Performing cultural heritage: Authenticity and the spirit of rebellion

In his keynote speech at the 2014 National Play Festival, playwright Andrew Bovell described the troubled relationship between Australia's past and its representation:[T]he 'History Wars' is one of our great national themes, one of the most volatile fault lines in our society. At one end of the argument the story is told of a peaceful and gradual settlement, a noble and benign act of nation building and at the other end, a story of violent occupation and resistance culminating in massacre and genocide.... The point is that our history is contested ground. There's a reason it's called a war. We are fighting over the story that will be told to our descendants. And the stakes are high. It is after all the story of who we are and what was done.... The question for us, as writers, is what story will each of us tell.' Marxist historian E.H. Carr insists that 'history means interpretation'; if this is true, then cultural heritage also means interpretation - only more so.2 Heritage is a mixture of myth and memory existing alongside, but not bound to actual historical fact; it is something that is both tangible and intangible, possibly material, increasingly virtual, a layering of affect and lived experience, private and public relationships, objects, sites, environments, records, regulations and traditions, that allows a certain passage between the past, present and future.3 To expand upon Joseph Roach's reflection on memory, cultural heritage 'operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past'.4 In this article, I trace the performance of a single story associated with Australian cultural heritage through three very different performative iterations. Each interprets the historical story of the Ballarat goldfields in the nineteenth century, white colonial settlement and the famous Eureka Rebellion, and each provides a pathway through heritage via performance into a contemporary Australian cultural landscape.Twenty-first-century Ballarat is situated on a freeway and fast train line that links directly to Melbourne, 112 kilometres away. It has a population of 100,000 people and is a rapidly growing regional centre with an economy based on agricultural production, industry and importantly, tourism. Heritage and the historical past are central to the cultural identity of Ballarat. The city was settled after rich deposits of gold were first discovered in 1851, a find which sparked the gold rush in Australia. The social, economic and environmental upheaval that followed in the colony became political when (to quote the history highlighted on the City's website)... in 1854 the Eureka Rebellion - Australia's only armed civil uprising - took place on Ballarat's goldfields: 28 people died in a pre-dawn battle at the Eureka Stockade when angry miners and government troopers clashed over the administration and collection of gold licenses.The events at Eureka are an intrinsic part of Australia's story; they have etched Ballarat's place in the history books.5Ballarat claims further historical significance as the 'birthplace' of democracy in Australia. This heritage arises from the story of the fighting spirit of miners who pitched themselves in protest against the corruption of colonial police and died beneath the Eureka flag.6 While the attack was over in fifteen minutes, its legacy lives on. The Eureka flag is now on the Victorian Heritage Register. It flies permanently over both the Melbourne Trades Hall and the Ballarat Trades Hall and is emblematic of the Australian labour movement. Ironically, the Eureka symbol of the stars of the Southern Cross is a favourite tattoo often found etched on to the bodies of left-leaning nationalists as well as on supporters of the extreme right. The story of Ballarat further includes up to 60,000 years of continuous Aboriginal culture, which is largely absent from the white colonial heritage story of the gold rush and Eureka. …