In the blocked estuary that at present confines the architectural profession, more and more of the struggling marine life are feeding on the restoration business: since commissions for new work have disappeared, the nostalgia boom offers some prospect of survival. Other species have also grown new limbs on this diet. Heritage groups around Australia employ historians, archaeologists, geographers and bureaucrats. Architectural publications are booming, from the small city ‘Sketchbook’ to the scholarly survey. They tell us what to look at and where to find it; what we had before it was demolished; and what to buy and how to restore it. Galleries have started to hold exhibitions on architectural and environmental themes. In the past year or so New South Wales alone has mounted well-documented shows on ‘Mr John Verge’, ‘Colonial Gothick’ and ‘The Villas of Woolloomooloo Hill’ at Elizabeth Bay House, on ‘Sydney Unearthed’ at the Macleay Museum, and on the Newcastle architect Frederick Menkens at Newcastle District Art Gallery and the National Trust gallery in Sydney. ‘Walter Burley Griffin’ and ‘The Art of Gardening in Colonial Australia’ have been touring Australia with the Art Gallery Directors’ Council.

The boom has had many good results. Today a building of even the most modest streetscape or environmental value has vastly more chance of survival than it would have had in the destructive Sixties, and progress from the position in earlier decades is, on the whole, overwhelming. The advance at the popular level can be gauged by comparing two publications intended to assist the modest owner and restorer of an old house. Rob Hillier’s Let’s Buy a Terrace House, published by Ure Smith in 1968, reflected the then fashionable trend of ‘doing up’ (which in practice mainly meant tearing down), while Ian Evans’ recent Restoring Old Houses, published by Macmillan in 1979, is an advocate of the presently fashionable school of ‘stripping down’ or restoring to an ‘authentic’ appearance.