“Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here”: Austerity, Heritage and a Steam Museum

One of my favourite novels is Iain Banks’s 1994 cyber-punk classic Feersum Endjinn. Set in a fully-wired future, it tells of a world where the real and the virtual are indistinguishable, and where many people’s consciousness exist within a crumbing digital architecture. Characters move through a landscape of decaying partial data, their experiences increasingly unintelligible.

It’s not unlike how , in the very near future, we’ll need to experience heritage sites in Nova Scotia.

“Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here” certainly captures where we seem to be going. Heritage sites are being closed; dead links pretend they never existed. Of course, the sites are still there, under that dead link. We can see a snapshot of the site in the Wayback Machine – though a snapshot is just that – there’s no functionality, just some pictures and some text. It’s not yet crumbling like Banks’s “cryptosphere”, but it will. It may be virtual, but it’s just like the real-world Sutherland Steam Museum: not yet crumbling under a lack of maintenance, but it will.

The Government of Nova Scotia announced a series of cutbacks in its February 2026 budget. Heritage, and arts and culture more generally, appear to have been the low-hanging fruit as their cuts were massive. Conservative ministers popped into town for a very short legislative session to announce a series of slashed budgets lines across almost all programs in the arts sector. Most cuts ranged from 30 to 50 per cent, and some entire programs were cancelled. Programs that had existed on shoestring budgets for years are again being asked to do more with less, and this time, more with much less. Several museum sites are simply being shuttered.

The Sutherland Steam Museum is a case in point. It’s a small museum, with a suitably small staff, in the small rural community of New Denmark, Colchester County. It’s a source of pride for that community, a modest generator of tourist traffic, and moreover a reminder of how their community forebears made their way in a dynamic, ever-changing capitalist world. It will be shut down, permanently.

I’m a historian, not an accountant or a finance guy, so I can’t profess great knowledge on this, but I am genuinely mystified by the calculations. We speak of ourselves as proud purveyors of culture and history. We even wish to sell some of that to tourists. We love when someone notices one of our writers or musicians. But developing that kind of culture is not organic, it does not simply emerge from our stoney soils – it’s certainly something in which this government seems unwilling to invest. The Houston government made choices, as all leaders must. But rather than looking to build new sources of revenue, they decided to reduce it by cutting bridge tolls, taxes on non-resident homes and shave a point off the HST. No doubt this has put additional cash in people’s pockets, but it does not come cheap. Oh look, the Province can now claim, we’re in an even tougher budget situation; we’ll need to cut more services. Fiscal policy via self-inflicting wounds appear to be the method of choice.

Heritage sites can’t be understood as sources of revenue, and they aren’t primarily for sale to tourists – they’re for the people of Nova Scotia. These sites are [were!] intended more for education in local history than for drawing off a bit more cash from New York golfers. This is where the greatest loss comes: at the expense of knowing less of ourselves, less of how we adapted to a changing world, less of how we were modern, progressive actors willing to make our place in the emerging industrial world. Do the folks who walk the greens of Cabot Links know they walk over mines that were the livelihoods, and death sentences, for thousands of miners and their families? How will Nova Scotians understand how their province came to be when the choice is between 18th-century fortifications or a millionaires’ yacht race? I hope they enjoy the race; it’s a great event; people should enjoy such events. But they shouldn’t come at the expense of who we are, and where we came from. Of finding resources of hope, not spectacle. All that is solid does seem to melt into air.

The great irony of the Sutherland Steam Museum example is that it offers [offered!] a clear example of exactly what conservatives so frequently laud: hard work, an innovative business strategy, and bourgeois aspirations. The Sutherland mill was the creation of a family that understood change, and responded creatively to its possibilities. Steam engines and a railway meant a Nova Scotia producer need not be tied to the coast, that fossil fuels and steel rails, not river currents, were the energy that could drive the future. Heritage sites like the Sutherland museum give us access to important elements of that dynamic past, of a people who made their way in the modern world.

Heritage is not a frill. It’s something necessary to our sense of self, to our sense of community, to our shared sense of identity. When we visit historic sites, when we see well-chosen elements of our past, speak with knowledgeable guides, and when we see and feel the connectedness of our lives to a distant past, we can build social cohesion and a sense of self-esteem in our communities. And at the same time, we can explore our past mistakes, our shortcomings, and better understand why less effective decisions were made, and how the threads of history formed our cultural cloth. We can see how social solidarities were sometimes acts of exclusion. We can see our virtues, and our failings, and better understand where we are today. Heritage sites provide entrées to history, and self-aware communities. They are the critical infrastructure around which community history can be organised and made real.

Heritage is more than heritage sites. But they’re important. Such sites are material reminders of important aspects of that past. They can be touched, viewed, and walked through. They can be a places of dialogue and understanding. We’ll find little of that on YouTube, and still less in the future portended by the devastating cuts in this budget.

Written for the Acadiensis Blog.