Distinctiveness: islands

Islands are an integral part of how Queensland is imagined, perceived and portrayed. While islands hold a certain universal appeal, the tropical locality and density of islands along the Queensland coast contributes to a distinctive landscape

Custom, conflict and the construction of heritage: European huts on the Tasmanian central plateau

Since the 1990s, cultural heritage managers have become increasingly interested in the intangible as the way that local communities create value for cultural heritage places. The present paper uses historical and ethnographic information on the practices of people living below the Great Western Tiers in Tasmania to examine the way these people turned the huts on the Central Plateau into heritage. Increased environmental regulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulting from the inclusion of the Central Plateau in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area disrupted a range of practices that maintained communal attachment to and 'ownership' of the land. Some of the people living below the Great Western Tiers responded by using the huts on the plateau to memorialise their past attachments to the mountain. But this created a new status for huts as heritage, and both the regulator and the regulated agreed that this category of buildings now needed managing. This fundamentally altered the nature of the communal attachment to parts of the Central Plateau because it required an acceptance of the regulatory framework that had disrupted the practices that were the basis of the original 'communal' ownership of land

Ask first: a guide to respecting indigenous heritage places and values: issues and gaps analysis

The purpose of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage conservation in Ask First is unusual because it does not simply focus on the place and its values. Rather, it states that the primary purpose is to sustain the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their heritage places. This definition attempts to encapsulate the obligation that traditional owners have to care for their country, and that sustaining this relationship is fundamental to the conservation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage

Assessment of the indigenous national heritage values for Wurrwurrwuy stone picture site

The stone pictures at Wurrwurrwuy might be nationally significant as a rare example of stones arranged to depict secular subjects rather than the arranged stones being associated with ceremony and the sacred. The stone pictures depict a range of subjects including Aboriginal camps, fish traps and images relating to the Macassan trepang industry including praus, canoes, the stone fireplaces where trepang were boiled and Macassan houses. The depictions of praus at Wurrwurrwuy show the internal arrangements of the vessels, which is rare in Aboriginal depictions of praus in any medium. The creators of the stone pictures would have acquired their knowledge of the internal arrangement of praus during visits to, or voyages on, such vessels

Waiting, power and time in ethnographic and community-based research

Waiting is one of the most common phenomena in ethnographic and other community-based research. Nevertheless, it remains under-explored in academic writing about the theoretical and methodological aspects of fieldwork. While waiting time often allows new data or information to emerge, we argue that such times have a significance independent of knowledge outcomes. We review various conceptions of waiting: as a time for self-awareness; the use of enforced waiting to exert power over the disadvantaged; and its obverse, the choice by the more powerful to ‘wait upon’ another’s needs and priorities. We use stories from our own fieldwork experience to suggest that in the particular context of ethnographic or community-based research, the choice to ‘wait upon’ others is a form of researcher reflexivity that can partially redress historical or current power imbalances

You don't know what you don't know: ethics and participant consent issues for eResearch users

This paper shares the experiences of researchers and research support teams to enable eResearch that is ethically sound, particularly with regard to the consent of research participants. A key goal of eResearch is to use compute and data intensive infrastructure and collaborative approaches supported by advanced ICTs (HPC, Cloud Storage, Collaborative tools and High Speed networks) to enable data sharing and re-use. This paper shares the practical challenges and solutions from the perspectives of researchers and research support teams at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and poses questions and suggestions on ethics dilemmas such as ensuring that research participants have consented to share the data collected on them with other researchers. A collaborative and consultative approach involving teams in the USQ Office of Research, the USQ Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) Chair, the ICT Service Division and Library Services division resulted in successful outcomes for researchers

Weedy Life: Coloniality, Decoloniality, and Tropicality

Respect for any form of life entails nurturing all the potentialities proper to it, including those that might be unproductive from the human point of view. Are there lessons to be learnt about decolonisation of the tropics from a focus on ‘weeds’? The contributors to this photo-essay collectively consider here the lessons that can be learnt about the relationship between colonisation and decolonisation through a visual focus on life forms that have been defined as weeds and, consequently, subject to a contradictory politics of care, removal, and control – of germinating, blooming, and cutting. The essay demonstrates the continuing colonial tensions between aesthetic and practical evaluations of many plants and other lifeforms regarded as ‘invasive’ or ‘out of place’. It suggests a decolonial overcoming of oppositions. By celebrating alliances of endemics and ‘weeds’ regeneratively living together in patterns of complex diversity, we seek to transcend policies of differentiation, exclusion and even eradication rooted in colonial ontology

Visiting the Great Barrier Reef

The cosmic scale, verdant islands, blue lagoons and brilliantly coloured underwater life of the Great Barrier Reef have attracted and intrigued visitors from the very earliest European navigators to the two million tourists who visit the region each year. Despite its timeless appeal, the pleasures of these landscapes changed significantly during the twentieth century. Patterns in tourist landscapes have been determined by transport, infrastructure and conservation. They have also been driven by human imagination

Towards a cultural heritage tourism research strategy: developing synergies in Australian research

This report outlines the development of a research strategy for cultural heritage tourism in Australia. It identifies broad areas of mutual research interest in heritage conservation and tourism management to foster synergies and cooperation between these fields. The strategy is defined and structured to allow flexibility and adaptability in response to emerging issues and local specificity. It achieves this through the identification of key areas of research interest that serve to guide and link a number of related questions. This provides an overarching framework for long-term, integrated research goals. The report further identifies illustrative projects that demonstrate how such conceptual research can be implemented through small-scale, local, applied and consultancy projects. The report thus provides a strategy to address broad research questions through a number of related small-scale projects

Survival: how the landscape impacts on people

Queensland's historical landscape encapsulates the tension between threat and survival. Climate and geography – humid jungles, desert plains, and a hazardous coastline; extreme weather – storms, cyclones, floods, and droughts; and conflicted politics – Aboriginal massacres, intolerance and insularity, have shaped the people of Queensland