Publicomos

Réf.

41378

Type

conference item

Titre

Port Arthur : heritage, home, haven or horror?

Langues

English

Auteurs

Harrington, Jane / Sullivan, Sharon

Date

2008

Pages

12 p.

Titre de conférence

16th ICOMOS General Assembly and International Symposium: ‘Finding the spirit of place – between the tangible and the intangible’

Lieu de conférence

Québec, Canada

Date de conférence

29 sept – 4 oct 2008

Mots-clés

memory / spirit of place / intangible heritage / World Heritage List / historic landscapes / landscapes / prisons

Pays mentionnés

Australia

Monuments et sites

Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania, Australia

N° Patrimoine mondial

1306

Résumé en anglais

This paper explores the way in which places and senses mutually create/recreate each other. Emphasis is placed on how places are experienced, but are also created through conceptualisation and imagining: place is not only the physicality of being ‘here’, but also imagined through layers of memories, often of other places, and sometimes grounded in the memory of others. Specific reference is made to the Port Arthur Historic Site, which is conceptualised variously as convict heritage place (World Heritage nominated), community place, tragedy place and tourism place. The paper applies theoretical approaches combining philosophical and anthropological understandings of space and place, which explicate the multi-vocality of landscapes that enmesh people, place and time. It is shown that spirit and place become embedded in a flow of power and negotiation of social relations that are rendered in the physicality of tangible elements and the embodiment of imagination, memories and symbolic attributions.

Document joint

77-9Xh9-132.pdf

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (BY-NC-ND)