Amy Clarke

The Brisbane 2032 Olympics and Paralympics signal a shift from mega-city hosts to a more regional and sustainable approach to staging the Games. Uniquely in a Summer Olympic bid, Brisbane’s application was based on the hosts being from the broader Australian region of south-east Queensland. In appointing Brisbane, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach outlined the importance of sustainability and economic responsibility, and recognised the long-term regional and national strategies around development in Australia. In this changing global sports ecosystem, this paper examines the legacies of Atlanta 1996, a smaller-scale Olympics through media coverage of this edition of the Games, including general and sports reporting. The findings outline areas for the Brisbane 2032 organisers to consider in delivering an Olympics that is sustainable for the hosts. The Games were most effective for fulfilling elements related to sports legacies and the economic focus on making a profit, or not requiring government funding. There are considerable positives in the Olympic stadium still being in use, along with the aquatic centre, and the continued popularity of the public space and broader developments based around the Centennial Olympic Park.

Relationships are fundamental to our lives and the living, and key to all forms of existence - ontologically, ethically, and spiritually. They represent a sense of interconnection, belonging, attachment, and kinship. They weave together a tapestry of people, things, and more-than-human connections--networks that are in a mutual relationship with heritage and processes of heritage-making. In this paper, we reflect on the idea of relationships. Taking inspiration from our experiences as co-chairs and presenters of the ICOMOS GA2023 Relationships Theme, we use 'relationships' as a concept to frame and facilitate a deeper understanding of their meanings in our everyday lives and heritage-making processes. We use the concept to explore relationships across three distinct papers presented at the Scientific Symposium. The case studies illuminate the fundamental interconnections among people, places, and 'things', encompassing lost relationships, the significance of nuturing strong relationships, and the value of developing new ones.

Sport plays an important role in the conception of Australian national identity. Much of the scholarly work on this topic has concentrated on professional, high-profile sports and athletes. In this article, we draw attention to a highly symbolic aspect of popular sporting culture—school sports houses—and the prominent historical figures and motifs that they project through their team names, mascots and colours. School sports houses are potent examples of banal nationalism, whereby elements of Australianness are reinforced through the tradition of school athletics and swimming carnivals. Here, we highlight the overlap between the school-based agenda of encouraging group identity and the broader notion of the nation as an imagined community. Using a comprehensive dataset of Queensland high school sport houses in 1969 and 2023, we observe several trends, such as the persistence of houses named after colonial explorers and the disparity between houses with women’s and men’s namesakes. We consider the role of school sports houses as “identity primers”, or scripts, that encourage schoolchildren to identify with specific historic figures, landforms, animal totems, character traits and other qualities as indicators of the region and nation in which they live.

The highly visible yet poorly studied phenomenon of roadside colossi—oversized commercial buildings and statues in the shape of everyday objects, referred to in this article as Big Things— has often been dismissed as a kitschy by-product of American postwar consumerism and car culture. There are no universal definitions or typologies for this form of material culture, nor is there a sufficiently global history that explains the origin, spread and contemporary popularity of these landmarks. In this article, I address these gaps in the discourse, drawing attention to the rich yet largely untapped theoretical underpinnings of Big Things. In doing so, I highlight the potential for further study of these landmarks as material evidence of broader socio-cultural impulses, particularly in communities across North America and Australia, where Big Things can be found in their greatest numbers.

Nation-themed retail, hospitality and entertainment spaces are a valuable yet underu-tilised resource for the analysis of national stereotypes and dominant brand narratives. When such spaces operate outside the borders of the nation upon which they are themed, they can be interpreted as presenting a 'stage' national identity: one that is understood as being unreal, and yet simultaneously hyperreal. This article explores the visual signifiers (e.g. décor, displayed products and promotional materials) and consumption opportunities (e.g. food, drink and cultural events) at 110 Scottish-themed pubs, bars and restaurants located outside of Scotland's borders. In doing so, it highlights how national historical narratives, symbols and motifs are commercialised by and for people outside that nation, often to the extent that outdated views are perpetuated, stereotypes are exacerbated, and the signifiers of other nations are absorbed and/or hybridised. This has potential impacts inside said nation, too: on the tourism industry, food and drink sector, and on the nation's ability to attract and retain the interest of outside investment and skilled migrants, among other things. This research thus draws attention to the complex role(s) of nation-themed spaces in overseas settings, particularly in mediating and – in some instances, contradicting – the collective and commercial identities and/or official (government-endorsed) brands of the nation being displayed for consumption.

Big Things—oversized three-dimensional representations of everyday objects, often situated on the roadside—have received minimal academic attention to date, despite being a popular phenomenon across several countries including Australia and Canada. Sometimes dismissed as “lowbrow” or commercialised art forms, they are, in fact, landmarks that can be investigated as material evidence of the identities and values of the communities—local, regional and national—who build, maintain and visit them. This article takes a comparative approach to the 1,075 Big Things in Australia and 1,250 in Canada, revealing chronological, geographical and typological trends that highlight the capacity of these structures to represent their surrounding regions. In doing so, this article also demonstrates the value to be gained through studying Big Things as networks of meaning that evolve over time, reflecting the changing nature of their host societies.

In the aftermath of the last ice age, when sea level rose along most of the world's coastline, the activities of coastal peoples were impacted by coastal submergence, land loss and sometimes isolation as offshore islands formed. In some parts of the world, there is clear evidence that people encoded their observations of postglacial sea-level rise into oral traditions that were communicated across hundreds of generations to reach us today in an intelligible form. In other contexts, people's observations of rising sea level are likely to have formed the foundations of ‘legends’ about undersea places and the peoples inhabiting them.

For a selection of coastal sites in Australia and northwest Europe, this study discusses a range of contrasting situations in which culturally-grounded stories about coastal submergence, land loss and isolation plausibly recollect the nature and effects of postglacial sea-level rise. Using science-based histories of postglacial sea-level change, minimum ages are determined for each group of site-specific stories; in the case of Australia, these range from 7000–11,500 BP, for northwest Europe from 5500 to 9500 BP. For selected sites in the Pacific Islands, where human settlement about 3000 years BP post-dated the end of postglacial sea-level rise, localized submergence is recalled in traditional stories of local people.

It is argued that studies of late Quaternary coastal evolution can often be filled out by adding details from stories preserved in local cultures, something which leads to a clearer picture of the human-societal impacts of coastal submergence and land loss than can be obtained from palaeoenvironmental reconstructions and geological evidence alone.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) was elected into government in 2007, and in January 2012 announced plans for an independence referendum. In the same period, the SNP government implemented substantial cultural and heritage projects — some of which showcased the long history of Scottish‐English animosity. In the accompanying political rhetoric, it was clear that the SNP was utilising history for the 2014 independence campaign. This referendum ultimately resulted in Scotland's retention of the Union, though the SNP remained in power. The Scottish‐British relationship was further tested in 2016, however, with the UK referendum on leaving the EU. All Scottish electorates voted in favour of remaining, and the chasm between Scottish and British identities and future trajectories has since widened further. This article compares the SNP's promotion of nationalist historical narratives prior to the 2014 referendum, particularly those seen in government‐supported heritage initiatives, with subsequent historical narratives expressed especially through diplomatic engagements in light of Brexit. In doing so, the infusion of nationalist histories in contemporary Scottish politics — and the potential complications of this approach for the SNP in the post‐Brexit political landscape — will be highlighted.

Australia's laid-back, sun-drenched beach lifestyle has been a celebrated and prominent part of its official popular culture for nigh on a century, and the images and motifs associated with this culture have become hallmarks of the country's collective identity. Though these representations tend towards stereotype, for many Australians the idea of a summer holiday at the beach is one that is intensely personal and romanticised - its image is not at all urbanised. As Douglas Booth observed, for Australians the beach has become a 'sanctuary at which to abandon cares - a place to let down one's hair, remove one's clothes […] a paradise where one could laze in peace, free from guilt, drifting between the hot sand and the warm sea, and seek romance'.1 Beach holidays became popular in the interwar years of the twentieth century, but the most intense burst of activity - both in touristic promotion and in the development of tourism infrastructure - accompanied the postwar economic boom, when family incomes were able to meet the cost of a car and, increasingly, a cheap block of land by the beach upon which a holiday home could be erected with thrift and haste. In subtropical southeast Queensland, the postwar beach holiday became the hallmark of the state's burgeoning tourism industry; the state's southeast coastline in particular benefiting from its warm climate and proximity to the capital, Brisbane. It was here - along the evocatively named Gold Coast (to Brisbane's south) and Sunshine Coast (to its north) - that many families experienced their first taste of what is now widely celebrated as the beach lifestyle. As one reflection has it: "In the era before motels and resorts, a holiday at the Gold and Sunshine coasts usually meant either pitching a tent and camping by the beach or staying in a simple cottage owned by family or friends […] Simplicity, informality, individuality […] were the hallmarks of these humble places."

This Forum evolved from a provocation by the Editors of this special issue of Fabrications that "too often heritage conservation assumes an apolitical stance by neglecting to acknowledge its own unsettling agendas." The Forum's five contributors highlight a range of challenges and trends that architectural heritage professionals - including historians - have begun to identify and engage with in a critical fashion. These pieces demonstrate the need to commit to historical practice that embraces the "critical turn," and to acknowledge our responsibilities as "gatekeepers" and producers of knowledge. While we cannot control the multitude of interpretations that our work will surely generate across time and space, we can consider whether we are contributing to, or challenging, existing silences, inaccuracies, and regimes of knowledge. This Forum does not claim to provide answers, but instead seeks to foster discussion and identify some of the avenues along which work in the general realm of "Architecture / Heritage / Politics" is - or should be - progressing.