Cultural Landscape and Goldfield Heritage: Towards a Land Management Framework for the Historic South-West Pacific Gold Mining Landscapes

Abstract

This article investigates how cultural landscapes (especially the potentially limiting organically evolved landscape) can be used as a research framework to evaluate historical mining heritage sites in Australia and New Zealand. We argue that when mining heritage sites are read as evolved organic landscapes and linked to the surrounding forested and hedged farmland, the disruptive aspects of mining are masked. Cultural landscape is now a separate listing for World Heritage sites and includes associative and designed landscape as well as those that have evolved organically. These usages have rarely been scrutinized with care. We analyse how mid-nineteenth century goldmining sites can be best thematically interpreted and understood for their heritage, indeed World Heritage, significance and, where appropriate, developed for their sustainable heritage tourism potential. Drawing on a number of research disciplines, a schematic framework is offered for interpreting and classifying these new world cultural landscapes based upon analysis of gold-rush heritage sites throughout the Trans-Tasman world. We evaluate and apply this framework to place-based case studies in Victoria, Australia and Otago, New Zealand.

Key Words:

• Cultural landscape
• mining-heritage
• Australia-New Zealand history
• World Heritage designation
• landscape classification
• landscape history

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was supported under Australian Research Council's Linkage Projects funding scheme (project number LP0667552) and the Monash University Research Fellowship project. The authors wish to thank Antoinette Dillon for producing the maps as well as Leanne Howard, Andrew Reeves, Lyndon Fraser and Parks Victoria, Castlemaine. Reeves also thanks Alan Mayne and all the honours students who took Digging for Gold and Heritage Workshop subject and the goldfields field trips in Australian history at the University of Melbourne and the Monash Berwick Writers Group for their comments. For the Friends of Mount Alexander Diggings (FOMAD).