Last Sunday was the launch of the Beliefs Attitudes and Customs self-guided interpretive trail at West Terrace Cemetery. This trail complements the Heritage Highlights tour (featured in this 4-minute video) that was launched last year and won a 2011 tourism award.
The trail was launched as part of a Victorian funeral re-enactment staged during the About Time history festival. Over 400 people attended the re-enactment, which was an impressive turnout.
I was responsible for writing the signage and self-guided leaflet for the trail, with the assistance of historian Geoff Speirs who helped me with some of the background research and sourcing of images.
In contrast to the Heritage Highlights tour, the Beliefs Attitudes and Customs trail focuses less on individual personalities and more on how the cemetery reflects both the religious diversity of South Australia and the change in social attitudes since the colonial era.
So this trail encompasses the different religious sections of the cemetery, the funeral rituals of these different faiths, and how these religious sections came about in the first place. It is also an opportunity to compare the practices of colonial times, which to modern eyes can seem very rigid and superstitious, with the more ‘scientific’ view of death and the grieving process prevalent today. However in the absence of the prescribed social norms of yesteryear, we now may find ourselves at a loss regarding how we are ‘supposed’ to deal with death and grief.
I have to confess that while fascinating, some of these more abstract ideas proved difficult to write about in a way that was clear, engaging and succinct. Time will tell how successful we were in this goal.
This is extremely interesting Regan. It interests me particularly because it seems to connect with interpretive planning work we have been doing recently at the National Memorial Arboretum near Alrewas UK (I can’t see how to put links into comments here but it is well worth a Goggle!). This ‘national centre of remembrance’ explored the many and varied ways in which society explores and expresses remembrance in a fascinating series of cross-disciplinary seminars where academics contributed a wide range of perspectives and insights. This provided an exciting and fertile seedbed for interpretive planning and design and we have high hopes that , funding permitting, a new visitor centre will create an inclusive and many-faceted view of Remembrance and what it means today (as well as in the past). The project has involved a lot of thought and reflection and it sounds like your project did too. I think this is interpretation at its most exciting.
Hi Susan,
May not work as a link but I’ve found the address: http://www.thenma.org.uk/
Remembrance is an interesting concept – it exposes the nexus between socially and culturally constructed meanings and those that are highly personal and introspective. Prof. David Uzzell (University of Surrey) gave a presentation at a Visitor Research Forum here earlier in the year: “Heritage, Collective Memory and Memorializing the Past” It looked at the relationship between personal and collective memories and memorialisation. http://www.tourism.uq.edu.au/visitor-research-forum-2012