One of Ballarat's most beautiful industrial heritage buildings and a part of the city's working landscape for almost 140 years, the mill was constructed over a decade, having started and a grain mill. Its final designs were made by Ballarat's renowned architect Henry Caselli in 1886.

Pasco's has been part of the life of Creswick since the 1850s; its historic buildings were once slated for demolition for a new supermarket.

The reuse of industrial sites and retail premises for contemporary arts and creative ventures is a trend recognised as having helped save much of what is left of colonial working history in Australia.

Whereas once bodies such as the National Trust and Heritage Victoria were accused of looking after the remaining homes of the rich and influential from the early days of settlement and large church and bank buildings with impressive facades, increasingly an understanding of how the consistent fabric of all of our built history is growing.

READ MORE:

In Ballarat, the drive for what was known as 'civic renewal' in the 1960s and 1970s saw many buildings, some surviving from the 1850s and 60s, demolished in the name of 'progress'. Many now recall with dismay the destruction of the London Chartered Bank building on the corner of Lydiard and Sturt Streets, and the loss of the Nicholl Drapers (later Morshead's) at the start of Bridge, replaced with Norwich Plaza.

Lester's Hotel. The Benevolent Asylum. The Ballarat Orphanage. Ballarat East Town Hall. The Ballarat Brewing Company. The Ballarat Gaol. The Phoenix Foundry. Smith's Chaff Mills on Doveton Street. The Alfred Hall. All gone, among many others. But it could have been much worse. A proposal to demolish the Ballarat Town Hall and Post Office to build a mega-council precinct, and tear up Sturt Street Gardens to put in an underground carpark were seriously considered at different times, as was the demolition of Her Majesty's.

While these outcomes might seem far-fetched now, it's worthwhile remembering that only recently one proposal for the historic saleyards site on LaTrobe Street involved no protection for the buildings on the site, and excavations for the new GovHub building were done without a proper, rigorous archeological assessment. This resulted in the disruption and destruction of historical remnants and caused concern among researchers and others.

So the willingness to embrace the reuse of a heritage industrial site, and move beyond simply retaining a facade, is important. In Sydney, the hard-fought retention of the the Cockatoo Island shipyards and the Eveleigh Street Railway Workshops is important not only for the buildings that are saved, but for the education they provide about our working past.

Most of the occupations undertaken in these places were hard work, and often dangerous. Occupational health and safety as we know it today was almost non-existent; workshops were filled with machinery with no guards, hot oil was likely to spray out of them and workers could be maimed or even crushed if they were inattentive or unlucky. Asbestos was used for everything from roofing to pipe lagging; dust would float throughout.

Walking through theses revived spaces gives visitors a physical idea of the labour required to produce everything from fabrics to steam engines in our past - jobs that required skills now lost, in industries also lost to the country forever.

At the Woollen Mills in Ballarat, Mt Pleasant resident Bill Garner recalled seeing dye-stained workers trudging home after their shifts.

"When you saw the people going home, the workers, they really had put in a hard day's work: their clothes were stained and their boots were heavy," he recalled this year.

"I think in a place like Mount Pleasant, which has been devastated in a way like a small country town in that all the shops have closed, the trams stopped, the churches shut, there are no sports teams, there are no public halls left: it's remarkably intact architecturally, but there are no public spaces aside from the reserve. Reviving the Mill in this way will generate the potential for some tremendously good things."

Much industrial heritage remains to be rejuvenated and explored in Ballarat, and some efforts are being made to explore reuse. The George Farmer buildings in Eureka Street are one example; recently the Manchester Unity Building in Grenville Street has been repurposed for a ballet school while maintaining and highlighting the original features of the hall.

Industrial heritage is as important to the culture of a city as is any church, town hall or sporting venue, and it's important to address the lack of protection given to many important sites. Heritage overlays need to incorporate our working past, or they will be as lost to us and our descendants as the site of the Eureka Stockade.