World heritage as authentic fake: Paradisic Reef and Wild Tasmania

Abstract

This paper explores how the imagined landscapes that act as a catalyst for World Heritage listing, are unable to be reconciled with formal heritage assessments. We explore this tension through two Australian World Heritage landscapes: the Great Barrier Reef and the Tasmanian Wilderness. The history of these listings suggests a teleological process driven by a desire to create authentic utopias. While utopias are imagined spaces, Paradise at the Reef and the Tasmanian Wilderness are realised through hyperreal landscapes (fakes). However, these wholistic landscapes dissolve into a series of inventories of species and numbers in official listing. We suggest the failure to recognise the hyperreal is a form of false consciousness that creates a tension between managing for formally recognised values and managing the unmanageable utopia, and that a broader use of cultural landscapes might be useful in addressing this divide.

Keywords:

• World heritage
• authenticity
• utopia
• environmental campaigns
• conservation
• landscape

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of organisations who have supported this research, including the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, James Cook University and the University of Southern Queensland. We further acknowledge the support of the CRC Reef which funded the original fieldwork and archival research at the Great Barrier Reef. We extend our thanks to the anonymous reviewers who helped strengthen the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Although Büsst’s illness and death are not causally linked to the protests, he died fighting for the protection of the Great Barrier Reef. His death occurred during a Royal Commission into oil drilling at the Reef that he had instigated, but he died before he was able to give evidence.

2 This conception of wilderness is highly contentious because it continues a trajectory of dispossession of Aboriginal people from their lands (Bird Rose, 2012; Langton, 1996).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Celmara Pocock

Celmara Pocock is Director, Centre for Heritage and Culture and Professor of Anthropology and Heritage Studies at the University of Southern Queensland. She 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.

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

Dr 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.