WHEN I began to work in the field of heritage interpretation, the rules were set out before me. The field had as its main theoretical text Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage, published in 1957. Professional conferences held by Interpretation Australia focused on the visitor experience, signage and visitor centres. There was little interrogation of the term ‘heritage’ or understanding of the fact that this was a contested, critical and complex activity.

At the 2013 Interpretation Australia conference, historian Andrea Witcomb presented a critique of interpretation at Melbourne’s Legal Precinct, where she drew attention to the notion that creating uncritical empathy with prisoners at the site through role play was problematic. This was met with bewilderment and anger by some conference attendees. One incensed critic stated: ‘The person who did the interpretation at the Legal Precinct was my friend – she put in so much work.’ Implicitly, interpretation at that time in Australia was an activity beyond criticism. A lot of effort was put into telling people how to feel and think about a place but not into wondering how the stories behind the interpretation had been chosen. It was an act of advocacy rather than interrogation.

This jarred with my own professional training as an historian but echoed my experiences in the heritage sector to that point. In the 1990s, I was the State Library of Victoria’s Field Historian. My main task was to collect historical pictures and manuscripts for the Library’s Special Collections. However, within the Library at that time, there was tension between the way collection managers defined significance and my desire to bring in material that represented the activities of men and women who had been marginalized or omitted from the historical record.

In the mid-1990s, in the absence of criteria for significance in the Library’s pictures and manuscripts collection policies, acquisitions were usually linked to the colonization of the State of Victoria and traditional narratives of the past – pastoralism, war and politics. This extended to using colonial descriptions for Indigenous images (a situation that has now been remedied by the appointment of an Indigenous staff member to approve all Indigenous images) and a predominance of records representing the activities of ‘great men and important events’. Given that this was at a time when the New Social History had been prominent in the field of history for over 20 years, it showed that little understanding of a democratic way of representing the past had permeated the Library’s culture in the 1990s.

This situation was complicated by the highly personal nature of the collecting activity. As a youngish historian, I often met older people crippled by grief. In some cases, the act of donating was an act of honouring the person’s late partner: a symbolic rather than material transaction. To some collection managers in the Library, however, these personal collections were ‘junk’. Stepping boldly where fools feared to tread, I sometimes decided to collect the material anyway – it would only take up a little bit of space, I reasoned, but meant so much to the donor. Unfortunately, this approach was not always welcome and I was asked to return the material to the donor on one occasion. The process of acquiring material culture as a form of memorializing had been overridden by notions of what was ‘important’ to the Library.

 

I left the State Library in 2000, spent one year in an advertising agency and then started a business that was initially based in history. Over the 17 years of my businesses’ operations, the SHP team has seen interpretation through the lens of public history. As a result, we have often been confronted by questions of what kind of history we do, to whom it matters and how we deal with conflicting views of the past.

However, as we moved from history into the field of heritage interpretation in the mid-2000s, we were ducks out of water, working in an area that had been primarily codified as communication by the professional heritage interpretation sector. In this process, history was often ‘fixed’ by the people in charge and encapsulated in a message to be conveyed to the public. The locus of meaning for interpretation lay with the interpreter. The media of poetic writing, talks and guiding were in turn ‘theatres of interpretation’ for skilled practitioners, who had the ‘passion’ and ‘gift’.

In the words of Michael Glen, a former member of the Association of Heritage Interpreters and an Executive Committee Member of Interpret Europe: ‘…interpretation is a VOCATION, a calling – in that sense a confession…it tends largely to be a natural gift for, or at least an inclination towards, providing guidance, teaching and personal development in others.’¹

 

Although the field of heritage interpretation did not initially set out to reject democracy, it implicitly did so by rendering the community silent and invisible. Interpretation was done for the public, under the assumption that this intercessionary approach would produce great benefits for heritage sites, which were defined through qualitative tools such as visitor satisfaction and metrics such as visitor numbers. Leading environmental and social psychologist David Uzzell describes this as the themes – markets – resources model, where the public is viewed as visitors, tourists or consumers of resources who need to be educated.²

This approach dates from the origins of the profession of heritage interpretation in the United States Parks Service, where journalist Freeman Tilden understood nature as a manifestation of divinity. In ‘revealing’ nature and being ‘provocative’, Tilden believed heritage interpretation would naturally lead park visitors to understand nature and then care for it (this simplistic link between messaging and action has now been disputed).

This approach is profoundly undemocratic, positioning the interpreter as the source of wisdom about a site and the community as receptors of this wisdom. It is also a very western notion, where nature is understood to be apart from human presence: a ‘wilderness’. In Australia, from the 1970s onwards, this notion was enthusiastically taken forward by groups such as the Wilderness Society and the Victorian National Parks Association. However, it met with resistance from Indigenous communities, who had been in Australia for many thousands of years before colonization, and from other groups that claimed special affinity with the land, such as mountain cattlemen in the Victorian Alps. ‘Sense of Place’ was the forum within which these competing claims of attachment to the land were debated.

 

But this approach was not confined to the natural environment area. Within the cultural heritage sector, much has been written about ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’, the term coined by archaeologist and academic Laurajane Smith to explain how the codified values of experts in archaeology, art history, history and architecture reinforce grand narratives of nation and class, on the one hand, and technical expertise and aesthetic judgement, on the other.³ This includes the quasi-scientific method by which experts classify heritage sites through criteria such as aesthetic, scientific, social, spiritual and technical significance.

From the origins of the modern heritage profession in the 1960s, these criteria privileged built heritage and the judgements of experts such as architects and art historians. In Australia in 1979, for instance, three-quarters of the places on the Australian Government’s Register of the National Estate were individual buildings.⁴ As the province of the expert, therefore, the cultural heritage sector was anti-democratic in much of its practice until the 21st century, rarely addressing the complexities of how communities generate and consume heritage. This often led to expert voices prevailing over contrary or conflicting local views or to the valorization of written over oral testimony. For instance, the Niitsitapi of Southern Alberta, Canada, commented that the significance of the Writing-on-Stone archaeological site could not be determined by archaeologists:

‘…A’i’si’nai’pi is a sacred place because spirits are present in the valley. The cultural and spiritual significance of A’i’si’nai’pi does not come from the presence of archaeological evidence or specific physical components. It doesn’t matter how many rock art or archaeological sites are located at A’i’si’nai’pi or how they are described and catalogued. The landscape and our traditions make A’i’si’nai’pi significant to the Niitsitapi.’⁵

 

The recent understanding of the importance of intangible cultural heritage and social value has changed the heritage landscape and put the spotlight on communities as well as on the processes that underpin heritage interpretation. As archaeologist Edward Gonzales-Tennant comments, ‘…interpretation is inherently political and produced in relationship to modern social and cultural constraints.’⁶ Former ICOMOS President Gustavo Araoz described this as a ‘new heritage paradigm’ where social processes are integral to the significance of the place.⁷ Nevertheless, many decisions about heritage still lie outside the community.

The work of social historians, beginning with the ‘History from Below’ movement by Birmingham School historian E.P. Thompson, offers a way to reframe this situation through a method that includes community research and the publication of results in the local press and on television. The process is transparent and the outcomes public, yet this approach also needs to be pragmatic: communities cannot be romanticized as the ideal ‘other’ in juxtaposition to controlling behaviour by heritage professionals. The two areas instead need to share expertise: the professional’s in how to analyse, record and contextualize local history within the meta-narratives of the past, and the community’s in revealing the affective meanings of place and in telling local and personal stories. Later in this article, I will discuss one example of how this could work in practice.

 

By offering counter-narratives to ‘official’ histories, storytelling by local communities, in particular, provides a compelling way in which more democratic interpretations of the past can take place.⁸ Within the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), rights-based heritage has also become a major concern over the last twenty years. But democracy has a broader meaning than storytelling. The ‘Nara Document on Authenticity’, which follows the eponymous conference of 1994, promotes cultural diversity and the idea that ‘the cultural heritage of each is the cultural heritage of all’ and that responsibility for cultural heritage and its management belongs, in the first place, to the community that has generated it and, in the second, to those who later care for it.⁹

The 1999 revision of Australia ICOMOS’s ‘Burra Charter’ also shows a more inclusive approach to heritage than do previous versions, not only by including spiritual significance as a criterion of assessment for the first time but also by stating that stakeholder communities should have a role in conserving and preserving places of special importance. Nevertheless, the 1999 ‘Burra Charter’ still positions community as an object, stating that ‘places of cultural significance enrich people’s lives, providing a deep and inspirational sense of connection to community and landscape…’¹⁰

 

Yet, it is the notion that a community can be both the subject of interpretation, and an active agent within the interpretive process, that offers the greatest possibility for democratizing the discipline. This kind of interpretation needs to embody the notions that, rather than being cohesive or univocal, communities are ever-changing, complex and multigenerational. Moreover, a community’s relationship with place is not static: community members act dynamically with heritage places through emotions of joy, attachment, grief or loss. These heritage places are also created anew through social interaction; for instance, a woman visiting a place as a child will create it again as she visits over time with her friends, family, children and grandchildren. Place is both a function of the community and created by it.

But how does heritage interpretation become more democratic on a larger scale? At first, it seems that developing communities have raced ahead in this area. Both the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have invested in tourism projects to develop capacity-building tourism projects in Asia. In the case of heritage interpretation in Punjab, India, the aim of natural and cultural heritage interpretation is not only to provide infrastructure but also to ensure greater participation by local communities in tourism-related economic and livelihood activities, to strengthen the capacity of concerned sector agencies and local communities for planning, marketing and developing tourist destinations and attractions and to promote private sector participation and small businesses.¹¹ SHP was awarded both contracts and worked with a leading Indian international heritage consultancy, the Conservation Research Cultural Initiative (CRCI), for several years. This was through Asian Development Bank funding for the local government agency, Punjab Heritage Tourism and Promotion Board.

 

In practice, however, this has been difficult to implement. Over the last several decades, vernacular heritage projects have sprung up not only in India but around the world. These communicate heritage in the formats of walking tours, food tours, local history projects, oral/video history and through social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. However, the field of heritage interpretation has few, if any, models of how larger projects can incorporate these approaches to create lasting economic and social outcomes for local people. Indeed, large projects can even be counterproductive for communities associated with heritage sites.

In Punjab, the projects have begun to take predictable paths: signage, large sound and light installations, pamphlets, audio tours etc. Economic outcomes in this case are based on the model of distributional income from tourism, where the developed attractions will ideally create jobs within the surrounding economy in services such as food and beverage, accommodation, retail and so on. However, this can easily turn into outcomes that override heritage in favour of income and have a cannibalizing effect on the attraction, which then becomes unpopular with tourists due to charges of ‘inauthenticity’, overcrowding and commodification. Indeed, with the staggering rise of international tourism, and development of the cruise industry, some World Heritage sites are adopting drastic procedures to mitigate the effects of tourism: Dubrovnik in Croatia is currently limiting cruise ships to the historic city centre and Florence is also taking action over mass tourism.

 

One of the key areas around which debate has occurred in Punjab is Gobindgarh Fort, which Punjab Tourism has designated as a theme park to be operated by a private firm at the time of writing. Gurmeet Rai, Principal of CRCI who undertook the original conservation work on the fort, comments: ‘(One must) recognize and understand that the physical fabric of a monument is a memory of a nation and a people. It is a standing witness of times gone by and helps us understand cultures. The protection and conservation of these, what may appear as maybe insignificant "piles of brick", holds something precious for those generations of people who are yet to come even if those that exist today are indifferent or helpless! Protecting heritage is also about intergenerational equity and justice! Heritage is not a "commodity" to be consumed. It is to be treasured and taken care of. Value is not only economic value!’¹²

Retaining heritage, then, is a profoundly democratic activity, because heritage is an intergenerational repository of social memory. But tangible benefits for communities are equally important. Heritage interpretation activities that can provide real and meaningful economic returns to communities associated with heritage sites is desperately needed around the world as manufacturing industries decline, traditional industries are replaced by digital industries, climate change displaces whole populations and neoliberal policies of ‘trickle down’ economics are invoked to promise new jobs where there will be none. However, the success of such ambitious enterprises in changing the lives of the poorest members of a community, and the most disenfranchised, is dependent on the economic model brought to the situation, which is in turn governed by planning processes. In practice, in small communities, good outcomes often depend on the community leader distributing income fairly among community members.

 

This was the case in a traditional village on the island of Tanna, Vanuatu, which participated in a tourism programme linked to a resort. I visited the village as a tourist in 2017 and participated in a number of tourism programmes: living in the village for a night, going on a walk to a waterfall, eating traditional food, singing songs. All tourism took place within the traditional familial structures of the village and with minimal disruption to social activities, rituals and the village economy. From the understanding I gained on my visit, income from tourists was used to buy supplies for the villagers and the village, to repair huts and to install a bush toilet. The western idea of ‘democracy’ might not apply to this village, because the chief controlled the distribution of income from tourism, but it was a profoundly communal model of management aimed at maintaining traditional lifestyles and lifeways.

 

Conversely, without a sustainable management model, cultural tourism income in developing communities runs the risk of either becoming concentrated in the hands of multinationals or becoming susceptible to corruption and mismanagement. In the west, communities often fare little better in terms of genuine outcomes. In most cases in which I have been involved, consultation has been embedded in the interpretive methodology but undertaken as a largely meaningless gesture. In one Australian rural town, for instance, SHP spent a great deal of time consulting with local people on the design of a new community facility. Over a period of several months, residents of this town participated enthusiastically in workshops and in discussions about the creative development of the facility, which was aimed at generating tourism for a town that had lost its main industry and was rapidly losing its population.

However, when the final budget was determined, the local government authority brought in a cost estimator to ‘fix’ things. He overrode the results of consultation and the ideas that tourism generation was at the heart of the project and that heritage interpretation had been structured to involve the community and produce lasting, long-term economic and social benefits for the town. The facility suddenly morphed into a new ‘library/community facility’ with no links to tourism. The consultation had been meaningless, as had the model of using the town’s remarkable heritage to create a unique point of difference and engage businesses at different levels.

 

What could interpretation look like, instead, as a genuinely shared activity? At the time of writing, SHP is working as a consultant for Lendlease Communities on a project at Epping, Victoria, that involves the Wurundjeri, the Traditional Owners of the land where Lend-lease’s new residential development will take place. Frequently, Indigenous consultation for interpretation has been a process only of story gathering but, in this case, Lendlease Communities asked the Wurundjeri what outcomes they wanted from the work. They identified areas such as job creation and working with their young people. From this premise, SHP scrutinized the whole interpretation project, from the creative concept development to research, design, multimedia and construction on the site, to see where Wurundjeri involvement could take place.

Potential for cooperation includes co-creation of content; joint lessons on ‘shared history’ for local schools; translation of all interpretation into Woiwurrung (the Wurundjeri language); developing a Woiwurrung language education kit that the Wurundjeri can use within their own community with students around Victoria; mentoring Wurundjeri group members in heritage, history, graphic design and digital media design; engaging Wurundjeri artists and identifying employment opportunities in the construction industry.

At the time of writing, we are waiting to meet the Wurundjeri Land Council to discuss this, but hope it will be a step forward in providing a new working model of heritage interpretation based not only on shared histories but also on meaningful, tangible outcomes for the Wurundjeri such as jobs, skills development and training in industries linked to interpretation.

 

Footnotes:

1. Michael Glen, ‘Interpretation: Profession, Discipline, Art or Science?’, http://www. interpret-europe.net/fileadmin/news_import/Glen2009-Boletin-article_en.pdf, p. 3.

2. Cited in Emma Waterton and Steve Watson, ‘Framing Theory: Towards a Critical Imagination in Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19(6), p. 548.

3. Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage. Routledge, London and New York, 2006, p. 11.

4. Paul Ashton and Jennifer Cornwall, ‘Corralling Conflict: The Politics of Australian Heritage Legislation Since the 1970s’, Public History Review 13, 2006, p. 59.

5. Cited in James Opp, ‘Public History and the Fragments of Place: Archaeology, History and Heritage Site Development in Southern Alberta’, Rethinking History 15(2), p. 251.

6. Edward Gonzales-Tennant, ‘Archaeological Research and Public Knowledge: New Media Methods for Public Archaeology in Rosewood, Florida’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Florida, 2011, p. 12.

7. Gustavo Araoz, ‘Preserving Heritage Places under a New Paradigm’, Journal of Cultural Heritage 1(1), p. 55.

8. Opp, op.cit., p. 247; Gonzales-Tennant, op. cit., pp. 38-39.

9. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, ‘The Nara Document on Authenticity’, whc. unesco.org/document/116018, accessed 25 March 2018.

10. Australia ICOMOS, ‘The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, 1999’, Burwood, Victoria, Australia, 2000.

11. Punjab Heritage Tourism and Promotion Board, ‘Tender for Cultural Heritage Interpretation’, available on application.

12. Gurmeet Rai, Facebook, accessed 25 March 2018.