Heritage as social action

An earlier version of the present chapter first appeared in a discussion paper (Byrne, Brayshaw and Ireland 2001) on the social significance of cultural heritage places prepared by the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service. This organisation had responsibility for the management of Aboriginal heritage places across the whole of NSW ( a total of c.60,000 places) and also for those non-indigenous heritage places that lay within the State’s national park system (c.9,000 places). The discussion paper was written against a background of concern that inadequate attention was being given by heritage practitioners to the social significance of these heritage places. As far as Aboriginal heritage was concerned, practitioners inside and outside government had stressed the archaeological significance of places that included rock art sites, shell middens, rock shelter deposits, stone artefact scatters, ceremonial rock arrangements and initiation sites, carved trees, and human burial sites. In the case of the on-park non-indigenous places, belonging to the period after the British settlement of Australia in 1788, the emphasis was on architectural significance. These places included old homesteads and the infrastructure of sheep and cattle stations, old mines, lighthouses, the remains of convict-built roads, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century defence installations around Sydney Harbour. The present chapter, in revised form, was part of my own contribution to the social significance discussion paper (Byrne, Brayshaw and Ireland 2001). My intention in the chapter was to stimulate thinking and debate about the social significance of heritage places by reviewing some of the relevant literature in the fields of history and anthropology. It was hoped this review would prove useful to heritage practitioners working in private practice (as consultants) or in government agencies where background reading tends not to be considered ‘core business’ in the way it would be if they were working in universities.