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“Hisitage Is A Lie” - that we are told to believe is “real”.
“His-itage” is not my Heritage. It is the colonists, multi-cidal constructed Heritage, within the manufactured colonial city, urban and rural landscapes of “Australia”.
A lie that we are often told to believe is real. A lie that we are told to protect from anything seen as “alien”, that threatens its cultural normality, and its sense of national cultural identity, belonging and pride of place.
Centred in conformity to unify its population, physically, mental, psychologically, cultural, socially, economically. Its driving power, the British Crown, its empir-ing, and its colonial mission to conquer, dominate and conform the masses to obey and protect at any costs.
One particular way this is achieved is through our domestic surroundings, consciously and subconsciously living each and everyday surrounded by the cultural byproduct of invasion and colonialism. Such as, “Heritage Colours” that in turn has been labeled as “Heritage” by the dominant Eurocentric cultural keepers. The safe-guards of the colony, and it’s cultural identity, for example local Councils, as well as State and Federal governments that all follow heritage protocol, acts, and laws to keep it all in order and in place.
Commonwealth laws are also created to provide and ensure protection of its historical colonial cultural past. As well as a number of government funded organisations that also take part in the maintenance, preserving, and protection of “our colonial heritage”.
Such as Heritage Trust Australia, Heritage Trust Tasmania, Heritage Trust Victoria, Heritage Trust NSW, National Trust of Australia Queensland, to name a few. These organisations also play a key role in promoting colonial cultural heritage, with a air of romanticism, nostalgia and grace of it’s architectural buildings and designs that represent, colonialism, empire, capitalism, patriarchy, and colonial political power, history, progress, and present day.
Thus, so called glory days, all built upon unseeded lands, taken by force and stolen from it’s First Sovereign peoples to help create a national colonial cultural identity, that somehow we are meant to identify with, and call ours.
In this conceptual body of work, “I question whose heritage is it, if it’s not mine?”
At what cost do we go on protecting and practicing colonialism, when the oldest living culture on the planet is destroyed, erased and sacrificed for quick dollars and profit in the name of progress before our very eyes on a daily occurrence.
In this, our 21st century are we capable of making a cultural change, and shift our society to more sustainable development, and economic growth, that leads to greater prosperity for all people?
That centres around “true colours” of first sovereign socialism and cultural development, rather than archaic preservation values of colonialism, and perpetual cultural and historical identity denial hidden behind the facade of “Heritage”.
Clinton Naina.
2024.
