The Politics of Place

This chapter presents research on the UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape Uluru-Kata Tjuta in Australia. Drawing from ethnographic interviews of heritage experts and archival research, the chapter examines the politics embedded within managing and interpreting cultural landscapes in World Heritage contexts. It asks: how do heritage designations affect claims to traditional homelands, resources, and subsistence and resource management practices? The data show how largely apolitical and ahistorical narratives reconfigured the historical and social conditions of the park and redefined Traditional Owners' relationship to Country. It argues that state and national laws and World Heritage and national park policies work in ways that force Traditional Owners to make claims within systems that are largely incompatible with their custodial responsibilities, knowledge practices, and customary laws.

Toward a Critical Theory of Heritage

This chapter locates heritage landscapes as central to ongoing debates and future contexts and offers insights and recommendations of how engagements with landscapes can include emancipatory discourse and/or be deployed in ways that mobilize agency. It suggests ways that heritage managers can move toward protecting the intellectual and property rights of Indigenous people in heritage initiatives that could include developing research protocols, in collaboration with Indigenous people that take on the political and historical contexts. Not only as a consideration of issues related to Indigenous heritage such as confidentiality, intellectual property rights, access, right of review, and ownership of data, but also as a way to bring in the controversial topics and concerns. The chapter suggests that to develop dialogue and expand the context for Indigenous knowledge in heritage and environmental management practices, scholars must restructure how we report our work and the laws and practices that guide investigations. This chapter argues that the field of critical heritage theory has much to offer as it moves away from a critique of shortcomings to instead provide recommendations and a new engagement with heritage landscapes that makes room for multiple understandings and brings in subjugated and stakeholder knowledge.

Landscapes as Heritage

This chapter examines the political dynamics, cultural processes, and frictions of landscapes as heritage. It defines heritage landscapes and locates these within the emergent field of critical heritage theory (CHT). The chapter discusses how landscapes figure prominently in peoples' lives and imaginations. They are also the site of conflict and crisis, displacement and loss, and/or are the means in which communities negotiate identity, nation-state boundaries, sovereignty, or come to terms with difficult events. This chapter argues that scholars are often constrained in how to address these contexts in their work, and suggests that some of these challenges relate epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Drawing on research experiences as an archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnographer, and international heritage expert, the author illustrates the complexities of landscapes as heritage, and argues that it is critical that scholars and researchers reconcile the landscapes encountered in their work with their sociopolitical contexts.

Landscapes of Extraction

This chapter presents ongoing research on the resource frontiers of Western Australia. Resource frontiers conceptually mark the space of enactment around people and resources, and engender revitalization and renewal as much as inequality, exploitation, and displacement. As spaces of connection, frontiers engage action: investment, extraction, negotiation, development, and divestment. They have engendered new paths and access to resources, and repositioned stakeholders as key negotiators in courts, public forums, and cultural heritage initiatives. This chapter asks: how have notions of landscapes come to be redefined in this process? Drawing from research along the Pilbara Coast of Western Australia, the chapter examines how this region represents a true resource frontier, with infrastructure (physical, political, and social) being built to support Australia’s expanding extractive operations. It shows how industry is mobilizing the language of heritage, Indigenous rights, and sustainability in their conceptions of heritage and through their corporate and social responsibility campaigns. The chapter argues that it is urgent to clarify the competing claims and trace the varied agendas of global institutions, corporations, the nation-state, and stakeholders. It examines how corporate conceptions of heritage intersect with ideas and issues surrounding land and access, indigeneity, sustainable development, and the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Experts and Epistemologies

This chapter examines the consequences of landscapes as heritage and discusses the culture of expertise in heritage negotiations. Drawing on the author's role as a heritage expert and interviews with heritage experts and practitioners, this chapter fleshes out the epistemological criteria upon which expert claims of ownership, authenticity, and identity are made and why this matters. It demonstrates that the multiple theories and methods that are brought to bear in interpreting cultural landscapes, referred to as the “epistemologies of landscapes,” intersect with issues related to cultural and natural heritage, landscape preservation, and identity. Although developments within the landscape paradigm have enabled greater flexibility in design and practice, the majority of models heritage experts draw on were developed within a modern and western framework. In many ways, this genealogical legacy structures whose interests are defined and given legitimacy in how landscapes are imagined and explained, and has tangible implications for descendant and stakeholder communities. The chapter also examines the intersecting frameworks of ecosystems services and natural capital that are increasingly central to heritage negotiations to show how these have become a currency that multinational corporations, the nation-state, private sector, and other decision makers have increasingly drawn on in decisions and management.

Epilogue

I am back in Western Australia. It has been only two years since I visited this home on Crockett Way in Karratha. I park the van in front of what had once been a well-kept home. I’ve come to see if my former informant is still living there; I had lost track of him after he was laid off in 2014. I assume he has moved away and that his home is in foreclosure. I base this solely on anecdotal evidence: a broken window, a yard overgrown with weeds, and a for sale sign that appears to have been there for some time. I hear a dog barking and see someone peek out from the home next door, signs that not all the workers have moved away....

Of Environments and Landscapes

This chapter examines the environmental contexts of cultural landscapes in Mongolia (climate change) and coastal sites in Alaska (oil spill) to show how landscapes intersect with environmental concerns and contexts. The case studies are placed within the larger debates surrounding the research and management of Indigenous heritage and the sociopolitical contexts and implications of heritage practices in environmental contexts to argue that the political contexts of heritage landscapes are often not identified within debates on sustainable development. The chapter demonstrates how ideas of sustainability, wilderness, and nature are central to how ideas of place are established, and urges that cultural heritage hold a more prominent position in ongoing debates.

Prologue

The view, the man told me, “does not disappoint.” We are standing in the parking lot of Woodside’s North West Shelf Visitor Centre looking out upon the massive onshore liquefied natural gas plant, which includes processing and domestic gas trains, condensate stabilization units, and storage and loading facilities. It is a full-sensory experience: whirring, humming, hammering, pounding, whistles, announcements, and an eternal gas flame, set against the blue hue of the Indian Ocean, which brings to mind the flags settlers once used to claim lands. Woodside built the industrial plant on the Burrup Peninsula in the Dampier Archipelago, in the Pilbara region along the northwestern coastline of Western Australia on one of the most important petroglyph and sacred sites in Australia and “Country” to the Traditional Owners, the Ngarluma/Yindjibardni, Yaburara Madudhunera, and Wong-Goo-tt-oo people....