Community Conservation; Customs; Heritage; Huts; Practices; Social Value; Tasmania; World Heritage;

10.1080/20518196.2022.2080905

This paper uses historical and ethnographic information to examine how local communities have turned huts on the Central Plateau, Tasmania into heritage. The Central Plateau was subject to increased environmental regulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s following the inscription of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. These regulations disrupted a range of community practices that maintained communal attachment to and ‘ownership’ of the land. Some locals responded by using the huts on the Plateau to memorialize their attachments to the mountain, creating a new status for the huts as heritage. Consequently, the government and community agreed that these buildings now required conservation management. This marks a fundamental shift in community attachment from practices (intangible heritage) to material hut preservation (tangible heritage), that has required community to accept the regulatory framework that disrupted their prior cultural practices that formed the basis of their traditional ‘communal’ ownership of the land.