Building the case for world heritage nomination of the Mount Lofty Ranges (160)
The Mount Lofty Ranges World Heritage Bid is exploring South Australia’s colonisation history at a landscape scale and in a global context through the lens of Unesco’s world heritage criteria. The bid aims to demonstrate how the agro-pastoral settlement landscapes of the ranges are the tangible product of a transformational shift in European migration history. Purposefully linked to the town surveys of Adelaide, the country surveys of 1836 to 1856 correspond with the second main wave of Australia’s settlement history, when the focus shifted from penal colonies to free settlement. In a global context they provide enduring evidence of the earliest adoption and successful adaption of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s systematic colonisation model.
The nomination dossier will show how the Wakefield model was debated, shaped, influenced and promoted by the Philosophical Radicals, embracing Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, Adam Smith's economics, John Austin's jurisprudence, and John Stuart Mill's rationale for democracy and universal suffrage. It will also demonstrate how the model impacted on land laws and development policy elsewhere in the new world, and how it influenced global economic debate for over a century. This paper explores how these associations and influences form the heart of the bid’s case for Unesco recognition.
