Australian Heritage Research Articles

Geoheritage and Geoconservation in Australia

While Australia has a long history in conservation, less well known are Australia’s efforts to identify and conserve important sites of geoheritage significance. This paper provides a background to geoheritage and geoconservation in Australia and reviews the policies and legislation that underpin listing of sites of geoheritage significance in all Australian jurisdictions and shows that there are inconsistencies and inadequacies in the current set of processes to identify and protect such sites in Australia. The recent Australian Heritage Strategy provides an overarching framework by which Australia’s heritage places can be better identified and managed to ensure their long-term protection and proposes new ways to support and fund heritage places. However, it is yet to be implemented, and this paper outlines the need for a systematic inventory-based system of identifying representative geoheritage. To achieve the objectives of the Australian Heritage Strategy, a renewed focus on geoheritage and geoconservation is required. Finally, this paper also includes a brief description of the emerging field of building stone heritage.

Ethnographic sound collections and Australian Aboriginal Heritage: Kaytetye song traditions remembered

ABSTRACTSong was one of the principal methods of transmitting knowledge in the fundamentally oral societies of Indigenous Australia. As the breadth of song traditions has greatly diminished over the past 200 years, archival recordings of song now form a significant resource of intangible cultural heritage for Australia’s Indigenous people. The song performances recorded in the past are now being rediscovered, remembered and in some cases revived. This paper presents findings from a recent project involving the return of a set of poorly documented recordings of songs to Kaytetye people in central Australia. These newly discovered recordings, the earliest ever made of Kaytetye singing, are shown to be an important heritage resource for these communities. Working collaboratively with senior song experts in order to gain a better understanding of the meaning and cultural significance of various songs, I document the how this discussion of audio material generated important social-histories and memories, reinforced local understandings of rights in cultural heritage, and revealed both continuities and changes in Kaytetye ceremonial and song practice.

Estimating stature using human forearm and leg anthropometric data in an Australian female sample

ABSTRACTStature is a key morphological characteristic used to identify deceased individuals in a forensic context. However, very few Australian-specific standards are published. This is likely due to a methodological difficulty in accounting for the significant level of ancestral admixture present in modern Australian populations. Here, we report new regressions predicting adult stature based on a morphologically discontinuous living female Australian sample. A total of n = 60 adult females born in Australia, n = 53 of which had at least one generation of Australian heritage, were examined for stature and extremity length using standard anthropometric methods. Maximum length of palpated ulnae, radii and tibiae were measured, yielding data for successful regression modelling. We report a total of 24 statistically significant models predicting stature from these measurements. The strongest simple and multiple linear regression models explain up to 66% and 62% data variation, achieving standard errors of estimate of 3.565 and 3.705 cm respectively. Our results are comparable to methods based on other populations. These new models expand current standards for identification of human remains in Australia, and complement global methods of stature estimation from fleshed human remains in mass disaster situations.

The National Estate (and the city), 1969–75: a significant Australian heritage phenomenon

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the Australian Whitlam Labor Government between 1969 and 1975 produced a distinguishably Australian conception for heritage through its notion of the national estate. A watershed for the recognition and preservation of heritage in Australia, it was expansive, democratic and interventionist in its philosophical underpinning and approach. Focusing on the domain of urban heritage and drawing on a diverse range of archival sources, this article examines the national estate’s international origins, along with its reworking by Whitlam, his inner circle and the Inquiry into the National Estate (1973–4). The national estate reshaped public, management and regulatory understandings of heritage in Australia, and informed the Australian Heritage Commission (1975–2004) and the Burra Charter (1979), leaving lasting local and global impacts.

For all Australians? An analysis of the heritage field

This article presents a field analysis of heritage tastes and patterns of engagements in Australia. Using multiple correspondence analysis, it examines a dimension of data collected as part of the 2014–2015 national survey on Australian cultural practices. The data are positioned against the recently published Australian Heritage Strategy, released in 2015, which marks out heritage as a cultural orientation of relevance ‘for all Australians’ (12), thereby alluding to a field that might be defined by openness and far-ranging levels of cultural engagement. The social spaces of heritage captured by the Australian Cultural Fields survey reveal an alternative picture, however, and suggest that there are significant social divisions regarding recognition of, taste for and participation in heritage within the Australian context.

Bird impacts on heritage buildings

PurposeThere is much anecdotal evidence that birds and their droppings are a major problem for the heritage profession. The purpose of this paper is to examine how serious heritage practitioners consider the bird impact to be.Design/methodology/approachAn online survey was conducted of 59 Australian heritage professionals of between one and >20 year’s experience in the field.FindingsBird impacts were not considered of major concern to buildings. The longer experience a practitioner had, the less likely the impacts were considered an issue. Feral pigeons were deemed the most problematic, followed by cockatoos, starlings, swallows, seagulls, mynas, sparrows, cormorants, ibis, ducks and birds of prey. The professionals ranked common deterrent methods. The highest-ranking deterrents were bird netting and bird spikes, but they were only considered moderately effective. The costs of installation and maintenance, as well the ease of installation, were all deemed significantly less important than the physical impact, the aesthetic sympathy and the effectiveness of a deterrent method.Practical implicationsThis study indicates that the impact of birds on buildings in Australia may be of less concern than previously thought, and may be driven by other factors (i.e. aesthetics, commercial companies) rather than actual effects.Originality/valueThis is first study of its kind that surveyed the experiences of a wide range of heritage practitioners.

The Piano Mill: Nostalgic Music and Architecture in the Australian Bush

The Piano Mill is a tower in the forest of New South Wales designed and purpose-built to house 16 reclaimed pianos. Architect Bruce Wolfe conceived it as a massive sound sculpture incorporating a steampunk look and nineteenth-century acoustical devices. To launch The Mill the author composed a new work, All’s grist that comes to the mill, that responds to the architecture, the natural environment and Australian colonial heritage.

“A Regional Conservation Manifesto”, The Burra Charter and the Australian Re-invention of Urban Heritage Management, ca. 1975–1985

ABSTRACTSince the 1970s Australian heritage practitioners – academics, consultants and policymakers – have constituted a robust urban heritage management field. Particularly via the 1979 Australia ICOMOS Burra Charter, this field has equally impugned and influenced regional and international urban heritage practice. Examining the archives of leading Australian heritage protagonists, this article argues that the Australian innovations of the 1970s and 1980s were prompted in part by a backlash against European heritage ideas and practices, after Australian heritage practitioners found themselves side-lined at European meetings. Over subsequent decades, the Australian heritage management events of this historical period have proven significant for local, regional and international conservation efforts in cities and beyond.

Australian cultural built heritage: stakeholders’ perceived conservation barriers and motivations

Stakeholders are recognised as drivers of effective conservation of cultural built heritage. Yet, as stakeholders have eclectic views in terms of their interest in, knowledge of and perceptions about the management of historic fabric, their practices are often diverse. The objective of this paper is to gain an understanding of the stakeholders’ views drawn from relevant professional field on the issues that act as barriers to conservation and identify the factors that motivate built heritage management in Australia. Using a qualitative research design, two focus groups were conducted in Queensland and New South Wales with purposely selected key informants (N = 14) working in the Australian heritage sector. The study presents stakeholders’ interest in managing built heritage and the perceptions concerning the application of conservation policy and practices in the Australian built heritage sector, as influenced by the interdisciplinary backgrounds of participants. The paper contributes to an in-depth understanding of the conservation barriers and motivators and their implications for policy and practices in the management of Australian built heritage. The study is based on the perceptions of key informants with diverse interests and knowledge about the conservation of cultural built heritage; this makes the research analysis and implications inclusive and influential from both theoretical and practical points of view.

‘Searching for My Lady’s Bonnet: discovering poetry in the National Library of Australia’s newspapers database’

AustLit is a major Australian cultural heritage database and the most comprehensive record of a nation’s literary history in the world. In this article we will present the successful results of a project addressing the challenge of discovering and recording creative writing published in digitized historical Australian newspapers, provided by the National Library of Australia’s Trove service. As a first step in identifying creative writing, we developed an automated method for identifying articles that are likely to be poems by searching for a number of signals embedded in articles. When this work began, AustLit contained more 10,200 bibliographical records for poems published between 1803 and 1954 (75% prior to 1900) with links to the full text in 115 different newspaper. The aim of the project was to expand this number of bibliographical records in AustLit and provide a foundation for analysing the importance of poetry in newspaper publishing of the period. Taking advantage of Ted Underwood’s (Getting Everything you Want from HathiTrust , and Open Data ( ): The Stone and the Shell, Underwood blog posts (Both accessed 27 October 2015), 2012) work with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century full text in the HathiTrust collection, we trained a naive Bayesian classifier, modifying code from Daniel Shiffman (Bayesian Filtering. (accessed 27 October 2015), 2008) and Paul Graham (A Plan for Spam. (accessed 27 October 2015), 2002) and improving the quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) by using the overProof correction algorithm. We have been able to successfully identify large numbers of poems in the newspapers database, greatly expanding AustLit’s coverage of this important literary form. After suitable training of the classifier, we were able to successfully identify 88% of the newspaper articles that a knowledgeable human would classify as ‘poetry’. Our results have encouraged us to consider enhancing and extending the techniques to aid the identification of other forms of literature and criticism.

Reconociendo el vínculo entre la significación social y las prácticas en torno al patrimonio cultural

Appreciation of community connections to place is an emerging domain in heritage practice, establishing inclusive, people-centered approaches that are able to 'hold their own' within the dominant paradigm of expert and State-centered practice. It sits within the framework of values-based management. Social value has developed as an important way that concepts such as shared identity can be expressed in relation to heritage places. Globally it offers a much needed perspective, aligned with “people-centered approaches”, and with the potential to co-create understandings of values with those who hold those values. Australia’s experience and leadership have been and are still key, but equally there is now the chance for an enrichment and expansion of the concepts advanced to date as others from different cultural backgrounds start to engage in this discourse. This paper explores how social value emerged in Australian heritage discourse, bringing contemporary community connections into heritage practice, examines its influence internationally by looking at selected documents, and using selected case studies to illustrate methodologies and reveal learnings draws out some key issues.

Mobility, Modernity, and Abroad

Mobility, Modernity, and Abroad

Forest as Place in the Album "Canopy": Culturalising Nature or Naturalising Culture?

Forest as Place in the Album "Canopy": Culturalising Nature or Naturalising Culture?

Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Re-imagining Perth’s Wetlands

Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Re-imagining Perth’s Wetlands

From Cantonese religious procession to Australian cultural heritage: the changing Chinese face of Bendigo's Easter Parade

ABSTRACTChinese processional and musical performances in Australia are the subject of several key studies; however, the origin of the performances or their continuation during the ‘White Australia’ policy era and their transformations over time are neglected. This article investigates the Chinese processional performances that have featured at the Bendigo Easter Fair since the late nineteenth century, and outlines three stages in the transformation of the procession from a Chinese religious procession to a performance of Bendigo's cultural heritage. The case shows a dynamic, bi-directional relationship between the Anglo-Celtic and Chinese communities that predates the ‘White Australia’ policy and continued throughout the era. It offers reconsiderations of several issues in the study of Chinese transnational communities, namely the importance of culture in establishing transnational networks, the role of music in maintaining and recreating cultural identities, and the importance of the Chinese processional performance in multicultural Australian history.

The global rock art database: developing a rock art reference model for the RADB system using the CIDOC CRM and Australian heritage examples

Abstract. The Rock Art Database (RADB) is a virtual organisation that aims to build a global rock art community. It brings together rock art enthusiasts and professionals from around the world in one centralized location through the deployed publicly available RADB Management System. This online platform allows users to share, manage and discuss rock art information and offers a new look at rock art data through the use of new technologies in rich media formats. Full access to the growing platform is currently only available for a selected group of users but it already links over 200 rock art projects around the globe. This paper forms a part of the larger Rock Art Database (RADB) project. It discusses the design stage of the RADB System and the development of a conceptual RADB Reference Model (RARM) that is used to inform the design of the Rock Art Database Management System. It examines the success and failure of international and national systems and uses the Australian heritage sector and Australian rock art as a test model to develop a method for the RADB System design. The system aims to help improve rock art management by introducing the CIDOC CRM in conjunction with a rock art specific domain model. It seeks to improve data compatibility and data sharing to help with the integration of a variety of resources to create the global Rock Art Database Management System.

Representing and reframing: J.W. Lindt’s Glenrowan, then and now

John William Lindt’s images of Glenrowan following the fall in 1880 of the notorious Kelly gang of bushrangers are among the esteemed Australian photographer’s most famous work. This is arguably a result of the photographs’ evidentiary status in relation to a significant event in Victorian history. However, an investigation of the way the perceived objectivity of these images functioned within the specific cultural context of their time allows for a deeper reading of Lindt’s work and its significance today. This article considers the circumstances of production, distribution and interpretation of J.W. Lindt’s Glenrowan photographs, and their relative evidentiary status as perceived in relation to other means of representation. It is found that while his iconic posthumous image of bushranger Joe Byrne conforms to the conventions of the posthumous portrait popular at the time, Lindt’s series also records the ‘media event’ of the Glenrowan siege and its aftermath. The photographs were distributed as a means of providing privileged access to the event, but may also be compared to alternative modes of representation in the press, such as sketches, which provided a different perspective that was perceived as no less ‘realistic’. Serving as documents of both a significant historical event and of the media and public response to that event, it is concluded that the photographs can operate as an entrance-point to discussions on multiple levels about Australian heritage. This additional contextualisation extends to the significance of these images today, as part of the University of Melbourne’s Grimwade Collection.

Why do East Asian children perform so well in PISA? An investigation of Western-born children of East Asian descent

A small group of high-performing East Asian economies dominate the top of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. This has caught the attention of Western policymakers, who want to know why East Asian children obtain such high PISA scores, and what can be done to replicate their success. In this paper I investigate whether children of East Asian descent, who were born and raised in a Western country (Australia), also score highly on the PISA test. I then explore whether their superior performance (relative to children of Australian heritage) can be explained by reasons often given for East Asian students’ extraordinary educational achievements. My results suggest that second-generation East Asian immigrants outperform their native Australian peers by approximately 100 test points. Moreover, the magnitude of this achievement gap has increased substantially over the last ten years. Yet there is no ‘silver bullet’ that can explain why East Asian children obtain such high levels of academic achievement. Rather a combination of factors, each making their own independent contribution, seem to be at play. Consequently, I warn Western policymakers that it may only be possible to catch the leading East Asian economies in the PISA rankings with widespread cultural change.

A Critical Analysis and Philosophical Review of ‘Rapid Reburial’: theClarenceproject

In 2012, Australian cultural heritage practitioners and conservation scientists collaborated on a national underwater cultural heritage (UCH) reburial project, known as the Australian Historic Shipwreck Preservation Project (AHSPP) funded by the Australian Research Council. This resulted in the excavation, documentation and reburial of the ‘at risk’ shipwreck Clarence. Following the excavation, the site and associated artefacts were reburied and subsequently covered by shade cloth and finally, with polyvinyl chloride (PVC) tarpaulins. After completion of the in situ reburial, a number of critical issues were put into sharp relief including: what constitutes the accurate identification of a site as being ‘at risk’; and the implications of ‘rapid reburial’.

Visuality and Its Affects: Some New Directions for Australian Heritage Tourism

This review emerges out of long-standing debates that seek to define Australia's responses to its colonial heritage. In particular, the review will question how ‘affect’ functions as a foundation for shared public understandings of the past and related identities at iconic Australian heritage sites. From there, it will move to explore how visitor photography can be used as (a) a means of capturing and assessing visitors' frames of reference and sensory experience; (b) recovering memories; and (c) imbuing heritage sites with meaning. None of this is easy to pin down methodologically. Indeed, given the relative ‘newness’ of theoretical talk dealing with the politics of affect in the fields of heritage and tourism, little attention to date has been channelled towards figuring out what this might mean empirically. As such, the core component of this review is an examination of the literature that has emerged around visual/performative ethnographies, particularly those that focuses on the visual as a means of capturing what bodies do. Here, a process of being ‘in place’ will be foregrounded, through which individual heritage visitors are transformed from passive viewer into active director, thereby becoming co-producers in the creation and legitimisation of both historical memories and conceptualisations of present-day Australian society.