Adelaide’s graphic heritage: the quintessential “contested” colonial city

As the state capital of South Australia, Adelaide is a quintessential colonial city. However, in the land colonial settlers called Australia, colonialism demeaned notions of “Country” in a physically and politically contested space. New approaches have been called to reconsider Australia as a shared space that places high value on indigenous identity. From within a context that challenges us to think about how Country and culture might be envisioned, designed, planned, and implemented, this paper reports on an exploratory hypothesis about how graphic heritage can be applied to enhance sustainable development in South Australia. Building on recommendations from a collaboration between academic research and the United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO, the imprecise relationship between heritage interpretation, presentation, and representation is exposed to reveal how graphic heritage can function as an enabling tool for disparate partners to provide a focus for discussion and joint purpose.