Canberra’s a good-looking city but we don’t just wake up like this, it takes a team of conservators to beautify us so we can smile for the cameras.

Conservator Doug Rogan, from International Conservation Services, has just cleaned 15,000 individual stainless steel pieces that hang from the ceiling in the basement of the John Gorton building in Parkes.

His team took down every single 15cmx15cm piece of stainless steel, cleaned it, and hung it back up again.

“They create this amazing effect with the light sitting above them and they work like a diffuser,” said Doug, who’s been a conservator for 20 years. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it before anywhere else.”

Remember when the historic wooden doors of Old Parliament House burnt down during a protest in 2021?

Well Doug oversaw the conservation works that took 11 months to repair the iconic jarrah doors.

“That was a massive undertaking trying to retain as much of the original unburned features of the door,” he said.

Our picture-postcard city requires a face-lift regularly, as Canberra’s harsh elements can be brutal on our complexion.

In the lead-up to Anzac Day, the bronze sculpture at the Royal Australian Navy Memorial on Anzac Parade had a deep clean and a new wax coating applied.

“The sculpture’s water feature can now be turned on again as it is an integral part of the work [it produces sounds that mimic a bow wave, propeller throbbing, and a surfacing submarine],” Doug said. “The whole work has now been conserved and restored and it looks better than ever now. The Canberra artist [Ante Dabro] was involved and he’s very happy.”

Parliament House is another client of Doug’s, with its more than 700-year-old Magna Carta (founding document of constitutional and parliamentary government) which has recently returned to public display after extensive conservation.

Doug was involved in providing security and environmental monitoring systems for the new custom-made preservation case, which protects the 13h century document’s parchment, ink, seal and cords.

“We also do security and collection tracking of art at Parliament House and the National Gallery of Australia,” Doug said. “The system monitors artworks for any movement so that if a painting is touched or interfered with, an alarm goes off immediately. They also monitor the environment, temperature, and relative humidity.”

One of Doug’s favourite jobs is to audit Canberra’s public art collection (including our prized phallic artwork in Belconnen).

“It’s actually one of the more fun jobs they do each year,” he said. “You get to go to parts of Canberra that you wouldn’t otherwise go to. It forces you to get out and about and see these amazing things like the aerodynamic ‘Angel Wings’ at the National Arboretum.”

Professional conservators like Doug are specially trained in dealing with cultural material in our major museums and galleries.

“It’s all about understanding what things are made of and what things are safe to use to clean them or repair them,” Doug said. “Our general approach is to try not to do interventions, as we call it, unless we have to and if we do, we try to make it reversible so you can understand what we’ve done years down the track. That’s the principle we operate by.”

Work Christmas parties for Doug and his workmates are usually held close to their head office in Sydney but Doug – who was married at the Carillon – wants the next one to be in Canberra.

“We often end up having Christmas parties at something that we’ve been working on because it’s always some interesting heritage site, but I have been pondering getting everyone down to Canberra to do the same sort of thing because we’ve got so much interesting and different pubic art in Canberra.”

Party at Belco Owl?