“This was no Downton Abbey,” laughs Matthew Smithies, the managing director of the National Trust in Tasmania, “it was a place full of life, with a history more rich and complex than many are aware.”
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Those who walk the halls of the three storey Georgian house, will soon be treated to new historical interpretations which comprehensively detail the many layers of Clarendon’s past.
“The idea is that a visitor will come here, and they’ll discover something wherever they go throughout the site and it’ll be a discovery of surprises,” said Mr Smithies.
“Rather than just having the interpretation of the physical building, we’re actually looking at the whole site which includes all of the grounds and all of the outbuildings and the National Trust has never done that before.”
Clarendon’s most well known owner was woolgrower and merchant James Cox, who settled on the banks of the South Esk with a 6,000 acre land grant in 1817.
But the property was also the home of Walter and Kathleen Menzies, who repurposed many of the outbuildings into stables for fine thoroughbred horse breeding.
Mr Smithies said the hardest thing to do as a heritage manager at Clarendon was to decide whether or not to represent just one point in time.
“Our view for Clarendon is no we don’t, throughout the site, we represent the different owners, and the different eras and the different activities,” he said.
“We’ve got this most incredible shearing shed, it’s a fairly low to the ground, built out of brick, and we’re doing a lot of research on that now and we actually think it may have been one of the original homesteads that was repurposed into the shearing shed and we want to tell that story. We’re trying to establish what are the stories we need to tell in each of the rooms, and if we do that it will make the whole site of Clarendon intensely interesting.”
Mrs Menzies donated the home and extensive formal gardens and parklands to the National Trust in 1962, and thus began another chapter in the story of Clarendon.
For the past 50 years restoration work has touched many parts of the property, including the recent re-roofing.
10,000 slates were imported from Wales to replaced the roof installed at Clarendon in 1880, making it the third roof in the property’s history.
“For over 22 years we've known that we had to put a new roof on because it's been leaking. Last year we were at the stage where we had to tarpaulin the roof to get us through winter, it was terrible,” said Mr Smithies. “[But] what a thrilling project that was, we had a contractor do the work for us and they were incredible. They had millimetre rulers and every single slate that went down, went into an exact spot and position within millimetres.”
“So much care was taken and with the project we asked that an apprentice was put on so they could learn the trade of slating because a lot of these heritage trades have been lost,” Mr Smithies said.
Heritage managers carry a heavy burden of responsibility, their work conserving heritage sites like Clarendon will not just be judged today, but by the generations to come.
When the site closes in August and reopens for Spring, more stories of the conservation journey will be on show.
“Interpretation should be a continuous discipline within a heritage management organisation. We should be constantly reviewing our interpretation and making adjustments to it, that’s what keeps heritage places vibrant and stops them being mausoleums. We cannot represent heritage in that museum space anymore,” he said.
One of the world’s leading authorities on early colonial heritage, Dr James Broadbent, was recently on assignment at Clarendon for a week.
“Our team worked with him and we were open throughout that period when he was here. He went around and did a whole heap heap of paint scrapes so we could find the original colours and original finishes of the wall surfaces and the architraves,” said Mr Smithies.
“The really fascinating thing is that when James was down here with us, visitors that came in were absolutely fascinated with what he was doing and he became attraction in his own right.”
Mr Smithies said it almost took double the time to complete the work, because visitors to the estate were so interested in the process and what was happening.
That public interest has given the National Trust the confidence to continue with the bold plan for historical interpretation at Clarendon, similar he says, to the was Kew Palace in the United Kingdom is displayed.
“It’s a story that we don't tell, it's a story that heritage practitioners don't tell and they forget how important it is. Because we live and breathe and do it, they also forget how intensely interesting it can be to people and how we can serve and look after this space and these objects can sometimes for some people be a lot more interesting than the raw history,” he said.
It is these stories of passion for life at Clarendon, both in the past and in the present, that will safeguard the site for the many stories of the future.
