ABSTRACT
Master narratives about class and nation underwrote the ways in which the English country houses, discussed in the previous chapter, are used as sites of heritage. As ‘heritage’, the houses became symbolic focal points in the negotiation and expression of overlapping identities based on both national and class allegiance. While that chapter revealed the ability of the AHD to underpin and validate these narratives, it was also demonstrated that these narratives are neither static or uncontested. This chapter explores these issues further, and examines how the Australian AHD’s representation of nationhood and national identity are themselves performed, negotiated and ultimately contested. The chapter argues that the AHD and the forms of national identity it constructs are inevitably multilayered and underpin authorized sub-national identities. However the AHD inevitably sits within a web of competing national and sub-national interests, and in mapping the way various dissonant interests use the AHD to assert their identities and claims to heritage resources, the chapter aims to explore the consequences of this dissonance for understanding the nature of heritage and its use. This chapter reiterates the argument that ‘heritage’ is a cultural process of meaning making and, in identifying and examining the ways in which different meanings about an item of ‘heritage’ come into conflict, explores how the power and authority of certain meanings and understandings about the nature of the Australian past are created, reinforced and legitimized – or alternatively marginalized.
