Heritage, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Australia and New Zealand

This chapter begins with a consideration of the relationship between heritage and reconciliation in Australia and New Zealand. While there is a swathe of literature on the topic of heritage and conflict more broadly, there is markedly little that approaches heritage through a lens of peacebuilding, and what does exist is not focussed on reconciliation in settler-colonial nation-states. Although the past and its meaning-making through heritage are implicit in much reconciliation literature, the role of heritage in building peaceful relations in Indigenous/settler contexts is not well understood. In considering how to raise the pre-eminence of reconciliation in thinking about heritage and vice versa the chapter begins to explore their inter-relationship in theory and practice. We recognise an intrinsic complexity that the terms ‘heritage’ and ‘reconciliation’ are understood in a multitude of ways and are sites of deep contestation in themselves. Nonetheless, we consider the exploration of the meaning(s) of these terms, and the connections between them in Indigenous and Western intellectual traditions, a useful approach. The chapter considers different ways in which the concept of reconciliation is understood, before providing insights into heritage and peacebuilding within Ngarrindjeri and Māori philosophies, and how this inter-relationship might also be identified within the major Western debates over definitions of heritage in a range of social and political contexts.