Interview Recording
Interview Transcript
Gwenda Sheridan interviewed on 30 March 2021 by Jean Elder
This is an interview with Gwenda Sheridan, who is being interviewed for the Australian Garden History Society’s National Oral History Collection. Gwenda is speaking about her extensive research as a landscape heritage planner into Tasmania’s unique cultural landscapes as well as histories of some of our oldest gardens and their plantings.
Synopsis
Heritage and town planner Gwenda Sheridan is busy incorporating heritage protection values into town planning in Tasmania. She developed the first landscape management plan for Queen’s Domain in Hobart, which she was invited to revisit and expand, and has worked on hundreds of development applications in Tasmania. This interview charts her career from her early studies in geography and history to her current work in Tasmania’s north, naming many of the properties she has helped protect, colonial landscapes that need preserving and the reasons why. She speaks of the historicity of Tasmanian towns, and projects such as her research into the Launceston Horticultural Society of 1838. Sheridan has been described as a ‘cultural landscape crusader’ – she continues the fight with decades of research behind her into Tasmania’s remarkable cultural heritage.