Know Your PlaceHeritage Planning and Policy
Know Your PlaceHeritage Planning and Policy
Know Your Place acknowledges the Dja Dja Wurrung, Yorta Yorta, Bangerang, Taungurung, and Mumirimina as the Traditional Owners of the lands and waters on which we work. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded, and we pay our respects to Elders past, present and future, and to the deep, continuous and evolving connection to Country each of these nations holds.
Heritage practice carries an obligation of dignity: to communities past and present, to the people whose stories live in place, and to those deliberately erased from the record. That dignity must include agency, allowing communities to speak their own histories from a place of direct knowledge.
Days Mill, Murchison East
Who sees themselves in what we protect? Most heritage studies favour a narrow slice of history: recognised architects, civic institutions, grand houses, documented in exhaustive detail. Left out are the people who built these places and were never recorded, immigrant and diaspora communities, industrial and working sites, and Aboriginal communities living their culture today. What gets protected is a decision. It has never been neutral.
Convict graffiti, Woolmers Estate, Tasmania
The places and stories that formal systems have overlooked deserve the same rigour and advocacy as any other: industrial and manufacturing heritage, archaeological and sub-surface remains, sites of dark or contested history, immigration and diaspora heritage, and the continuing, evolving culture of Aboriginal communities. We actively seek these out.
How we treat the places and histories entrusted to us reflects the kind of practice and community we want to be part of.
Community engagement that begins at the consultation stage is already too late. We build relationships with the people whose heritage is being assessed from the scoping stage onward, because their knowledge is evidence, not commentary on our findings.
The best heritage outcomes come from the right people working together. We invest in long-term relationships with people who share this thinking, and know when to bring others in.
I love working regionally. It's heritage at landscape scale, easy to miss if you're not out there looking properly, and it rarely gets the attention it deserves. Know Your Place works across regional Victoria with a focus on Loddon Mallee, and throughout Tasmania.
A note on language: "Aboriginal" is used throughout this site as a broad, practical term, standing in for an entire nation of peoples who identify deeply and independently of one another. Wherever possible, including in the Acknowledgement of Country above, we name the specific peoples whose lands and waters we live and work on. That distinction matters, which is also why the Acknowledgement stays fixed at the top of every page here rather than something to click past.
Know Your Place does not undertake private or commercial work within the Cities of Greater Bendigo, Clarence and Greater Shepparton, reflecting the advisory work carried out in each.