title: Expanding Cultural Heritage: Cultural Continuation, Cultural Management, and Rock Art in Central Queensland
Creators: name: King, Madeleine F
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: rock art
subject: cultural continuity
subject: cultural heritage management
subject: cultural rights
subject: Carnarvon Gorge (SW Qld SG55-07)

description: Rock art is culture in the landscape. This simple fact places rock art in a rich and meaningful context - the natural and cultural landscape, sacred and sovereign to First Nations people - as well as in a vulnerable one. From a practical conservation and management perspective, rock art is open to a number of risks and complexities not associated with other cultural forms. Indeed, conservation challenges are intensifying as both natural and cultural threats to rock art accelerate around the world, particularly where climate change, urban and industrial development, and visitor impacts present multiplying risks. To face these challenges, the evolving field of cultural heritage management is addressing an expanding list of priorities and interests at the same time as it attends to its own blind spots: in particular, First Nations cultural rights, and recognition that cultural heritage management is not the sole charge of archaeologists and anthropologists (who cannot and ought not meet the scale, diversity, and complexity of challenges alone).1 A key concern of this thesis is examining who should lead decision-making and who should participate in the conversation on cultural heritage management. In addressing this issue, I aim to contribute to what anthropologist and archaeologist Brian Egloff has characterised as a "limited and ad hoc" collection of cultural heritage management projects globally that explore grassroots engagement and decision making in archaeological conservation.2 This project develops a values-based model designed to support First Nations stewardship and the management of stakeholder relationships. It is proposed that this new model be implemented for the care, conservation, and management of culturally significant rock art in the Central Highlands Region, or Sandstone Belt, of Queensland (including Carnarvon National Park). The model puts forward an approach to the protection and conservation of rock art that integrates the multiple functions, behaviours, outputs, and values of the cultural and natural landscape. The model looks beyond the material conservation of a discrete cultural heritage "site" and considers broader cultural, social, economic, and environmental conditions. Part of these conditions are existing cultural heritage management paradigms, which I identify in the literature as: the statutory landscape; visitor behaviours; stakeholder relationships; and cultural rights and values. This project adapts two interdisciplinary frameworks to create a new model of cultural heritage management. The first framework is drawn from contemporary art discourse and management. This field has a range of relevant experiences in caring for culture in the landscape (public art, land art). It offers a more expansive understanding of conservation priorities as well as an important emerging discourse on cultural continuation, which explores the varied and ongoing cultural traditions of First Nations artists. Examples drawn from the work of Australian First Nations contemporary artists show that rock art continues to be practised both within and beyond cultural heritage sites. In contemporary art, the use of non-traditional materials and coded references may obscure connections with rock art to some outside audiences. The second framework adapted in the model is permaculture. It is an unusual point of reference given that it is typically understood as a principled and ecological approach to agriculture or gardening. However, this project references an emergent body of literature that explores permaculture's potential to inform a wide range of management practices outside of this original context. These two unlikely frameworks for cultural heritage management are brought together to create a "holistic" or "integrated" approach to the care, conservation, and management of rock art, that: (a) is led by Traditional Custodians on their own terms; (b) takes an inclusive approach to community and other stakeholders, including the provision of conflict resolution; (c) understands rock art as part of complex natural and cultural landscapes that extend far beyond the cultural heritage site; and (d) is driven by a set of defining principles and cultural values.