Description:
This article investigates how cultural landscapes (especially the potentially limiting organically evolved landscape) can be used as a research framework to evaluate historical mining heritage sites in Australia and New Zealand. We argue that when mining heritage sites are read as evolved organic landscapes and linked to the surrounding forested and hedged farmland, the disruptive aspects of mining are masked. Cultural landscape is now a separate listing for World Heritage sites and includes associative and designed landscape as well as those that have evolved organically. These usages have rarely been scrutinized with care. We analyse how mid-nineteenth century goldmining sites can be best thematically interpreted and understood for their heritage, indeed World Heritage, significance and, where appropriate, developed for their sustainable heritage tourism potential. Drawing on a number of research disciplines, a schematic framework is offered for interpreting and classifying these new world cultural landscapes based upon analysis of gold-rush heritage sites throughout the Trans-Tasman world. We evaluate and apply this framework to place-based case studies in Victoria, Australia and Otago, New Zealand
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.