Photos of the Past: The Negotiation of Identity and Belonging at Australian Tourism Sites: Final Report

This research report provides timely and much needed new knowledge on how individuals capture and understand ‘Australia’ in response to messages encountered at popular heritage sites. The research itself was conducted at seven sites within Australia: Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Kakadu National Park, the Blue Mountains National Park, Geikie Gorge National Park, the Burra Heritage Trail, Port Arthur Historic Site and Sovereign Hill. Six of these seven sites are discussed in the following report (the Burra Heritage Trail is discussed in a separate research output). For the purposes of analysis, the six case study sites were condensed into three genres (1, 2 and 3). Genre 1 includes those heritage tourism sites where Aboriginal peoples’ views of Australia’s history are used to inform visitors. Genre 2 includes those sites that bring together Aboriginal peoples’ histories with settler narratives. Genre 3 includes those heritage tourism sites that draw upon interpretation strategies that emphasise settler and/or colonial history. The analyses collected together in this report provide an important evidence-base that can be used by policymakers to reconsider a fuller range of affective responses to Australia’s colonial past, and perhaps better understand how emotions and felt responses contribute to the making of wider discourses of ‘Australian-ness’ and Australian identity.