HOBART SCENIC PROTECTION AREA

Not many Acts of parliament require the inclusion of the word ‘beauty’, but Tasmania’s Wellington Park Act (1993) has it.

Beauty has a prominent part in that Act. In its Purposes (Section 5) the Park’s Trustees are required to ensure (c) ‘the preservation or protection of the natural beauty of the land’. This Beauty Purpose is not confined to land. The same preservation or protection is extended to any beautiful features of the land.

(Is the use of beauty—as opposed to handsomeness— evidence for a perception of the mountain as having a feminine gender?)

The meanings and limits of the term ‘natural beauty’ is not defined in the Act nor in the management plan, but this Purpose and references to beauty—as well as aesthetic qualities, values and characteristics—appear throughout the Park’s management plan—sometimes discussed at length. Certain beautiful features are named and the beauty spots are mapped.

The beauty spots are said to include the park’s numerous rivers, waterfalls, rivulets and running waters (and also the ‘purity’ of those waters). The beauty of the land is said to be found in its striking landforms—for example ‘the toppling dolerite columns along its eastern escarpment’, its ‘continuously and diversely vegetated slopes’ in combination with its variety of smaller landscapes. For example, in the mountain’s high-altitude, periglacial landforms, the dolerite boulder streams and boulder fields, in ‘the temporal changes of lighting and atmospheric effects’, and in named features of beauty such as Lost World, the Yellow Cliffs, Sleeping Beauty, the Organ Pipes, Disappearing Tarn and the Rocking Stone. There is beauty recognised more broadly in the mountain’s dramatic shape, height and setting. Some form of beauty is also said to have been established in the park’s ‘wild nature’.

The Plan concludes that ‘the visual beauty of Wellington Park is one of the most important factors shaping people’s perception of [the Park]’. And this perception is the bridge to the cultural value of aesthetic significance.

The management plan contains maps (commissioned for the plan itself) bounding Scenic Beauty. The beauty blobs are frequently over prominent (i.e high) points such as mountain peaks (Table Mountain, Cathedral Rock, The Organ Pipes, Collins Cap) but also include the Wellington Falls Area and ferny gullies on the lower eastern slopes.

Anthropologists and sociologists find embedded in every religious/legal ethical system in every culture, in every story, evidence linking them to both large large, impressive, or unusual geological relics such as river canyons, mountains and beaches, and grand geological processes like floods and earthquakes, as well as small, local commonplace things like the shapes and colours of the stones lying around the place. The features inspire artists to create stories and images. Natural features influence cultural behaviours and customary practices and these change the places. This con-fusion of the natural with the cultural is known as entanglement.

For example, in the Wellington Park Management Plan the mountain’s “earth systems”—its waterfalls, cliffs, gullies, rocks and viewpoints—are recognised simultaneously as the “foundation for the Park's ecosystems and the basis for its high landscape value”. The ecosystem (natural) and the landscape (cultural) are entangled.

On the mountain, the courses of tracks have been turned to pass geological sites; indeed, some of the walking tracks were built for no other reason but to reach them; and subsequently, by frequent depiction in literature, upon canvas, and on waterproof map; and, by being protected by law and custom: the con-fusion is demonstrated.

HERITAGE SIGNIFICANCE

The View of the Mountain’s landscape has not displeased the only humans who can be mentioned in connection with nobility and majesty. Royalty.

During the visit to Tasmania in 1900 by the then Duke and Duchess of York, hence England’s King and Queen, Mr E F Knight, of London’s Morning Post wrote that from the deck of the royal ship chartered for the cruise: “We had seen in Australasia a succession of finest harbours in the world. It would be difficult to pick between them, but as far as the aspect of a city as seen from the sea is concerned, I think that Hobart must take the palm; behind the picturesque city covering the lower foothills stands a grandly shaped mountain, its slopes covered with dense forest from near the summit to the foot of a precipice of dark, rocky pillars, like the pipes of a gigantic organ. Truly Mount Wellington forms as noble a background to a city as can be found in the world.”

So impressed was Hobart’s Mercury, it republished the comment thirty years later—and ENSHRINE can’t resist either. Does this give the view international significance? Certainly, this pair were not the only or the last Royals to be impressed, as Tasmania’s Advocate newspaper reported on 29 May 1989: ‘Whilst visiting Cape Town in the early 1960s and taking in the view from Table Mountain, the Queen of England reportedly told her palace staff that it was not as beautiful as Mount Wellington and the view over Hobart.’

But seriously, the mountain’s established beauty spots have high heritage significance.

HERITAGE ASSESSMENT

Their importance is so great (as noted above) their ‘preservation or protection’ is one of the four key purposes of the Wellington Park Act 1993. This purpose finds expression at the heart of the management plan in statements such as this: ‘The visual beauty of Wellington Park is one of the most important factors shaping people’s perception of it’. WPMP page 24

An earlier assessment in a 208 Network report to the Trust concluded that the views of Mount Wellington from the City of Hobart ‘have or possibly have National Estate value for their scenic qualities alone.’ A statement cited in McConnell and Handsjuk’s WPMT’s 2010 Summit Area Heritage Assessment.

At the local government level, the best fit for preserving or protecting the mountain’s beauty is to recognise it in a Scenic Protection Area overlay. Both Kingborough and Glenorchy have recognised this scenic value and added the overlay to their planning schemes. (See map above.) Currently, there is a hole in the middle over Hobart. This hole it itself undesirable as planning schemes are required to take into account the zoning and overlays of the surrounding land.

ENSHRINE supports a Scenic Protection Area overlay for the eastern slopes of the mountain.

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