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2. Vestiges of Colonialism: Manifestations of the Culture/Nature Dividein Australian Heritage Management
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2 Vestiges of Colonialism Manifestations of the Culture/Nature Divide in Australian Heritage Management Heather Burke and Claire Smith These natives were coloured with iron-ochre, and had a few feathers of the white cockatoo, in the black hair of their foreheads and beards. These simple decorations gave them a splendid holiday appearance, as savages. The trio who had visited us some days before, were all thoughtful observation; these were merry as larks, and their white teeth, constantly visible, shone whiter than even the cockatoo’s feathers on their brows and chins. Contrasted with our woollen-jacketed, straw-hatted, great-coated race, full of work and care, it seemed as if nature was pleased to join in the laugh, at the expense of the sons of art. Sun never shone upon a merrier group of mortals than these children of nature appeared to be. Thomas Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia, 1848 When Thomas Mitchell and others of his ilk described their encounters with Indigenous peoples,1 they did so within a social framework that placed the colonizers at the apex of progressive “civilized” society. In contrast, Indigenous peoples, lacking any appreciable European understandings of “culture,” were placed in a state of nature—the simple, innocent inhabitants of a far away past or geographically distant present (Griffiths 1996:9–27). The “children of nature” syndrome was predicated upon a fundamental dichotomy between culture and nature that underlay the philosophy of the age of progress and its resulting imperial impulse. Nature was a resource to be encompassed, developed, and profited from—civilized society’s role was to observe it, classify it, and collect it (Griffiths 1996). As post-Enlightenment western European society increasingly distanced itself from nature, the culture/nature divide became the filter for many aspects of ethnological, anthropological, and archaeological enquiry throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In relatively raw settler societies , in particular, this dichotomy had important ramifications, first for the conservation movement, and second for the subsequent shift to the recognition and management of cultural heritage. 22 Heather Burke and Claire Smith Lacking the ancient monuments and works of high art (European “culture”) encompassed by the Venice Charter of 1957 (International Council on Monuments and Sites [ICOMOS] 1964), settler nations had to look to other facets of their new worlds in the process of inscribing their identity. Australian settler culture thought itself bereft of visible signs of culture or history: “I miss the picture galleries, Statues, and fine buildings of England, there are no fine churches, or cathedrals, no antiquities here, except the sea and the hills” (Snell [1850] quoted in Griffiths 1996:152). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the first attempts to protect any asset for an appreciative public applied to the natural features of these new lands. In Australia, a process of reserving public lands to protect their scenic values began in the early 1860s. Influenced by British ideas of conservation and concepts such as the “garden city movement”—the provision of public space and “green belts” as antidotes to the pollution and crowding of industrial cities (Lennon 2003)—the conservation movement was initially closely linked to recreation and the potential for public lands to provide a wide variety of entertainments. By the early twentieth century, however, a significant shift had taken place, from nature as a leisure resource to nature as a reserve of pristine and edifying wilderness. Framed by older European romantic sensibilities, the idea of wilderness sought to evoke an emotional connection with the natural environment , at the same time creating a sense of temporal depth through the physical aspects of the landscape itself: “wilderness was appreciated as a source of national identity, a reservoir of images that were unique and awe-inspiring, and a match for Old World cultural grandeur” (Griffiths 1996:261). Moreover, in line with notions derived from landscape painting, naturalness and primitiveness went hand in hand: to qualify as wilderness a place needed to appear ancient, pristine, and timeless (Griffiths 1996:260). There was a time lag between recognition that the natural environment had important civic, emotional, and amenity-providing qualities, however, and recognition of the existence of anything approaching cultural heritage. Moreover, when this did occur, it remained an outgrowth of the long-standing European desire to appreciate nature in its pure and pristine state, and the culture/nature divide this was predicated upon. Just as the “children of nature” syndrome structured many European interactions with Indigenous people, so, too...