A history of heritage policy in Australia : from hope to philanthropy

Following the heyday of the 1970s, the past few decades have seen a diminishing of federal investment in heritage in Australia (Sullivan 2015, p. 111). Indeed, across that timeframe, Australia’s heritage field has seen the onus of responsibility move from federal to local government to a significant degree, where it is now supplemented by the promise of community involvement and a growing expectation that heritage should duly attract its own capital investment, principally through tourism. The sum total, to borrow from Watson and González-Rodráguez (2015, p. 461), has been a strengthening belief in a ‘heritage economy’, which can perform its part not only within the wider environmental ‘crusades’, but as something that ‘makes money and regenerates moribund places’. At the same time, its continued ability to make the nation remains one of its key features. Fulfilling that need is achieved through a process of careful selection and display and the ascription of national significance and meaning to those places concerned. This selectivity is of course self-fulfilling and remains essential for both the production of tourism commodities as well as a crucial mechanism in the identity-making process at the level of the nation. In other words, for heritage objects and places to be effectively developed as marketable and identity-lending, it remains essential that they be linked (through their very selection and subsequent marketing) to pre-existing national narratives that they can reflect, be a part of, substantiate or provide material evidence for (Watson 2009). Thus, it remains those ‘national’ stories – linked to periods that are well known, and are easy to imagine and visualise – that continue to provide the active semiotic that supports the selection of new heritage places and the product development and promotion that goes with them. This makes the heritage field something of an outlier from many of the other fields examined in this collection: though it illustrates a powerful movement towards the commercialization of heritage and a somewhat inconsistent engagement with transnational influences, it is a field that has refused to withdrawal from the project of nationing.