Museum Volunteering: Heritage as ‘Serious Leisure’

The growing number of volunteers in the heritage sector indicates a desire for a leisure experience by pursuing a subject interest with like‐minded people. Millar and others have suggested that volunteers are the ‘ultimate frequent visitors’, and as the day visitor market for museums and heritage attractions declines, this paper offers the repositioning of ‘heritage visiting’ from day visits to longer term connections with particular heritage attractions via volunteering. It draws on Stebbins’s concept of serious leisure as a way of reading museum volunteering as a leisure practice and argues that museum volunteering is a way of practising heritage as leisure that is ‘self‐generated’, with museum volunteers active in constructing their own identities. According to the concept of ‘serious leisure’, museum volunteers become part of a social world inhabited by those knowledgeable about heritage and history. The paper concludes by examining the adequacy of Stebbins’s P‐A‐P system for analysing the power relations between museum professionals and volunteers in the museum social world.     

‘The Birthplace of Australian Multiculturalism?’ Retrospective Commemoration,Participatory Memoralisation and Official Heritage

In Australia, the authorised heritage discourse contributes to shaping the stereotypically Australian. It actively engages in creating a contemporary national story which glosses over the more shameful or distasteful episodes and themes in Australian colonial and post‐colonial history which is presented as being by‐and‐large progressive and benign. While the process of forging national history has become more complex and increasingly fraught, given globalisation and the emergence of new histories, nation and nationalism remain culturally persistent. The turn to multiculturalism from the 1970s as the principal way of defining Australianness and the nation lead some conservatives in politics and the heritage industry to appropriate the new social history, using it to present diversity as an indicator of a fair and open society. In this process, both history—an evolving academic discipline—and the past—lived experience which has meanings and uses in the present—were transformed into heritage.