Custom, conflict and the construction of heritage: European huts on the Tasmanian Central Plateau

ABSTRACT

This paper uses historical and ethnographic information to examine how local communities have turned huts on the Central Plateau, Tasmania into heritage. The Central Plateau was subject to increased environmental regulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s following the inscription of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. These regulations disrupted a range of community practices that maintained communal attachment to and ‘ownership’ of the land. Some locals responded by using the huts on the Plateau to memorialize their attachments to the mountain, creating a new status for the huts as heritage. Consequently, the government and community agreed that these buildings now required conservation management. This marks a fundamental shift in community attachment from practices (intangible heritage) to material hut preservation (tangible heritage), that has required community to accept the regulatory framework that disrupted their prior cultural practices that formed the basis of their traditional ‘communal’ ownership of the land.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• community conservation
• social value
• huts
• Tasmania
• customs
• practices
• World Heritage

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the communities below the Great Western Tiers who took part in the original studies and who have continued to be generous in sharing their perspectives and stories, and to all others who have shared their insights. We thank Margaret Howe from the Mountain Huts Preservation Society especially for her generosity including provision of images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Letter from B. Davis, Secretary, Department of Lands Parks and Wildlife to Messrs N.W. Johnson, L.F. Ritter and N.F. Whiteley dated 30 March 1989; Letter from B Ford, Chief Property Officer of the Department of Environment and Planning, Property Services Division to N.W. Johnson, dated 15 July 1991.

2 Sydney Morning Herald 26 September 1984, page 13; Sydney Morning Herald 13 June 1985, page 4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Collett

David Collett is Honorary Professor in the Centre for Heritage and Culture at the University of Southern Queensland. Professor Collett holds a PhD in archaeology from Cambridge University and has extensive experience in heritage management working with and for communities in Zimbabwe and Australia. This includes working as an Archaeologist for the Parks and Wildlife Service in Tasmania, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council and the Australian Heritage Commission and Department of Environment and Heritage.

Joan Knowles

Joan Knowles is an anthropologist and educator. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Durham and undertook ethnographic fieldwork with the Masaai in Kenya. She is an accomplished ethnographer, having undertaken applied research on domestic violence, aged care and European attachments to land in Australia.

Celmara Pocock

Celmara Pocock is the Director, Centre for Heritage and Culture and Professor of Anthropology and Heritage Studies at the University of Southern Queensland. She is a leading heritage scholar, with interest in peoples’ attachment to landscapes, social significance and community heritage, including Indigenous heritage; senses of place; storytelling and emotion; and the intersections between heritage and tourism. Her monograph Visitor Encounters with the Great Barrier Reef: Aesthetics, Heritage, and the Senses was published by Routledge in 2020.