The Hartley Revitalisation Project won the category for Adaptive Reuse – Government Corporation for work at the convict era Hartley Historic Site.

The widely applauded film ‘The Man From Coxs River’, based on a program of conservation of wild horses in the Megalong and Burragorang Valleys, shared first place in the category for Education and Interpretation.

A joint winner in this category was the website prepared for the Royal Australian Historical Society Western Crossings Project which the Trust also credited to Lithgow.

Referring to the Hartley project the assessors said ‘this is a lovely example of a conservation plan guiding good decisions although it has taken a long time to come to fruition with many iterations for proposals to relocate the intrusive public toilets to a discrete location.

On the Coxs River film they said ‘what we saw were only samples of this film but they left us wanting so much more’.

The Western Crossings award attracted the comment that ‘... this website brings together a number of resources with a huge amount of community buy in’.

This year the National Trust Awards celebrated their 20th anniversary with the theme ‘Journeys’.

A spokesperson said the entries have ‘celebrated the journeys that Australia has taken, from indigenous walkabout to the immigrants’ tale’.

National Trust CEO Brian Scarsbrick said the winners have helped provide the nation with a ‘wonderful gift for the future’.

He said the quality of the entries had been such that joint winners had been declared in some categories.