Abstract
Adelaide, the state capital of South Australia, is a quintessential colonial city. However, in the land colonial settlers called Australia, colonialism demeaned notions of Country in a physically and politically contested space. New approaches have been called for to reconsider Australia as a shared space that places high value on indigenous identity. From within a context that challenges us to think about how Country and culture might be envisioned, designed, planned, and implemented, this paper reports on a hypothesis about how the concept of graphic heritage can be applied to enhance sustainable development in this South Australian setting. Building on recommendations from a collaboration between academic research with the United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO, the imprecise relationship between heritage interpretation, presentation, and representation is exposed to reveal how graphic heritage can function as an enabling tool for disparate partners to provide a focus for discussion and joint purpose.
Keywords
graphic heritage; colonialism; adelaide; country
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1069
Citation
Harland, R. (2024) Adelaide’s graphic heritage: The quintessential “contested” colonial city, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1069
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Adelaide’s graphic heritage: The quintessential “contested” colonial city
Adelaide, the state capital of South Australia, is a quintessential colonial city. However, in the land colonial settlers called Australia, colonialism demeaned notions of Country in a physically and politically contested space. New approaches have been called for to reconsider Australia as a shared space that places high value on indigenous identity. From within a context that challenges us to think about how Country and culture might be envisioned, designed, planned, and implemented, this paper reports on a hypothesis about how the concept of graphic heritage can be applied to enhance sustainable development in this South Australian setting. Building on recommendations from a collaboration between academic research with the United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO, the imprecise relationship between heritage interpretation, presentation, and representation is exposed to reveal how graphic heritage can function as an enabling tool for disparate partners to provide a focus for discussion and joint purpose.