The Illawarra Escarpment’s striking landform and natural beauty have long been a source of awe and admiration, recorded in enthusiastic accounts by visitors from the early 19th century on. Its bold landmark topography, lush rainforests and breath-taking vistas are its most celebrated values, but behind the dazzle is a cultural landscape of great subtlety and complexity. While the landform remains virtually unchanged, its tree cover has altered greatly over time, and revegetation since the 1960s now masks many human-wrought changes. Many of the early traces of visitation, settlement and land use are today unnoticed; however, the fine-grained, the traces, the partly hidden, the almost lost are still there.
Ever since heritage assessment has been practised in New South Wales, the Illawarra Escarpment has been recognized as being highly significant – of State, indeed national, significance. Early heritage assessments focused on its outstanding landscape and scenic values but subsequent studies have recognized a much greater range of values. These have been identified using cultural landscape analysis, in which the impacts of European settlement on the Escarpment’s natural characteristics can be traced, identified and evaluated.
Extending between Stanwell Park in the north down past Dapto to Kiama and beyond in the south, the Escarpment contains some of the best stands of temperate rainforest remaining in NSW. Embedded in it are seams of coal which have fueled the major iron and steel works at Port Kembla. Importantly, too, it contains some of the highest scenic values anywhere in Australia, which have attracted thousands of tourists as well as artists, bushwalkers, environmentalists, and those in search of leisure and recreation.
Using a combination of detailed research, natural and cultural landscape analysis, and extensive community consultation, the consultant team prepared a heritage assessment of the Escarpment to assist Wollongong City Council planners to determine heritage constraints that may be applicable to development in the study area. The latter covered the land between the footslopes and the plateau top but not the towns and suburbs along the coastal plain.
The team traced the overland routes down the forbidding escarpment face, the entry of cattle for grazing in 1815, the exploitation of its rich timber resources (particularly red cedar), the mining of its rich coal seams, and the establishment of the dairy industry on its lower slopes and adjacent coastal plain. It identified the few remaining slab huts of the earliest settlers, the bullock and miners’ tracks down and around the Escarpment (especially Mt Keira and Mt Kembla), the stables and paddocks for the mines’ pit ponies, and the gravity transport systems for the coal mined from the upper slopes.
It also traced, through early paintings and photographs, and subsequently through aerial photographs, the rampant clearing of much of the area up to the 1950s, followed by the vigorous reforestation that occurred from the 1960s onwards under the umbrella of the environmental protection movement. The donation by mining companies of some former uncleared land to the State for regional parks in the 1970s led, in combination with some Crown land, to the creation of the Illawarra Escarpment State Recreation Area, where much valuable rainforest is now protected. This resource has helped stimulate intensive scientific and botanical studies into its biodiversity, ecosystems and habitats, providing a sound basis for the formulation by Wollongong City Council and the State Government of strategic management plans for the Escarpment.
The heritage assessment commenced with the preparation of thematic histories covering broad themes such as the Escarpment as a place for:
- first contact, travel, roads, settlement;
- production – timber, agriculture, mining & dairying;
- science, leisure and tourism; and
- inspiration, conservation and environmentalism.
These themes provided a sound basis for further research, and a means - via the Council’s website - of raising the consciousness of the local community and encouraging them to put forward places they considered of potential heritage significance. Five nominations were made for the Escarpment as a whole, 55 specific places were nominated, and mention was made of 68 other places. All nominations were recorded in a database, and heritage inventory sheets were compiled for some of them.
The process revealed many places that might not otherwise have been discovered through research. The team then undertook fieldwork to investigate and record both those nominations and places which members themselves had identified in the course of their research.
Following research of vegetation and riparian studies by specialists and NP&WS, the team summarised the landform and natural elements of the Escarpment study area which provided the matrix within which human activities have occurred. Drawing from the thematic essays; the existing, nominated and consultant-identified heritage items and places; and from the findings of fieldwork, the team then assessed the Escarpment holistically. From that, they formulated recommendations or ‘management options’ for Wollongong Council to consider and adopt as it sees fit.
© Warwick Mayne-Wilson, Conservation Landscape Architect. 2007
