Remembering Country: History & Memories of Towarri National Park ...

Published by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service June 2001
Copyright © NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service
ISBN 0 7313 6366 3
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research,
criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this
publication may be reproduced by any process without written permission
from the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Inquiries should be
addressed to the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.
The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent
those of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. While every effort
has been made to ensure that the information is accurate at the time
of printing, the NPWS cannot accept responsibility for any errors
or omissions.
National Library Cataloguing – in – Publication data;
Veale, Sharon.
Remembering country : history & memories of Towarri National Park.
ISBN 0 7313 6366 3.
1. Land use, Rural – New South Wales – Towarri Mountain Region -
History. 2. Agriculture – New South Wales –
Towarri Mountain Region – History. 3. Towarri National
Park (N.S.W.) – History. 4. Towarri Mountain Region (N.S.W.)
– History. I. New South Wales. National Parks and
Wildlife Service. II. Title.
994.44
Cover design: Jelly Design
Design and layout by: Jelly Design
Printed by: RT Kelly Pty Limited
NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service
PO Box 1967 Hurstville NSW 2220
Phone: 1300 361 967 or 02 9585 6333
Fax: 02 9585 6555
Web site: www.npws.nsw.gov.au
Cover photograph: Ruth Logan (left) and Marie Halliday (right), in 1953
when as members of a local youth group they climbed part way to the top
of Mount Tinagroo. Photo courtesy Ruth Logan.
Foreword
In 1997 the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service embarked on
a program of research designed to help chart the path the Service would
take in cultural heritage conservation over the coming years.The Towarri
project, which is the subject of this book, was integral to that program,
reflecting as it did a number of our key concerns.These included a concern
to develop a landscape approach to cultural heritage conservation, this
stemming from a recognition that to a great extent the conventional
approach, in taking the individual heritage ‘site’ as its focus, lost the
larger story of ‘people in a landscape’. It also concerned us that the
site-based approach was inadequate to the job of understanding how
people become attached to the land.
Attachment, of course, is not something that can be excavated by
archaeologists or drawn to scale by heritage architects. It is made up
substantially of memories. In the present case, Sharon Veale takes an area
of farmland in the Upper Hunter Valley that in the late 1990s became
Towarri National Park and she asks how its former occupants remember
it, how they revisit the land and their lives on the land via their memories.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service has a compact with the people
of New South Wales, both Aboriginal and non-indigenous, to acknowledge
the meaning that their lives and the lives of their ancestors have given to
the lands in our care.This commits us not just to the study of individual
landscapes and the communities of those attached to them, but also to
a study of the very process of attachment itself.The present book is a
step in that direction.
Denis Byrne
Cultural Heritage Division
NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service