Vicarious Heritage: Performing multicultural heritage in regional Australia

The heritage tour began at one of the high points of Australia's Great Dividing Range. Situated at the top of'The Crossing: the tourists looked down over the steeply inclined federal highway, which weaves its way through dense vegetation and steep cliffs to reach the peak before crossing into the vast agricultural hinterland beyond. Visitors walked around the immaculately manicured gardens for which the viewing site and the local City of Toowoomba are well-known. Gathered on the viewing platform, tour participants politely admired the spectacular vista of the Lockyer Valley down below. Interrupting their thoughts, the performer-guide asked them to imagine the site 170 years previously, and proceeded to describe a significant and deadly confrontation between white settlers and Indigenous Australians. Few participants were previously aware of the conflict, which was rarely discussed in the city. Many on the tour were unsure how to respond. The tour formed part of Toowoomba's well-known annual Carnival of Flowers (discussed elsewhere in this collection by Andrew Mason). The heritage tour had been created to diversify the tourist experiences for visitors to Australia's 'Garden City' in a collaboration between the local University of Southern Queensland, regional government and industry partners. The Carnival of Flowers is a major event in the commercial and social life of Australia's second largest inland city, with over 100,000 spectators to key Carnival events each year. In addition to attracting tourists, the celebration is the premier expression of civic pride for local residents. Repeated annually for many decades, it represents continuity, stability and a sense of cultivated agrarianism from which residents draw great pride. The heritage tour centred on the gregarious persona of a performer-guide and sought to provide a marketable product of interest to visitors and locals alike. Within this mandate, it explored how people perceived the city of Toowoomba and their place within it. The city's architectural heritage of sandstone civic buildings and wide streets is well-known, but there has been little exploration of how locals relate these nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century buildings to the contemporary community. Rather than re-affirm a legacy of wealthy white landowners, we hoped to recapture the city's ethnically diverse past and to connect this to an environment that has frequently proved violent and unpredictable. In so doing, we sought to reintroduce a sense of vulnerability and difference as a continuum in the city's history, and to explore how this might be viewed as something other than negative.