Curating affect: exploring the historical geography–heritage studies nexus at Sovereign Hill

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the nexus of historical geography and heritage studies, using the case study of the Sovereign Hill outdoor museum in Ballarat, Australia. It reports on the application of more-than-representational thinking to spaces of heritage, and advances the argument that Sovereign Hill can be usefully understood as a semiotic landscape animated by the making, knowing and re-creation of the past, replete with both designed and incidental affective resonances and emotional affordances. The research upon which the paper is based aimed to capture the essences of encounters, engagements and moments of emergent meaning within a site that speaks to both an historic and newly made heritage. Key to this exploration were the energies, realities and responses of actual bodies as they moved around and interpreted the various ways in which Sovereign Hill presents the past to its visiting audiences. Methodologically, the paper draws from a series of qualitative visitor interviews gathered in 2014.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• Sovereign Hill
• affect theory
• meaning-making
• memory-work
• semiotic landscape

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank Emily Burns who working on this project as a research assistant and conducted interviews at Sovereign Hill. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance provided by both Emily Burns and May Willard in the coding of the data used in this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Emma Waterton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1861-4567

Notes

1 Interested readers should consult Anderson (2014) for a fulsome theoretical discussion.

2 This demographic detail is provided to give readers a sense of the overall sample, as opposed to forming the basis of an analysis founded on social difference. The overall sample was unsurprising in terms of its leaning towards female visitors (56 per cent) and in terms of age, with 74 per cent of those surveyed aged 45 or over. Interestingly, domestic tourists made up the bulk of the sample (64 per cent), which was also characterised by relatively low representation in terms of lower and higher managerial positions. This is in contradistinction to assumptions in the heritage literature about the social class of the ‘typical’ heritage tourist, who is assumed to be employed in occupations usually associated with the upper-middle and upper classes, and thus derive a higher income.

3 In addition to the Main Street precinct, Sovereign Hill also revolves around The Red Hill Gully Diggings precinct and the Gold Mine precinct.

4 During the 2 weeks of fieldwork, these recordings were available only twice, so it is reasonable to assume that many visitors will not hear this injection of an alternative voice.

Additional information

Funding

Associate Professor Emma Waterton was the recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery for Early Career Researcher Award (project number DE120101072).