A number of papers here address this in terms particularly of the conflict of discourses and uses which have influenced the sites discussed. Contemporary valuation of the natural environment is conditioned by a longer historical shift in Eurocentric perceptions and values. Dawkins outlines the complex of technical valuations and political choices which bore on the preservation and reconstruction of Arthur Head in Fremantle. The built environment bears the traces of a colonial past, but there the politics of popular memory may obscure past uses and meanings. Human uses of the built environment are of course constantly changing.
Domestic architecture is much more than a register of shifting aesthetics.
The urban industrial environment has quite different meanings and appeal, profoundly affected by economic fate at one level. But in the post-modern urban economy, Sophie Watson implies, gendered practices of representation of the industrial landscape articulate established systems of sexual difference in a refigured form. The forms of analysis employed in this volume indicate the breadth of approaches now in use in cultural studies, at a time when the meanings of 'culture' and the politics of representation are the subject of vigorous debate. Importantly, many of the subjects addressed in this collection of papers are notable for their politicisation, in Australia as elsewhere. Not a politicisation which is exhausted by the 'zero-sum' conception of power so criticised by Foucault and others, but one which renders these objects of the natural and built world sites of debate over use and value.