‘These enchanted hills’: transforming cultural landscapes in the Hills Face Zone, South Australia

ABSTRACT

Tensions between constructions of nature and culture are increasingly relevant in the twenty-first century as natural environments near large population centres come under increasing pressure from developers. The western face of the Mount Lofty Ranges, South Australia, is a historically significant cultural landscape where, following European colonisation, landscape use transitioned between ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ according to local economies and changing public perceptions. Historical and archaeological evidence for the evolution of this landscape illustrate the dichotomies between these changing landscape values and growing public appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of this ‘green’ backdrop to the city of Adelaide. During the 1960s and 1970s the South Australian Parliament passed legislation creating a Hills Face Zone to protect this region from urban development. This paper presents evidence why, fifty years later, this model for landscape management is increasingly relevant as world population growth and urban sprawl extend into natural environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural landscape evolution
• historic landscape management
• cultural landscape management
• open-space planning
• Adelaide Hills Face Zone
• South Australia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [LP0219387].

Notes on contributors

Pamela A. Smith

Pamela Smith was awarded a PhD by Flinders University in 2001 and is currently a Senior Research Fellow. She specializes in landscape archaeology and, in particular, landscapes and sites associated with frontier and colonial archaeology and their interpretation.

F. Donald Pate

Donald Pate is Professor of Archaeology at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. He was awarded a PhD in Anthropology by Brown University in 1989. Prior to joining Flinders as the foundation appointment in archaeology, Pate completed post-doctoral research fellowships at Harvard University and the Australian National University. Under his leadership, Archaeology at Flinders University has emerged as one of the pre-eminent teaching and research programs in Australia. Pate, Smith and Piddock have been conducting collaborative research in the Australian archaeological heritage area for the past 30 years.

Susan Piddock

Susan Piddock currently has academic status with the Department of Archaeology, Flinders University of S.A. She is interested in historical archaeology, the archaeology of institutions and landscape archaeology and has published in these fields.