Landscapes of Memory and Forgetting: Memorialisation, Emotion and Tourism along Australia’s Great Ocean Road
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-5195/4062Keywords:
Australia, Tourist Route, History, Landscape, MemoryAbstract
This article explores the history of the Great Ocean Road, described in its recent National Heritage listing as “Australia’s most famous coastal drive”. The road is unique in Australia as it was purposely constructed as a scenic tourist route and as a memorial to World War I servicemen. Over time the road’s memorial function was largely forgotten in public memory, overtaken by its fame as a tourist route. The history of the road’s setting, construction, promotion and interpretation reveals that it is a route which reflects changing, and sometimes conflicting, cultural preoccupations. Despite attempts to link its sublime setting and challenges of building the road with the heroic struggles of the servicemen in war; in spite of physical commemorative markers along the road; and in spite of the power and endurance of the “Anzac legend” in Australian culture, the connection did not resonate as intended. The road’s construction and subsequent interpretation illustrate the difficulty of inscribing “memory” onto a landscape with no prior connection to the events being memorialised. Its history reveals insights into the road’s cultural construction; tangible and intangible expressions of remembering and forgetting along the road; and the relationship between the road, landscape, memory and emotion.References
Alsop, P. (1982). A History of the Great Ocean Road. Geelong, Vic: Geelong Historical Society.
Australian Heritage Database, Great Ocean Road (n.d.) Available at: environment.gov.au/heritage/places/national/great-ocean-road/information.html. (Accessed 20 July 2011).
The Australian Motorist, (monthly journal published 1908-1956). Melbourne: Edgerton & Moor.
Australia-trips-info website, (n.d.) Available at:
australia-trips.info/Destinations/Vic/Great_Ocean_Road_Victoria_Australia/Great-Ocean-Road.html. (Accessed May 2012).
Bachelard, G. (1958) The Poetics of Space. Trans. M. Jolas (1994). Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Broadbent, G. (1933). Broadbent’s Official Motor Guide: Melbourne to Adelaide, Incorporating Princes’ Highway and Other Routes (6th ed.). Melbourne: G. R. Broadbent.
Broadbent, G. (1936). The Great Ocean Road. Road of Remembrance. Soldiers’ Memorial Highway. The Argus, Weekend Supplement 10 October, 30.
Bryson, B. (2000). Down Under. London: Doubleday.
Cecil, K. L. (1990). The Great Ocean Road. Anglesea, Vic: Anglesea & District Historical Society.
Cecil, K. L. & Carr, R. V. (1988). The Roads to Lorne: The Story of Communication between Geelong and Lorne including that via the ANZAC’s Highway. Anglesea, Vic: Anglesea & District Historical Society.
Clark, I. D. (1995). Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
Commonwealth of Australia Gazette. (2011). S53, 7 April.
Country Roads Board Victoria (c. 1964). Country Roads Board Victoria 1913–1963 Fifty Years of Progress. Melbourne: Country Roads Board Victoria.
Cousland, C. (2007). Travelling the Great Ocean Road...A Journey through Time and Place. Apollo Bay, Vic: Petticoat Publishing.
Davidson, J. & Spearritt, P. (2000). Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Davis, T. (2008). The rise and decline of the American parkway. In C. Mausch & T. Zeller (Eds.), The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe (pp. 35-58). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Davison, G., Hirst, J. & Macintyre, S. (eds). (2001). The Oxford Companion to Australian History, (Revised ed.). South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Dedek, P. (2007). Hip to the Trip: A Cultural History of Route 66. Alberquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Trans. J. Miskowiek. Diacritics, 16 (1), 22-27.
The Great ANZAC Highway: Victoria’s Memorial to Her Soldiers Welding Practical Patriotism to National Service (May 1918), Land & Transport, 2 (13), 11-14.
Great Ocean Road Renewal Program website (n.d.). Available at: www.gorcc.com.au/projects/255/. (Accessed June 2012).
Hucker, J. (2013). Vimy Ridge, Canada’s First World War memorial: restoration challenges of an early-modern structure. Historic Environment, 25 (1), 52-61.
Inglis, K. S. (1998). Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press.
Jakle, J. A. & Sculle, K. A. (2008). Motoring: The Highway Experience in America. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press.
Johnston, A. & Lawson, A. (2000). Settler colonies. In H. Schwartz & S. Ray (Eds.), A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (pp. 360-77). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Koshar, R. (2008). Driving cultures and the meaning of roads – some comparative examples. In C. Mausch & T. Zeller (Eds.), The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe (pp. 14-34). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Lake, M., Reynolds, H., McKenna, M. & Damousi, J. (2010). What’s Wrong with Anzac? Sydney: UNSW Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1974). The Production of Space. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (1991). Oxford: Blackwell.
Lewis, J. (1999). Shadows on the Landscape: Memorial Aspects of the Great Ocean Road. Masters of Tourism and the Visual Arts thesis, University of Melbourne.
Mausch, C. & Zeller, T. eds. (2008). The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Morgan, J. (1852). The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, Thirty Two Years a Wanderer Amongst the Aborigines (reprinted 1996). Sydney: R. Schicht.
Planbooktravel (2006). Great Ocean Road and Grampians, Australia’s Top Touring Regions (1st ed.). Sydney: Gregorys Publishing Company.
Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and Memory. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London & New York: Verso.
Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell.
Southern, R. (2007). Our Road to the Coast: Behind the Building of the Main Road from Melbourne to Geelong, and on to the West Coast, 1912–1932. Geelong, Vic: Geelong Historical Society.
Stone, D. (1991). Explore the Great Ocean Road: Along Australia’s Southern Touring Route Geelong to Mt Gambier. Lilydale, Vic: See Australia Guides.
Veracini, L. (2010). Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Whisnant, A. M. (2008). The scenic is political: creating natural and cultural landscapes along America’s Blue Ridge Parkway. In C. Mausch & T. Zeller (Eds.), The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe (pp. 59-78). Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Zeller, T. (2007). Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930–1970. Trans. T. Dunlap. New York: Bergahn Books.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2013 Rosemary Kerr
Copyrights and publishing rights of all the texts on this journal belong to the respective authors without restrictions.
This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (full legal code).
See also our Open Access Policy.
Metadata
All the metadata of the published material is released in the public domain and may be used by anyone free of charge. This includes references.
Metadata — including references — may be re-used in any medium without prior permission for both not-for-profit and for-profit purposes. We kindly ask users to provide a link to the original metadata record.
