Domestic Decay, Poetic Heritage: The Relocation of John Shaw Neilson’s Birthplace Cottage

<p dir="ltr">The Australian poet John Shaw Neilson (1872–1942), an impoverished itinerant labourer who rarely had a stable dwelling during his lifetime, is memorialised through a ‘birthplace cottage' which was moved from Penola across the state border to Nhill in 1961. The relocation of heritage buildings, often involving deconstruction, rebuilding and a change of setting, inevitably reduces heritage value and precludes it from official listing. The current structure now standing in Nhill might be seen as an assemblage that has been remixed and altered over time rather than an ‘authentic' heritage building. Instead the cottage can be encountered as a kind of ‘stage set' for imagining Shaw Neilson's impoverished childhood, conditions that were borne by many working people of the late nineteenth century. In this article I explore the meanings of the cottage, arguing that it can be read as an artefact of Nhill’s ‘pioneering' settler colonial past and a celebration of a peripatetic poet, at a time when such memorialisations are being challenged.</p>