Australian Heritage Management in Practice

This lecture will describe contemporary built environment heritage management practice in Australia and the work of RBA Architects + Conservation Consultants. In Australia, where our built heritage is mostly not more than 200 years old, we have been fortunate as a profession to have had instituted a sequence of foundational conservation charters including the internationally recognized Burra Charter – and associated concise, enforceable and realistic statutory controls which compel building owners and managers to appropriately conserve and adapt built heritage. Where many see heritage listing as an obstacle, at RBA we recognize it as an opportunity to capture cultural significance such as social and historical value and to activate latent potential. Our team of 12, which include historians and architects, works across three key disciplines; heritage assessment, forensic conservation and architectural adaptation.

Roger Beeston is an Australian registered architect who established his specialized practice, RBA Architects and Conservation Consultants (RBA) in 1994 after completing an architecture degree at the University of Melbourne and a 7-year apprenticeship with leading local conservation practice, Allom Lovell Sanderson. RBA specializes in the assessment, restoration and sensitive adaptation of buildings and places of heritage significance and is widely recognized for its conservation work by Heritage Victoria, the peak statutory heritage body in the State, the Australian Institute of Architects, local government agencies, corporations and private owners. Roger, as Director of RBA, has investigated and managed a wide variety of heritage places, primarily in Australia, but also across South Asia. He is a long-standing Heritage Advisor to the City of Melbourne, the Deputy Chair of AusHeritage, and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History at Federation University Australia.