Applying a cultural landscape approach in park management: An Australian scheme

The cultural landscape concept has considerable currency in global heritage management practice. The cultural landscape idea challenges enduring distinctions in heritage management, largely Western in origin, between nature and culture as well as between tangible (material) and intangible (immaterial) forms of heritage. It offers a conceptual bridge that can link very different western, eastern and Indigenous world views. Nevertheless there remain genuine challenges in applying cultural landscape approaches in the real world of day-to-day park management. This paper focuses on work undertaken in New South Wales, Australia, to construct an operational guide to applying a cultural landscape approach. A step-by-step method is outlined and three case study examples, related to landscapes where pastoralism, forestry and holidaying are dominant historical themes, are presented to illustrate the development of the approach.