Abstract
This thesis asks, ‘How might Australian heritage be operationalised as cosmopolitical matters of concern held in tension between the First peoples and second peoples of Australia?’ Offering a reading of Australian heritage in contriving a lens of cosmopolitics, albeit that such a lens was achieved with varying degrees of success, the study tells of encounters and gives a vernacular expression to some everyday happenings in which Australian heritage materialises as civilisational local–global relations, linked in with ties to people and to place. The Northern Territory of Australia situates the inquiry making visible infrastructural dynamics of the happenings of Australian heritage, offering analyses of policies in practice as effecting an ontologically diverse intervention serving the state and its citizens. The contrivance in showing of Australian heritage as ‘careful cosmopolitics’ emerged through inquiry problematising heritage as knowledge practices in being sensitised to the socio-political and historical circumstances from which the ‘Australian state’ has arrived and comes to know itself in part through its heritage operations.The thesis structures material characteristics of Australian heritage as three ‘care-scapes’, seeing each by analogy to a vertical archaeological plane, an ordered array of cultural sediment that might be read to reveal ‘happenings’ that have assembled, re-assembled and/or disassembled in generating multiple realities of on-site heritage locations. These studies disentangle the legacy of a truck as a museum and heritage object, prepare a material semiotic reading of the living cultural landscape of Kakadu National Park, and burrow into the genealogy of institutional interrogating policies of practice as meaningful materialisations of legacies in the present. Each care-scape is historicised and, in being offered as backgrounding in this thesis, is relegated to an appendix.
There are obvious points of difference between these Australian heritage assemblages. The truck mobilises Australian heritage in place as a movable and mutable heritage object; Kakadu National Park attempts a ‘fixing’ of Australian heritage as world heritage; and the ‘office’ of the Australian institution administers possibilities for heritage in a place, person, or thing through a conceptual brief built into policy and legislative arenas. However, along the way, glimpses are afforded of moments of nurturing and/or hindering the happening of a cosmopolitical frame of intention that materialises in heritage as a translating figure privileging representation of the state and the peoples within.
As an emergent collective materialising Australian heritage, these assemblages are entities that, while they might perform systematic address to epistemic injustices of the past, such address does not happen all at once. These chapters then are empirical studies that articulate the making and doing of Australian heritage preparing evidential profiles as cultural archaeologies that both situate and explore the instrumentation and practices of heritage, creating possibilities for a critical knowing of a new world of heritage service provision.
| Date of Award | 28 Nov 2022 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Helen Verran (Supervisor), Brown Stephen (Supervisor), Michaela Spencer (Supervisor) & Ruth Wallace (Supervisor) |