Everything you need to know about the new series including the Breakaway Creek church and premiere date
There is a project this season Restoration Australia This is unlike anything seen on the series before. Its revision is not particularly difficult. It doesn’t require hours of painstaking craftsmanship to save crumbling period features. Even host Anthony Burke admits it’s a “pretty simple restoration project.”
But the transformation of a small wooden church in the southwestern Victorian town of Breakaway Creek (population 50) is about much more than preserving bricks and mortar. Featuring a First Nations family in the program for the first time, this restoration is about reclaiming a place of trauma and dispossession and honoring the lands of the Gunditjmara people.
“We weren’t really that interested in the church itself,” says Burke, architecture professor and homeowner. Grand Designs Australia and its byproduct, Transformations in Large Designs. “We were interested in looking at a landscape… You can’t understand one without the other, and that’s not the same for a lot of the other places we follow.”
The vision of the church’s owner, Geelong cartographer Craig Molyneux, whose relatives live at the old mission, was to turn the church into a weekend retreat. Along with structural repairs and lead lighting depicting native birds replacing religious iconography, a local flora expert was consulted and a grass-weaving lesson was taken from old Aunt Eileen.
“Craig and [his wife] “Ros was very conscious of the bleak history,” says Burke. “Yet, they wanted to find a way forward and make room for that conversation to happen, no matter how difficult it was. “I was amazed by their generous spirit.”
This eighth season also features the show’s oldest property to date: a decrepit 200-year-old farmhouse outside Moruya on the NSW south coast. There is an abandoned monastery in Boorowa, NSW, “the scale of which is completely different”; An old pumping station outside Dungog in the Upper Hunter; and a disused post office in Carlton River, Tasmania.
“Four of the six houses in the season didn’t actually start out as a house,” Burke says. “A lot of people are thinking about adaptive reuse, so this was a moment where history became contemporary… Because of the heritage component, you’re asked to be the forensic expert on the fabric of the building. You have to be detailed as well as big picture.”
“I think a lot of new builds see this as a blank canvas. They bring big ideas and they become general very quickly, but you can’t do that with adaptive reuse. You have to respond to every scale of the project, and that requires a lot of attention and a lot of commitment.”
Burke restored his own family home, a 1910 workers’ cottage in the Sydney suburb of Annandale. “These are not prima facie rational decisions,” he says. “We choose these projects because we fall in love with a building and then decide what to do with it. But by then it’s too late.”
The season opens with a Victorian-era monster not far from the Breakaway Creek church featured in the fourth episode. In western Victoria, empty-nesters Jane Martin and Neil Gibbs contest the turreted bluestone mansion of villainous squatter John “Scabby” Moffat.
“When you walk in the front door and the hallway is big enough for the cricket pitch, you realize you’re on a different scale of ambition here,” says Burke. “The arch at the entrance was Arabesque. It was quite ornate.”
The property, of course, carries echoes of another part of colonial history.
“The area around Wickliffe doesn’t have a very clean reputation in terms of the way we deal with Indigenous Australians,” says Burke. “I think it’s going to be a problem if we try to hide the stories. What we need is a way to tell stories that invites everyone to the table. They need to be there together so we can try to make sense of our own history.”
Restoration Australia It returns on Thursday, May 21 at 20:00 on ABC and ABC.
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Bridget McManus is the television writer and reviewer for Green Guide. He was deputy editor of Green Guide from 2006 to 2010 and currently writes features and interviews for Life & Style in The Saturday Age and M magazine in The Sunday Age.
