Icy heritage – managing historic sites in the Antarctic: Pristine wilderness, anthropogenic degradation or cultural landscape?

Abstract

While best‐practice guidelines and policies in cultural heritage management had been established at both an Australian domestic as well as at an international level in the 1970s they did not appear to be reflected in the Madrid Protocol or Australian (as well as other ATCPs) cultural heritage management practice in Antarctica in the intervening period. There are a number of reasons why this delay in the adoption of best practice in cultural heritage management in Antarctica occurred and also why the adoption of best practice in this area since that time has been so slow. One of those reasons relates to perceptions – the perception of Antarctica as a “pristine wilderness” which needs to be conserved (or restored to a virginal state), free of the traces of past human interactions with the environment, which is the one this paper focuses on; and the strongly held perceptions relating to links between historic sites and territorial claims, which is the subject of a separate paper. This paper presents, as an idea for further discussion and examination, the thesis that while visions of pristine, uninhabited nature led to the conservation of Antarctica, they have also inspired practices and policies of environmental management which resulted in heritage destruction and removal in the past, and which, it can be argued, continue to influence management decisions made about Antarctic heritage today.