State Heritage Convention

Welcome to Virtual Delegates
By Dr Jenny Gregory
President of the National Trust of Australia (WA)

As President of the National Trust of Australia (WA) it is my pleasure to welcome you to this unique "virtual" convention.

Heritage is broadly defined as something that we have inherited from the past and something that we value enough today to leave for future generations. The key word is "value" and conserving heritage is really all about the identification, assessment, conservation and interpretation of the values that places and/or objects represent. Even myths, folklore and actions by people are all part of our value system.

These values are reflected in our community and our natural bushland as well as our historic buildings. Conserving and interpreting heritage values is what the National Trust is all about. The National Trust acts both as a steward and a catalyst reflecting community values and concerns.

As most of you know, the virtual convention began as a follow on for the first State Heritage Convention held at the Midland town hall in 1999. Time today is a precious commodity and it became apparent that this 2001 State Heritage Convention would need to undergo a change in format to make it accessible to the community of Western Australia. This was the rationale to present a virtual convention.

People wishing to participate in the convention can now view all papers, biographies and abstracts from their own home or office at times convenient to them. Online discussion forums will allow everyone to submit comments or questions in response to a paper. The traditional barriers to attendance of distance, time or finances have been eliminated. Now our imagination is the only limiting factor in how actively we choose to learn, explore or participate in this first online convention coordinated by the National Trust.

As the pre-eminent independent community body promoting the Conservation and interpretation of Western Australia's unique Heritage and educating the community about the use of heritage assets, this is not the first time that the Trust has taken the lead in utilising technology to expand our reach. In 1995 I had the pleasure of participating with the University of Western Australia's Development Unit of Information Technology (with the great acronym of DUIT) to produce 'Traces of the Past' a CD enabling a search of the National Trust's Register of Classified Places.

The Trust has also been very open in allowing technology and student's imagination and research to come together and I recall one group assignment at Tranby House which was presented in the form of an interactive CD linking half a dozen separate research topics complimented with innovative graphics, video clips, interviews and music.

After the inaugural state heritage convention in 1999, the Proceedings were made available on line. The National Trust was one of the first heritage organisations to use the power of the world wide web to make conference papers available in this way. The cost effectiveness of this approach and the wide reach were key factors in encouraging us earlier this year to place the Proceedings of the National Forum "Conserving Nature on Private Land" on line as papers were presented. During the four days of the National forum, there were over 4,000 visits to our web site a sixteen fold increase in reach beyond those who were able to attend.

This ability of the web to reach out and disseminate information and encourage informed discussion is one of the reasons that I am personally excited about the continued expansion of the Trust's web pages and this virtual convention.

I would also like to thank all those who have contributed presentation papers to the virtual convention. Many of you have put in many hours of work to give us these papers on time. Thank you for making this special effort .I encourage all of you to visit the trust web site at www.ntwa.com.au to view the interesting and valuable information contributed by many key stakeholders in Western Australia's heritage community. I am sure that you will find the information in the virtual convention extremely interesting and valuable.