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. Fromthere, it willmove to explore how visitor photography can be used as (a) ameans 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 downmethodologically. 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.