Description:
As Judith Bennett's quotation observes, the impact of the Pacific War on Pacific Islanders was a unique event that permanently changed patterns of life throughout the region. This chapter iTivestigates and analyses the present day cultural heritage legacy issues associated with WWII. It emphasizes the irnporrance of Islander perspectives of the conflict and how their heri tage is remembered and conunemorated at th.e present time. It also consid ers how official heritage dialogues commemorate the war. For many, the memory of the Pacific War, as well as in tum attention to the remaining heri tage, is fading and in some instances is no longer relevant. Seemingly there are competing trends regarding commemoration of war heritage or, increas ingly, forgetting it. Many Pacific Islands exhibit longevity in nurturing their war memory and heritage. An indicative example is the Solomon Islands, where there has been a recent spate of commemorative events and public sculptures to honour the coasrwatchers. Yet other Pacific Island societies place less and less value on their war heritage as time goes by. This tension between remembering and forgetting is primarily associated with the Pacific War's intangible heritage. "From introduction"
Description:
This chapter's objective is to move beyond standard understandings of places of pain and shame in the existing body of literature. It introduces a multidisciplinary heritage approach, focusing on the Kew Lunatic Asylum in Melbourne. This vast, impressive and prominent building highlights the level of government and public focus on benevolence, and benevolent incarceration, prevalent in Victorian era colonial society. When it opened, the Kew Asylum was among the largest such complexes in the world, its creators aspiring to bring forth a model institution that was not only an exemplar of colonial Victorian society but also of the British Empire.
Description:
This article introduces and evaluates heritage tourism interpretation strategies for depicting the Chinese-Australian gold seeking experience across an urban tourism landscape in central Victoria, Australia. The city of Bendigo has its origins in the nineteenth century goldrushes and contains a variety of heritage sites, most notably those connected with the Chinese migration to the region in search of gold. These sites, including a temple, museum, cemetery, and kiln site, form arguably one of the most complete collections of Chinese goldrush heritage assets still in existence across the globe and have the potential to be marketed to visitors as a Chinese heritage precinct. They provide a direct familial and cultural nexus between southern China and Australia, yet also highlight a complex historical encounter that requires development of visitor interpretation to bring the stories to life and provide meaning and tourist appeal. This article, using a cultural landscape model, will evaluate the way in which key historical assets can be understood as heritage tourism attractions in the present day and the role of interpretation in that process, particularly focusing on the use of podcasts and promotional media films as interpretive tools. It will also consider how thematic interpretation, based on and acknowledging contested narratives, may add to the authenticity of the precinct for visitors and complement the built heritage. The findings suggest that while some of the Chinese heritage sites in Bendigo are successful tourism ventures or have strong tourist potential, overall the tourist experience is fragmented and would benefit from more integrated interpretation strategies that link the various sites across the precinct and the region.
Description:
This paper is interested in the significance of Australian football to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia. In particular, this paper is interested in the cultural power of football and how it has foregrounded the struggle and highlighted the contribution that Indigenous people have made to the national football code of Australia. This paper also discusses key moments in Indigenous football history in Australia. It questions further that a greater understanding of this contribution needs to be more fully explored from a national perspective in order to appreciate Indigenous peoples’ contribution to the sport not just in elite competitions but also at a community and grass roots level.
Description:
Over the last hundred years, Anzac Day (25 April), the anniversary of the initial landing of Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in 1915, has captured the Australian and New Zealand national imaginations. The day remembers the first significant engagement involving Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the First World War. This article is an early report of a major project that will chart Anzac Day’s origins, development and contested meanings. It is both an historical study, tracing changes in commemoration and remembrance over time, and an investigation of the ways in which Australians and New Zealanders mark Anzac Day in the present day. It will interrogate the shaping of historical sensibility by exploring the complex connections between personal and collective remembrance. One of the challenges to understanding Anzac Day is dealing with the multiplicity of meanings of such a large-scale, diverse and now venerable (in modern Australian terms) observation. It will also examine the neglected subject of Anzac Day’s observance outside the Australia and New Zealand – in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the Pacific – where it has long played a role in expressing the identities of Antipodean expatriate communities.
Description:
Australians have been making pilgrimages to the battlefields and cemeteries of World War Two since the 1940s, from the jungles of New Guinea and South-East Asia to the mountains of Greece and the deserts of North Africa. They travel in search of the stories of lost loved ones, to mourn the dead and to come to grips with the past. With characteristic empathy, Bruce Scates charts the history of pilgrimages to Crete, Kokoda, Sandakan and Hellfire Pass. He explores the emotional resonance that these sites have for those who served and those who remember. Based on surveys, interviews, extensive fieldwork and archival research, Anzac Journeys offers insights into the culture of loss and commemoration and the hunger for meaning so pivotal to the experience of pilgrimage. Richly illustrated with full-colour maps and photographs from the 1940s to today, Anzac Journeys makes an important and moving contribution to Australian military history.
Description:
Destination managers often wish to utilise heritage assets to create memorable visitor experiences, yet there is a paucity of research aimed at understanding how these experiences might be perceived and valued for tourism purposes. This article uses a cultural tourism potential audit tool to evaluate the experiential value of a collection of Chinese heritage assets in the regional city of Bendigo, Australia. The tool was expanded to include analysis of the type of experience, categorising them as either peak or supporting. Findings suggest that some of the heritage assets had high or moderate experiential value, with a few forming the basis of peak tourist experiences. Other heritage assets, whilst high in experiential value, are best conceptualised as supporting experiences. Through the aegis of a heritage precinct, both types of experience may collectively attract tourists, provided they are integrated with a meaningful and appealing narrative.
Description:
Ballarat is best known as an exemplar mid-19th century Victorian gold rush city. It is located in the western region of the State of Victoria in Australia and is of state-wide importance being the largest inland city in the state and a major driver of regional growth and development. Ballarat is a city of communities, home to many diverse peoples, each contributing their own culture, ideas and aspirations to the city’s identity. Ballarat’s story is one of layered change over millions of years: the natural landscape formed 500 million years ago, whilst modern Indigenous people, the Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung, have deep connections to this ancestral country spanning back at least 50,000 years. Ballarat’s urban heritage and diverse community is more recent: it is one of the world’s most substantial and intact mid-19th century historic gold rush cities and one of the most important mass migrations of people during the search for gold. The intensity of this time is most evident in central Ballarat with the city’s urban form established during the first 20 years of the gold rush. Today, the city is considered the capital of Western Victoria and its key points of difference are its regional location and distinctive cultural identity. Ballarat is renowned for its intact historic streetscapes of public and commercial buildings, grand to humble housing, civic spaces, gardens and plantings. It is also acknowledged for its great lifestyle, significant cultural institutions and much loved calendar of festivals and events.
Description:
Ballarat is best known as an exemplar mid-19th century Victorian gold rush city. It is located in the western region of the State of Victoria in Australia and is of state-wide importance being the largest inland city in the state and a major driver of regional growth and development. Ballarat is a city of communities, home to many diverse peoples, each contributing their own culture, ideas and aspirations to the city’s identity. Ballarat’s story is one of layered change over millions of years: the natural landscape formed 500 million years ago, whilst modern Indigenous people, the Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung, have deep connections to this ancestral country spanning back at least 50,000 years. Ballarat’s urban heritage and diverse community is more recent: it is one of the world’s most substantial and intact mid-19th century historic gold rush cities and one of the most important mass migrations of people during the search for gold. The intensity of this time is most evident in central Ballarat with the city’s urban form established during the first 20 years of the gold rush. Today, the city is considered the capital of Western Victoria and its key points of difference are its regional location and distinctive cultural identity. Ballarat is renowned for its intact historic streetscapes of public and commercial buildings, grand to humble housing, civic spaces, gardens and plantings. It is also acknowledged for its great lifestyle, significant cultural institutions and much loved calendar of festivals and events.
Description:
Taking Broken Hill as an exemplar of Australian, indeed global, labour heritage, this article, analyses the survival of labour heritage and union practices in the town that continues to the present. It examines the interpretation of successive layers of industrial and labour history as a means of revealing a culturally dynamic and enduring community with close connections to its built heritage. The authors challenge the application of two-dimensional and static models of heritage interpretations too often applied to contested heritage sites. The authors argue that Broken Hill is a community whose determined social and industrial character and distinct built environment has transcended changing patterns of investment and economic decline.
Description:
Chinese immigrants and especially the Chinese on the goldfields of Victoria, now figure centrally in history curricula and in heritage and tourist promotions most prominently of course, through Bendigo’s Chinese Heritage Precinct and the Gum San Heritage Centre in Ararat. These public representations of nineteenth-century diversity draw equally from a reflexive, culturally-informed historiography and a radically transformed popular culture in Australia, Victoria in particular (Waterhouse 2009: 11–14). No doubt, when heritage analysis of the central goldfields was first systematised, following the Victorian Historic Buildings Act (1974) and a subsequent sequence of municipal conservation studies, the Chinese appeared as something of a curiosity, on the margins of the enterprise of mining and peripheral to the heritage of goldfields towns (Davison 1991). Only after decades of research and widening perceptions of what could be properly classed as heritage, has Chinese settlement emerged as critical to assessment and interpretation, and of course heritage tourism, within townships as well as in state forests and national parks. Perhaps coincidentally this interest in Chinese heritage parallels a revival of Chinese immigration to Australia, in a broad view, comparable to the peaks of the nineteenth-century gold era. And yet, in part because so many remnants of the work of Chinese settlers have been erased, and their intricate mining systems fragmented, these sites unintentionally revert to the status occupied years ago by their creators – as eccentric curiosities.