ASHA invites you to join us for our next online lecture, a thought-provoking conversation about institutional heritage, memory, and the politics of what we choose to preserve.

Presented by Paul Johnston

Friday 17 April 2025 | 12pm AEST | Online (next Friday!)

Embedded within Hobart’s inner suburb of New Town, St Johns Park has been a place of institutional care for nearly two hundred years. First established as the King’s Orphan Schools (John Lee Archer, 1836), the site has continuously housed those deemed elderly, destitute, infectious, or addicted. It carries a weight of concentrated historical trauma that has never been fully acknowledged.

Now the subject of a state government redevelopment proposal, St Johns Park faces an urgent new threat: a plan to construct a major building on the Burial Grounds of over 400 Orphan School children, eight of whom were Aboriginal children taken from their families. With heritage agencies absent from this process, the Friends of the Orphan Schools now find themselves before the Planning Tribunal to prevent it.

Hobart architect and heritage practitioner Paul Johnston will offer an overview of St Johns Park’s origins and evolution, and explore what its long neglect reveals about heritage, memory, and meaning. This is a timely conversation about who decides what we remember, and what we allow to be lost.

Paul Johnston is a recognised expert on Tasmanian architecture and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects. His practice has completed conservation works and heritage management plans for some of Tasmania’s most significant places, including the Theatre Royal, MONA, Domain House, and the Queen’s Orphan Schools within St Johns Park. He has presented at the Professional Historians Association, the ICOMOS Science Heritage Symposium, and the Regional Architecture Association, and contributed to the Australian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale.

We hope to see you there.