Resisting or reinforcing cultural injustices – reimagining Norfolk Island’s World Heritage area

Professor Sarah Baker, based at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, is an esteemed cultural sociologist specialising in critical heritage studies and issues of cultural justice.

Her work champions the idea that heritage preservation should be an inclusive and participatory process, empowering communities and custodians to take an active role in safeguarding their cultural legacies. This includes how heritage value is understood by heritage consultants, scholars, and governments to produce more culturally just heritage management and avoid negative impacts on communities.

This work is exemplified by the recent research project Reimagining Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area (KAVHA), co-led by Dr Zelmarie Cantillon (Western Sydney University) and with significant contribution from Norfolk Islander and Griffth University PhD candidate Chelsea Evans. This Australian Research Council-funded project conducted between 2021–2024 aimed to explore the role living heritage sites play in resisting or reinforcing cultural injustices.

Norfolk Island is located in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 1,600 km northeast of Sydney, Australia. The island has a rich settlement history, with archaeological evidence of Polynesian occupation (c.1150–c.1450), followed by a British agricultural settlement (1788–1814) before it was re-occupied as a British penal settlement (1825–1855).

In 1856, around 190 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of Tahitian women and mutineers of the HMS Bounty, were relocated to Norfolk Island. The island’s Pitcairn settler descendants are an ethnically, culturally, and linguistically distinct group of people with a rich living heritage related to KAVHA.

However, there is a history of tension and cultural injustice between the Pitcairn Islanders and first, the British colony of New South Wales, followed by the Commonwealth of Australia from 1914 onwards, including more recent impacts after the removal of self-governance.

As a result, heritage management of KAVHA has overwhelmingly privileged the preservation and presentation of its convict heritage. Likewise, published scholarly research on Kingston has predominantly focused on the penal settlement.

“What you see on the surface is the built heritage site, with the buildings being regarded as one of the best examples of Georgian architecture in the southern hemisphere, plus you have the evocative penal ruins, the gaols and so forth. Amidst that, there is also a really interesting and important living heritage, with the Pitcairn descendants having made their homes amongst the heritage buildings for over 160 years,” said Professor Baker.

“Ensuring this living heritage is front and centre in heritage management as well as interpretive strategies, whether that be the bus and walking tours that move through KAVHA, interpretive signage or exhibitions, will ensure visitors leave the island with an understanding of the unique culture, language, and heritage of Norfolk Islanders.”

With a focus on living heritage, the Reimagining KAVHA project took a critical cultural justice inquiry approach towards research and practice to explore how cultural injustices are reinforced or resisted in relation to heritage management and interpretation in KAVHA. Key to this was a concern for accessible, timely outputs that could be utilised by community members when advocating for self-determination.

Central to the research impact has been the co-creation of eight Reimagining KAVHA zines published between 2021–2023, that drew on public history-making as a tool for research data collection and archiving, while enabling community members to tell their stories on their own terms. Zines are self-published, do-it-yourself booklets that have a long history as tools for activism in social movements.

Professor Baker and her colleagues explored how zines serve as an apparatus for cultural justice. They analysed the extent to which zines and zine-making, as product and process, can be understood as community archive. Their research received a Mander Jones Award (2022) from the Australian Society of Archivists for its insight into the potential of zines to enable and strengthen the presence of marginalised groups in dominant historical narratives.

A limited print run of the zines was distributed to participants, archival repositories, and other locations on Norfolk Island to increase the presence of community voices within diverse spaces and they are downloadable on the project website.

The zines also provide evidence of cultural sites that the Norfolk Island community has lost, including the Paradise Hotel. The Paradise was demolished in the 1980s as it was found to not be consistent with the Georgian architecture of Kingston. Today the site is a picnic area that features very little indication of what once stood there. However, the Paradise Hotel had a very long, important history on the island as a community gathering place that still lives very large in their minds and their memories.

Professor Baker and Dr Cantillon used the example of the Paradise Hotel to explore challenges between sense of place, heritage value, and heritage management and interpretation.

“The implications of sharing and researching what is happening on Norfolk Island has broader implications. It’s a transnational story around what is valued or not in a heritage site, and how that differs between experts and the local community,” said Professor Baker. “The Paradise Hotel is gone now, and it can never be recreated, but we are hopeful that by highlighting these tensions we might change the ways in which heritage value is understood, so that communities beyond Norfolk Island may still be able to maintain those sorts of places.”

The research team also used participatory mapping activities with local community members to help illuminate places, relations, memories, emotions, and traditional or customary practices that may be excluded or obscured by traditional maps in heritage management planning documents.

“Kingston es auwas (is our) playground. All relaxation en (and) fun happens in Kingston. Bounty Day, school sports. All serious matters happen in Kingston. Assembly, funeral, government. If Norfolk is our soul, then Kingston es auwas (is our) heart!” said one workshop participant.

Ongoing work by Professor Baker and her colleagues is bringing together concerns and experiences shared by the Norfolk Islander community into research outputs that will convey the damage that heritage consultancy can have when it doesn't understand the living heritage of a site. These outputs will also set out recommendations voiced by the Norfolk Islander community for future heritage consultancy work.

In relation to cultural justice and the ecosystem of stakeholders and factors related to resisting or reinforcing cultural injustices, Professor Baker’s ongoing research also expands to two related areas. The first looks at the pivotal role of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) in shaping and preserving public history, and how GLAMs can transform their practices to enable them to create a more culturally just future for all Australians. This work includes looking at volunteers and how their inputs as non-professional archivists or curators transforms ideas about heritage and heritage value within the GLAM space.

The second area focuses on how climate resilience relates to the management of World Heritage-listed properties in the Asia–Pacific and the role of local communities and indigenous knowledge and practices in climate resilience and heritage management.

Into the future, Professor Baker will continue to explore issues of cultural justice as a way to protect heritage using conceptual, methodological, and practical strategies. As exemplified by work undertaken with descendants of the Pitcairn Islanders on Norfolk Island, this will give a voice to communities who have historically been repressed in the management of heritage sites.