Encountering Migration Heritage in a National Park

Abstract

This chapter overviews a recent project in applied heritage research which examined the placemaking behavior of Arab and Vietnamese migrants in a national park in suburban Sydney. The concept and theory of placemaking were applied to describe and explain how recent migrants acquire their own place-based heritage in their destination. An account is given of the difficulty of convincing national park staff that the Georges River National Park was not “culture neutral” and that migrant visitors were indeed creating their own places in the park, albeit places that entailed virtually no physical alteration of the park landscape. Some park staff failed to see that the landscape of the park was already the product of a 200-year history of Anglo-Australian interaction with the local environment and, prior to that, had been shaped by millennia of Aboriginal occupation. The chapter goes on to consider this “failure” in the broader context of a critique of Australian multiculturalism’s “unity in diversity” ethos, which seeks to accommodate cultural difference without threatening the privileged position of the white majority. The chapter proceeds from this critique to consider “migration heritage” as a category of heritage practice in Australia, asking whether it is a truly inclusive practice or whether it construes immigrant heritage as adding to the national heritage landscape without ever reconstituting it.