MAINTAINING ONE OF SYDNEY'S BIGGEST STORIES
Eleanor Banaag, a Senior Associate at Extent Heritage, has worked in heritage conservation on sites across New South Wales. The biggest lesson she’s learned is that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. In fact, every heritage place has its own bespoke needs that must be responded to.
“Conservation is not a static thing,” she says. “It means different things to different people, different communities. But the end goal is that we want to preserve history. If we didn’t do this, these stories would be lost.”
Eleanor was fresh out of university and passionate about materials conservation when she landed a job with International Conservation Services, where she was part of a team involved in conserving a small but crucial element of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – the maintenance cranes that traversed the bridge’s arches for seventy years.
The cranes weren’t instantly impressive. “I didn’t think it was that big a deal!” she says. “When they had come off the bridge, they looked like pieces of scrap metal, and I thought, ‘we’re just restoring another piece of industrial scrap.’ But once you start thinking about what you’re doing to one small piece of a national heritage icon, you realise you’re not just touching up paint, or writing a report. You’re really coming up with new ways for people to appreciate this story.”
The cranes are a small but important part of the bridge’s history. In an early form, they were part of the bridge’s construction from 1928 to 1932, and they’re still there in photos of the Bridge’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. But the work was never over. As soon as its construction was finished, the Bridge began an endless maintenance cycle. Workers were suspended on precarious gantries hanging from these cranes (long before anyone had heard of occupational health and safety), painting and repainting the steel arches, replacing parts, and carrying out inspections.
“Sydney - Maintenance of Harbour Bridge Never Ending Job” (1947), directed by Jack S Allan. Source: National Film and Sound Archive.
By the time they came down in 1997, the cranes were in poor condition.
“They’d been exposed to sea air for decades,” says Eleanor. “One of them was completely unsalvageable. But these are significant elements of the bridge.”
Eleanor and her team took a different conservation approach for each of the three remaining cranes, from retaining the original fabric of one (right down to keeping broken glass and asbestos), to repainting and carefully restoring the second, to effectively rebuilding the third in a way that, while it wasn’t strictly historically accurate, would be durable enough to live on outdoors as an installation, telling its story to a wider audience.
“Conservation is a spectrum,” says Eleanor. “It could be keeping one small element and rebuilding the bulk of it, or it could just be a paint job, or carefully preserving every element. It’s about finding the right balance, enhancing the story you’re trying to tell.”
Over the years, as Eleanor has built her career around heritage maintenance, she has carried this project with her as a reminder that conservation requires flexibility and an openness to a range of approaches and methodologies, all with different outcomes.
But Eleanor’s main takeaway from this formative early project was that she could apply these principles widely. “It doesn’t matter if an object is significant to one person or a whole community,” she says. “And conservation is not just for national heritage places. It is certainly more than what we see in museums. If you bring me a journal that your grandfather kept in World War I, I can say, here are some great approaches to keep the object alive, telling its story.”
And like the maintenance of the Bridge, it’s work that’s never complete. “I see heritage work as a social responsibility,” says Eleanor. “If we don’t preserve what’s important about our culture, how will future generations know our stories?”