Colonial landscapes and violent silences: examining Queensland sugar plantation homesteads as sites of complex heritage-making

Le résumé fourni par la source

Queensland’s agricultural heritage is deeply entangled with the historical establishment of sugar cane plantations and the ongoing sugar industry throughout the state. Within these contemporary rural landscapes, small numbers of homesteads have survived, dating from the colonial era during which plantation-style farming proliferated. Such homesteads generally comprise a large home connected to a farming enterprise as well as accommodation for workers, out sheds, stables, and mills. In this article, we focus on three homesteads in Queensland – Ormiston House in Ormiston, Fairymead House in Bundaberg and Greenmount House in Mackay – to examine dispossession and silencing as an everyday heritage experience. We explore how the domesticity of homesteads, normalizing colonial presence amid suggestions of gentility, consciously marginalizes histories of Indigenous and Australian South Sea Islander presence. Drawing on literature at the intersections of affective heritage, heritage experience and global histories of the sugar industry, we demonstrate the vital potential of these homesteads to become sites of complex sites of heritage and geographies of memory.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.