The Burra Charter’s cautious approach still holds. But the ‘as little as possible’ refrain is too readily turned into a default ‘no’.

A nineteenth-century parapet in Melbourne. Heritage is not just the art of keeping things still. It is the harder craft of deciding how places like this continue to live in the present without losing what makes them matter.

The Burra Charter (rev. 2013) gives us one of conservation’s most quotable lines: ‘do as much as necessary, and as little as possible’. It appears in the preamble and returns in Article 3.1 as part of the Charter’s ‘cautious approach’. At its best, it’s a practical check on overreach: a prompt to earn every intervention through evidence and purpose.  It reminds us that historic places are sensitive and not blank canvases, and that change should be argued for, not assumed.

In Melbourne and Sydney, though, the phrase is too often used as a shut-down. A proposal arrives. Someone invokes ‘as little as possible’. The room relaxes into a default ‘no’. The maxim becomes a professionally acceptable way to avoid the harder work: defining what the place needs to survive, and identifying what kind of change actually threatens significance.

That drift matters because heritage places in New South Wales and Victoria are not assessed in a vacuum. They sit inside living cities and towns. They need access, safety, servicing, climate resilience, and viable uses that pay for upkeep. When we treat change as inherently suspect, we slide into a kind of curatorial materialism: a protective attachment to ‘original’ fabric and a romantic idea of authorial intent, treated as trump cards rather than starting points.  

The heritage object (a building, a streetscape, a landscape) becomes an end in itself. In that mode, places become elements to be protected from the present, rather than cultural infrastructure that should help us engage with the society we actually inhabit, and with the politics and possibilities of our collective future. The result is often a thinner, more defensive preservation culture, not the vibrant, outward-looking movement we actually need.

The line is only as good as the word ‘necessary’

The maxim turns on one word: ‘necessary’. Necessary for what? Life safety? Weatherproofing? Access? Ongoing use? Structural stability? Energy performance? A workable tenancy? A family home that functions inside a heritage conservation area, rather than a house preserved in amber? If we do not force ourselves to answer that, 'as little as possible' becomes a comforting default or vibe rather than a test.

In practice, ‘not necessary’ can quietly mean things that are not heritage impact analysis at all: ‘I’m not persuaded yet, and I don’t have time to be persuaded’. Or ‘the outcome makes me aesthetically uneasy’. Or ‘this is easier to refuse than to condition’. Those are human reactions, and sometimes understandable. But they are not a reasoned conclusion about significance.

This is where the dogged insistence on ‘harmony’, ‘integrity’, and ‘compatibility’ can start to read like a claim that style and form are what heritage is about, full stop. Sometimes those terms are proxies for taste, or for discomfort with contemporary design, rather than a rigorous account of values, evidence, and impact.

The real question the Charter presses on us: why does this place matter?

The most demanding thing the Burra Charter asks is not ‘how little can we do?’ It’s ‘what is important here?’ If we can be articulate about why a place matters—in human terms, not just as a checklist of fabric—we can assess proposals with more confidence and more honesty.

That shift changes the whole conversation. It moves us away from policing ‘change’ in the abstract and toward a performance-based evaluation of new work.

The questions become practical and harder to dodge:

Do the proposed changes make this a better place to live in, work in, or visit? Do they help the place stay occupied, maintained, and understood? Do they contribute to the broader significance of the place, or do they distract from it?

Those tests don’t lower standards. They raise them. They force an applicant to show their workings. They also force us, as assessors and advisors, to explain what we are protecting and why, rather than hiding behind a slogan.

An early-nineteenth century convict-built retaining wall, now structurally unstable and bulging outward. After investigation and testing, careful dismantling and reconstruction is the least harmful way to secure the fabric and the road it supports.

‘Minimal intervention’ is not the same thing as ‘minimal work’

Another common slip in approvals culture is counting interventions instead of judging impacts. Sometimes the least harmful option is a bigger, more coherent move that avoids lots of small, messy ones over time.

Take accessibility. In Melbourne and Sydney, many nineteenth-century and twentieth-century buildings simply weren’t designed for modern access expectations. You can ‘do very little’ and leave people out. Or you can approve a long series of awkward bolt-ons over a decade: ramps that never quite work, handrails that keep shifting, doors that keep getting replaced because nobody resolved the core problem. That slow churn is not gentle on heritage fabric, and it’s not generous to the public either.

A single, well-designed intervention—tight in footprint, legible, placed where the building can take it, detailed properly—can be less harmful overall, even if it looks like ‘more’ on a drawing set.

The same logic applies to services, sustainability, and amenity. It’s easy to say ‘heritage buildings can’t do that’. It’s more honest to ask: if we want this place to stay occupied and maintained, what is the least intrusive way to help it perform in the world we actually live in?

The uncomfortable truth: doing ‘as little as possible’ can be a slow decision to lose a place

In Melbourne and Sydney, we all know places that are ‘protected’ on paper yet slowly unravelling in practice: under-occupied, under-maintained, and caught in a limbo where the cost and complexity of doing anything becomes the standing justification for doing nothing. In inner-urban areas, a related pattern plays out in terraces and small commercial buildings that have become brittle assets—expensive to keep compliant, difficult to adapt to contemporary living or trading conditions, and increasingly valued as markers of prestige rather than as working parts of the city’s everyday fabric.

The risk is not always dramatic demolition, or even demolition by neglect in the obvious sense. It is the quieter attrition of viability: a place kept ‘intact’ in theory, but gradually hollowed out through deferred maintenance, constrained use, and the slow disappearance of a credible future.

Sometimes the greatest threat is not the bold proposal. It’s the timid one. The one that defers envelope repairs, under-scopes drainage, finesses access, and leaves a building vulnerable. Then everyone acts surprised when the next owner returns with an ‘urgent’ scheme because the place is now failing.

Heritage controls are meant to prevent reckless loss. If ‘less is safest’ becomes our default, we can accidentally encourage deferred maintenance and crisis-driven change.

Keep the maxim. Stop using it as a veto stamp.

None of this is an argument for loosening standards or treating heritage places as development sites with nicer plasterwork. Restraint remains a virtue. Fabric is finite. Evidence matters. Reversibility matters. Legibility matters.

The pushback is narrower: the maxim is too often deployed too quickly, too comfortably, and too flippantly. A better way to apply it in NSW and Victoria is to treat it as a two-part discipline, not a slogan.

‘As much as necessary’ means identifying the real risks to the place: water ingress, structural failure, vacancy, unsafe access, climate exposure, poor maintenance cycles, and the slow attrition that comes from a lack of reasonable amenity or a viable use. It means saying plainly what the place needs in order to keep living.

‘As little as possible’ means designing the smallest, tightest, most calibrated intervention that genuinely addresses those risks without eroding significance.

So the next time the maxim is dropped in a Melbourne design meeting or a Sydney pre-lodgement, the most useful response is not combative. It is simply more exacting:

Necessary for what outcome? And what is the evidence that this is the least harmful way to achieve it?

That turns an integral line back into what it was meant to be: a discipline. Not a reflex.

Ornament, craft, and material intelligence. The real question is not how little we do to places like this, but what they need in order to keep living.