state or local significance. This process is tied to legislative and planning regimes for land management and is associated with local, state and national heritage registers. Place-based heritage assessments are informed by decades of research through thematic studies and comparative assessments of various types of places, landscapes and environments.

However, little comparative work has been done on subjects and themes across Australian collections. There are very few cross-collection registers based on rigorous assessments of significance. This makes it difficult to substantiate assessments of national, state or local significance, except in obvious cases where items are related to major events like Federation.

Many people consider that the levels of significance for place based heritage have led to inconsistencies and cost shifting. For example, it has left local government struggling to support places like jails and courthouses that were created by state governments and colonial administrations. The network of these administrative buildings is an integral part of state and national histories but the application of heritage thresholds tends to mean that only some will be entered on national or state heritage registers, and therefore have access to the funding that may come with listing. Ascribing levels of significance has also meant that some values are excluded in national and state listings, such as recognising the meaning of places for communities.

One of the key principles of significance is recognising that there may be different points of view about what makes an item or collection significant, and that all values should be identified and considered, rather than ranking values in an artificial hierarchy.

Meredith Walker and Professor Lynette Russell have both argued from different angles that Australia is a constellation of communities and that they all contribute to Australia’s culture, history, heritage and national identity. This is embodied in the richly detailed map of Aboriginal language groups, and in the political map of Australian states and territories.

All the regions, communities and Aboriginal language groups are important for Australia and Australians. It is not practically possible to exclude some, or nominate one or two as of state or national significance at the expense of the rest. The patterning of Australia’s regional development and its cultural diversity is significant in a national context. This same is true for items and collections. Many nationally significant items are held in regional and community collections, and in family and private collections all over Australia. Similarly state and national collections include items of lower significance. The meaning of the items and collections for local or regional communities is an integral part of their significance, so values and meanings are frequently intertwined. New case studies in Significance 2.0 will explain this. Of course some items will be more significant than others, but this does not necessitate expressing significance in terms of levels of government, geography or ownership.

Participants at the 2007 workshop on thresholds of significance called for well researched thematic studies to underpin comparative knowledge of particular themes and types of items. These studies are the building blocks of knowledge of collections and are essential to inform accurate judgements of levels of significance. With our current level of knowledge, the authors consider that there is no practical or methodologically sound hierarchy of state or local significance for items and collections. Questions of how or where an item is managed, where it corresponds to levels of government, are essentially questions of management which are not intrinsically related to levels of significance.

Significance is still a relatively new concept for collections. Over time it will undergo further refinements and adaptations. In future, the collections sector may decide to adopt the levels of significance hierarchy as it works for place-based heritage, or it could explore alternatives not related to levels of government or geography. This would need to be based on close analysis of the pros and cons of such a system and on wider consultation across the collections domains. Part of the process would entail a thorough investigation of the theory, practice and demand for a system of levels of significance, whether related to levels of government or an alternative hierarchy. It would also entail a detailed technical paper on the thresholds for each level of significance. This requires more time, technical analysis and consultation on thresholds than can be done in the scope of the current contract for Significance 2.0.

[1] This annual program is managed by the National Library of Australia and supported by the National Archives of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the National Film and Sound Archive and the Department for the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.