ABSTRACT
The publication of Creative Nation represents the midpoint between two key government interventions into Australia’s heritage field: the Report of the National Estate (the Hope Report), published in 1974, and the Australian Heritage Strategy, released in 2015. The development of Australian heritage policy in the years in between the publication of the Report and the Strategy provides fertile ground on which to explore the degree to which the notion of ‘national heritage’ has been rethought and revised over that 40-year period. To address this, the chapter traces the ways in which the heritage field has been shaped (or not) by its own transnational heritage spaces, and by developments occurring in other nation-states as well as those at the international level. It also contemplates the role played by more general ideological uncertainties surrounding the viability of public investment in heritage.
