Amateur divers have just discovered the wreckage of what is thought to be a WWII Japanese submarine, off Sydney’s northern beaches. The ‘midget submarine’ has been identified as one of the vessels that attacked Sydney harbour in May 1942, in one of the most famous episodes of the war in Australia.
The Australian government has moved quickly to place a protection order on the site. Federal environment minister Ian Campbell has said the Department of Foreign Affairs is consulting with the Japanese government to discuss appropriate protection measures. “Clearly it’s not only a sunken submarine, but also potentially a grave site for the Japanese … who were on board”. Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has warned that “under no circumstances will anybody be able to lawfully go near it, to take anything from it or, indeed, to disturb it in any way, shape or form”.
Now compare this urgent concern for heritage protection with the government’s plans to approve an expansion of Woodside Petroleum’s gas plant on the Burrup peninsula in Western Australia, which would destroy a globally significant heritage site with some of the oldest rock art in the world. Not only that, the Burrup peninsula, or Murujuga as it is traditionally known, is also a war grave, where 60 Aborigines were murdered in the so-called Flying Foam Massacre of 1868. [pdf]
As I said elsewhere, the Australian government believes that digger heritage matters, and that koorie heritage doesn’t.
November 29, 2006 at 5:44 am
In this context: some time ago I had a discussion with someone who suggested that the future of archaeology would lie in ‘recent’ historical archaeology (e.g. world war II), because the people who treasure the collective memory of such significant events start to take these memories into the grave. In other words, not so much a ‘nostalgic’ archaeology as an ‘ultra-modern’ historical archaeology.
November 29, 2006 at 10:06 am
Yes, i suppose it’s been a natural progression from historical archaeaology to industrial archaeology to archaeology of the modern world. It’s also an area where archaeologists have made themselves more ‘relavent’ in recent years, for instance, investigating mass graves in the former Yugoslavia. I’m about to start reading a book called ‘Combat archaeology’ (in the same series as the one I reviewed below) which looks interesting.
I think though that archaeologists of the modern world will come up against some serious practical and theoretical difficulties.