Most renowned as a convict prison, Port Arthur sits within a landscape important to Aboriginal people and was a town for longer than it served as a penal settlement.

The Conservation Plan needed to address the heritage values in all of the historical layers of this place and shape effective policies to guide conservation and change, uses and activities.
A key task for the Context team was to document the social significance of Port Arthur. This was achieved through a series of workshops, on-site surveys and comprehensive questionnaires sent to community and representative organisations. The Conservation Plan needed to take into account the complex meanings of the site for the local, state, national and international communities. A challenge was finding ways to consider potential social values for state and national communities. Engagement with these large communties was not possible within the scope of the project. Instead surrogates were sought: in the case of Tasmanians we selected and interviewed a number of people who had written about the meaning of Port Arthur to Tasmanians.

The detailed recommendations placed heritage at the centre of future staffing, tourism and planning priorities for the site. Port Arthur is one of eleven convict sites that together form the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage Property, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2010. (Source: contextpl.com.au; https://www.gml.com.au/projects/port-arthur-management-plan/)

In 2007, the GML team returned to assist in the development of a new Management Plan to replace the 2000 Conservation Plan, expanding the scope to include the Coal Mines site. Context reviewed the social values assessment undertaken in 2000, providing input into the National Values, reviewing the actions actions undertaken to implement the 2000 plan and making recommendations about community and stakeholder engagement for the 2007 plan.