Custom, conflict and the construction of heritage: European huts on the Tasmanian central plateau

Custom, conflict and the construction of heritage: European huts on the Tasmanian central plateau

Since the 1990s, cultural heritage managers have become increasingly interested in the intangible as the way that local communities create value for cultural heritage places. The present paper uses historical and ethnographic information on the practices of people living below the Great Western Tiers in Tasmania to examine the way these people turned the huts on the Central Plateau into heritage. Increased environmental regulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulting from the inclusion of the Central Plateau in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area disrupted a range of practices that maintained communal attachment to and 'ownership' of the land. Some of the people living below the Great Western Tiers responded by using the huts on the plateau to memorialise their past attachments to the mountain. But this created a new status for huts as heritage, and both the regulator and the regulated agreed that this category of buildings now needed managing. This fundamentally altered the nature of the communal attachment to parts of the Central Plateau because it required an acceptance of the regulatory framework that had disrupted the practices that were the basis of the original 'communal' ownership of land.

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