Since at least the 1970s the concept of national heritage has been an inseparable p art of the practice of archaeology in A ustralia, and given that archaeology and cultural nationalism m arch hand in hand in virtually every country of the w orld, this is hardly surprising. N or is it surprising that a settler colony like A ustralia, in order to bond itself better to the exotic terrain by sending roots dow n into the continent's past, w ould at some stage w ant to appropriate to itself the tim

more »

... -depth represented by the archaeological rem ains of the indigenous m inority. Yet surely, on the face of it, there is som ething quite radical and extraordinary in the prospect of a settler culture w hich for so long had pronounced indigenous culture to be a savage anachronism suddenly turning to em brace the past of that culture as its own.