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Thank you very much for the invitation to come and speak here.

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 I greatly have enjoyed my time in China this time. 

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And Rouran has made sure that I have got to see 

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some of the significant heritage sites in this area of China.

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 And it has been an absolute delight.

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 And I'm very pleased to be here 

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to talk to you about my research in heritage tourism that I'm doing. 

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And I should say I am obviously Australian.

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 And Australians have a particular characteristic that 

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when we get excited,

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 and I'm always very excited about my research, we start to talk very fast. 

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So if I start to do that, please say ''wei'', as we said in Australia.

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 It's an Australian's annoy. Slow down. 

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So don't think you're being rude if you tell me to slow down. 

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So what I wanna talk to you about today is research that I have been doing for more than ten years now. 

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It become quite an epic issue in my life.

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 And I'm getting close to finishing this research. 

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There's a book coming out. 

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I hope fingers cross next year on this research. 

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It has been meant to have been coming out in the last couple of years, 

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but being a head, as your dean will tell you,

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being head of a large academic cohort is not  easy, 

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and it is very time consuming. 

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And it taken me away from our research. 

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So what is this research that I'm talking about? 

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Very simply. 

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I'm asking the question why do people visit museums and heritage sites?

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 What does those visit both individually and collectively do? 

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What do they do? What do they do in society? 

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What are the consequences? 

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What is the cultural work that visiting does?

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 What is the social work in society? 

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What is political work that visiting certain heritage sites as tourists do? 

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Now in anglophone contexts in the west,

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 there are a number of dominant assumptions about 

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why people visit and what this visiting does.

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 The two assumptions are that people go to visit heritage sites for education,  for their education, 

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or they go to have a nice day out, simply to do leisure, to recreate. 

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Now both of those things may be true. 

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But in anglophone context, we tend to stop there. 

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We tend to assume that's all evidence about and there are no further consequences. 

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So I'm looking at the social consequences of that visiting. 

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Also the assumptions that visitors come to simply have a nice day out  

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or to be educated that tends to create a perception the tourists are passive. 

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They are, if you like, empty vessels to be filled up with 

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the educational knowledge of the museum or the heritage interpretive staff,

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 whatever it may be. 

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So I've been concerned to understand 

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what meaning does visiting heritage sites have being a tourist in people's lives?

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 What social and political meaning does it have? 

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This is work that I've been undertaking in England, Australia and the United States. 

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Of course, Rouran has been doing similar work here in China.

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But before I go into talking about the results of what exactly I've been doing, 

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the slide, some of the heritage sites and museums that I've been researching at the last ten years.

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I need to say some of the theoretical concepts that I'm using in my work. 

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The definition of heritage that tends to be utilized in anglophone context

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and indeed tends to be utilized in much international debate, 

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identifies heritage as sites and places. 

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Heritage is a such things as the places I were in yesterday, 

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the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City. 

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It is places and sites, and usually grant monumental places and sites

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 or artifacts that we collect and put into museums. 

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There's been some growing recognition in anglophone west context of the idea 

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that heritage can also be intangible.

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 It can be such things as music and dance and storytelling. 

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But the dominant assumption in international debate, 

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it tends to energize the ways in which national policy in anglophone west context. 

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Opposite is what I have called the authorized heritage discourse. 

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This authorized heritage discourse says that heritage is things, physical things. 

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It is things that are good about the past, 

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or the things that are great and good and speak to national identity. 

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And it's things that have inherent value.

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 We assume that the value of these things are simply in the thing itself. 

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And we also assume that within this discourse

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that heritage experts are the best people to explain the value of the past 

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or the meaning of the past to the public or to tourists in this case. 

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So, it is something idea that tourism is all about 

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or should be about educating tourists about what past means for the present.

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 Now in my work, in the other work that I've done,

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 I've challenged the idea of the authorized heritage discourse. 

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I think that this discourse is too limiting.

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It is too Eurocentric, it is too much based on European 

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and it leads European understanding of heritage.

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 And it constrains the way in which other understandings, 

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including understandings about intangible heritage,

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 are given legitimacy and are understood on the international scale. 

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Now, that doesn't mean, of course, that the authorized heritage discourse isn't challenged, 

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and it is very much actively challenged, 

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and has been challenged by the convention for intangible heritage.

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 But nonetheless, it is still very much influential, particularly in western contexts. 

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Now in opposition to the authorized heritage discourse,

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 I take the position that heritage is something that is alive.

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 It is a moment or process of meaning making.

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 It is a process in which we take to interpret the past,

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 take the meanings of memories, of commemoration, of events in the past, 

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and bring them to the present to help us make sense of the present. 

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And we do that in context of particular needs. 

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Whether that need is to construct for ourselves a sense of identity 

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or to make links with people in the present or people in the past. 

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Whatever those needs or aspirations are, it is something that is done.

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So sites like the Great Wall, or the Forbidden City or sites like Uluru in my own country 

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or Presidential Houses in the United States, whatever those sites may be, 

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I would argue, they are not legacy of themselves, heritages,

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 but they are the cultural tools that we use for heritage making. 

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These are the cultural tools that we used to remember collectively 

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or individually or familiarly about the past and to give the past meaning. 

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So that could be brought to the present to help us make sense of the present, 

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to help us construct ways of understanding ourselves and ways of understanding other people. 

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The heritage is a practice or a performance, 

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which frames how individuals, families, communities, 

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nations and so on, engaged and negotiated 

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not only the meaning of the past, but the ways in which the past is used to legitimate 

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or to remake contemporary cultural values and narratives. 

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So heritage is a performance of meaning. 

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And of course, these performances occurred in the ways 

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we choose sites to be listed on world heritage list or listed on national heritage lists. 

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They could occur in the way we collect artifacts from museums, 

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they could occur in the way that we interpret those artifacts in museums 

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or the way we interpret heritage sites. 

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This is a process of meaning making. 

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We are making meaning. 

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The meaning of these things isn't inherented in them. 

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The meaning is created through the way that we use these things.

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 But we can also do this meaning making as we sit across the table,

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 for instance, at dinner with our grandparents and talk about family stories, 

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or the way we engage with our children about the meaningful stories 

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and construct our own familiar heritage. 

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We do this at an individual family level. 

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We can do this community level through the use of heritage site. 

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We do this at a national level, do the ways in which we manage or conserved, 

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or choose not to manage and conserve heritage. 

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These things are that we make for heritage. 

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And the definition of heritage 

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that I'm using also rejects the boundary that is often drawn between museums and heritage sites. 

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For me, they're all cultural tools that we used to remember, 

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to make and remake and continually remake heritage. 

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So this is the definition of heritage that I'm using.