| Rich Rewards: Cultural Diversity and Heritage Practice |
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Description
From Chinese Market Gardeners, German viticulturists and Afghan cameleers to the more recent arrivals of the post World War Two era and beyond, migration and migrants have played critical roles in the state's cultural, social and economic development.
Yet, if heritage tells a story of the past, heritage practice in rural and regional New South Wales has not yet mapped the cultural diversity that has, and continues to be, a vital element characterising the state. The State Heritage Inventory, for example, identifies around 17 000 items of local and state significance. Collating items listed by Local Government, Heritage schedules and the State Heritage Register, the inventory is the most comprehensive resource of heritage items in the state. Yet the heritage of ethnic communities barely features.
Culturally diverse heritage practices recognise that all communities have places, items and sites of value. Adopting inclusive heritage practices that reflect the cultural diversity of the State will ensure the contributions and experiences of migrant communities are recognised and celebrated as part of its collective history. For migrants, heritage, whether it is a place, building or object, articulates a sense of association with place and belonging in the community. It marks a set of experiences and tells the story of Australian citizenship. Inclusive approaches to heritage identification add to our understanding of place and community, creating layers of meaning and association that truly reflect the complexity of our society.
Part 1 of the ethnic heritage community consultation pilot program described in this report, was instituted as a step toward establishing more culturally diverse heritage practices in regional and rural New South Wales. Placing community consultation at the center of its approach to heritage, the program consisted of three workshops in Albury, Broken Hill and Orange. These workshops integrated a number of aims. They were designed to raise community awareness of heritage and to develop skills among ethnic community members to identify, assess and protect their heritage from their own cultural perspectives. With the aims of generating sustainable, culturally diverse, community driven heritage practices the workshops provided a forum where new partnerships between migrant communities and heritage organisations and practitioners were formed.
Creating a model for community consultation that would encourage people from non-English speaking backgrounds into the heritage processes throughout the cultural network was a guiding aim of the program and the experiences of the workshops have been used to develop a set of guidelines for consultation with ethnic communities. The guidelines have been formulated for use in a range of programs, sectors and initiatives. Local government, heritage advisors, social planners, historians, curators, or any other individual or organisation from across the cultural network could adopt them. Community organisations that recognise the value of heritage for building positive community identities may like to use them to develop a cross-cultural heritage project. The output of a project based on these guidelines could include local government heritage studies, museum exhibitions and collections, community development programs, a media campaign or history project.
The structure of the workshops and ensuing guidelines adapts for use by ethnic communities, a model of community consultation developed by planner Meredith Walker.[1] This model uses discussion and photography as tools in the identification and assessment of heritage items and places. Photography has a range of advantages as a heritage identification tool for ethnic communities. It is tangible and non-intimidating and provides an accessible approach for people that may be new to the heritage processes. As a visual approach it begins to break down barriers of language. The photographs themselves trigger memory, opening the way for oral history resources that enrich our understanding of community and ground people's experiences to their environment.
The Ethnic Communities Consultation in Regional and Rural Centres Pilot Program is project of the Migration Heritage Centre, the Centre being a NSW Government initiative through a partnership of Premier's Department, Ministry for the Arts, Ethnic Affairs Commission and the Heritage Office. It was managed by the New South Wales Heritage Office and builds onto its ethnic communities consultation program, which has already established close links with the Chinese, Ukrainian and Italo-Australian communities around the state.
Many communities in the pilot program nominated places of religious significance. Generally these sites symbolisedf the continuation of cultural traditions in a new country. The development of religious sites often revealed the social and economic struggles of ethic communities, linked to the broader social, economic and cultural conditions of the time.
[1] Meredith Walker, 'What's important about our town? A workshop model for identifying local heritage and character', The National Trust of Queensland , June 1993.