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Location marks on the map are approximate. Projects involving Aboriginal archaeology and Aboriginal cultural heritage are not included in this map for cultural sensitivity reasons, but we have listed some of the Local Aboriginal Land Councils we have worked in.
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When you partner with Artefact, you’ll receive timely and accurate advice on how to integrate archaeology, heritage and environmental considerations into your project plans.
Artefact includes specialists across key fields of archaeology, heritage, environment, interpretation, architecture and history. More importantly, with 50 staff we can assemble a skilled in-house team targeted to your specific requirements.
HISTORICAL HERITAGE
As highly experienced project leaders, Artefact has been lead consultant on many major projects. Our planning and management systems ensure that projects are completed in a timely, professional manner, working in partnership with our clients.
Since 2010 Artefact is proud to have worked on a diverse range of large and small-scale infrastructure and development projects.
During this time we have built-up extensive experience in a variety of sectors including rail, roads, power and renewables, health, greenfields development and urban renewal.
Some of the more well-known projects we've been involved with include: Central Station Metro; Parramatta Light Rail; Sydney Metro City & Southwest; Wickham Transport Interchange; Northern Beaches Hospital; St Vincent’s Private Hospital; Concord Forensic Mental Health Unit; Sydney Harbour Bridge; The Northern Road Stages 1 & 2; Berry to Bomaderry Upgrade (Princes Highway); West Wyalong Solar Farm; and Wind Farm and Transmission Line projects in the Pilbara and Western NSW.
With almost 50 staff, and offices in Sydney and Newcastle, we can assemble a skilled in-house team targeted to your specific requirements.
For a personal response to your heritage and environment needs, please ask how we can tailor an integrated solution to suit your plans, your timeline and your budget.
Artefact have worked on almost all major rail infrastructure developments in NSW over the past decade.
Our proudest achievement is our team. We value their skills and talents, and we trust that you will too.
At Artefact we recruit staff who are passionate about the past, skilled in their disciplines and professional in their approach. We all understand the need to balance our rich local heritage with plans that shape the State’s future. These attributes contribute to a great team culture internally – and to exceptional advice and service for you. We support each other to make sure that our clients come first, which is why we have an industry-wide reputation for being responsive, innovative and authoritative.
SANDRA WALLACE, MANAGING DIRECTOR
Artefact was established in 2010 by Dr Sandra Wallace, who remains the company’s Managing Director.
What ever your heritage project we are here to assist.
Country or city, desktop or fieldwork, we’ve covered most of New South Wales and ACT.
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Unlocking the truth of the past
Australia ICOMOS 2025 National Conference on Wadawurrung country in Ballarat, 17-19 November 2025. Stream: ‘Survival and Exclusion – Heritage in the wake of conflict and colonisation’
The paper ‘Architecture for a Nervous Landscape: Defensive Buildings in NSW 1788-1850’ outlined a research project being developed by Artefact Heritage & Environment and the University of Sydney which sets out to discover where, how and why defensive buildings and structures were built in New South Wales between 1788 and 1850.
The paper was delivered at the ICOMOS Conference that explored themes of ‘Battlefronts’ and ‘Un-Settling’ with some papers contesting the nature of heritage in Australia. Participants were invited to ‘critically examine heritage through lenses of disruption, resilience and transformation’ and to ‘challenge conventional narratives and expand the scope of heritage practice’. The paper, developed with architectural historian Cameron Logan and urban geographer Dallas Rogers from the University of
Sydney, certainly did this.
The paper asks, what can these places tell us about conflict, and about the sense of anxiety and insecurity that characterised the settler society in that period? How can we rethink this heritage that has endured through conflict and colonisation but remains shrouded in a discourse of pastoral idyll?
And how might we include First Nations voices and narratives in this dominant heritage landscape?
Images and stories of the lonely stock worker cowering in a slab hut deep in Aboriginal land, firing at attacking warriors through holes or slits in the timber walls of his only defence against flights of
spears are common. There are many historical accounts of these hasty defences, however there are few remaining examples of timber huts with augur holes or slits – though there are some, especially in Queensland.
Yet there are also a surprising number of surviving stone structures, often outbuildings, with rifle slit windows. It is unclear when many of these buildings were constructed, though often they were in advance of a homestead.
The question arises – were they built with the conflict of Aboriginal resistance in mind? Or perhaps they were constructed this way for multiple reasons – as secure storage, but also as a refuge against bushrangers, thieves and Aboriginal warriors. Or perhaps they were built like this with the memory of war – in effect an acknowledgement of the conflict for the occupation of Aboriginal lands.
Expressions of a nervous landscape
The paper responded to how a generation of research outlining conflict between First Nations people and the invading society has dramatically changed the historiography of the colonial period and the meaning of British settlement on the Australian continent.
The recent release of the book of the documentary series The Australian Wars (by editors Rachel Perkins, Henry Reynolds, Mina Murray & Stephen Gapps) is another important moment in a changing historical understanding of genocide and war in the conquest of Australia. But thus far historians have not returned systematically to the buildings and remnant material fabric that often enabled military aggression and sustained colonial defence on the frontier: Outbuildings with rifle slit windows, slab huts with gun loops, stone walls, strong rooms, alarm bells and a myriad of other domestic defensive architectural elements that reflect an unsettled, nervous landscape.
Denis Byrne has described the spatial logic of racial segregation in Australia as emerging from a “nervous landscape” (Byrne 2003). Our research proposes that the surprisingly ubiquitous defensive architecture of the first phases of colonisation was an early expression of that nervous landscape. As such, the buildings were vital infrastructure in the establishment of a new racial and environmental order on the Australian continent.
Image - Detail of an outbuilding rifle slit window in Appin south of Sydney.
Photo by Stephen Gapps
This project asks very different questions than earlier generations of architectural and historical scholarship. While building empirically on the historiography of colonial architecture in Australia, the project authors want to upend this historiography conceptually.
From the end of World War I, discourse on Australian colonial architecture encouraged people to imagine the early buildings of the New South Wales colony as home-like, restful places that were symbolic of a peaceful process of settlement.
Sydney Ure Smith’s Domestic Architecture in Australia (1919) and Hardy Wilson’s The Cow Pasture Road (1919) and Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania (1924), were the template. They depicted the buildings and landscapes of the early colony as having been shaped by a class of gentry farmers.
This characterisation of the early builders and buildings did two things. It provided a historical pedigree for Australian architecture in the twentieth century – repose, lack of pretension, suitability for the landscape (Hamann 1988) – and an architectural heritage for an emergent cultural nationalism.
Widely disseminated in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s in publications and exhibitions by the National Trusts, historical societies and other heritage-oriented groups, the buildings featured by Ure Smith and Wilson became the very image of the Australian past for the white-settler, national project.
CAN YOU HELP?
The project is in early stages and we seek input from heritage practitioners in particular, but also from anyone who has noticed defensive features in early colonial buildings. Many of these defensive details have been overlooked in heritage studies, conservation plans and listings. Some are recorded with minimal detail. Some have been assumed to be purely decorative or for other functions.
Please get in touch (stephen.gapps@artefact.net.au) if you have any suggestions of potential sites.
Image - A ‘rifle slit’ window exterior of an outbuilding in the Appin area south of Sydney.
Photo by Stephen Gapps