2026 Jim Kerr Address

The Jim Kerr Address pays respect to Jim’s legacy by perpetuating open inquiry into the understanding of place and the constant review of progress in conservation philosophy and practice.

Programme

4.00pm Reception: Sir Roland Wilson Building (#120), ANU.
4.30pm Welcome (venue Sir Roland Wilson Theatrette (Rm 2.02)): Professor Mat Trinca Talalin, Centre for Heritage & Museum Studies, ANU
4.32pm Welcome to Country: Paul House
4.40pm Introductions: Senator the Honourable Murray Watt, Minister for the Environment and Water Dr Tamsin Kerr, daughter of Jim and Joan Kerr
4.50pm-5.30pm Address by Professor Yujie Zhu - Heritage in motion: Rethinking Place, Identity and the future of heritage
5.30pm Concluding remarks and close - Dr Caitlin Allen President Australia ICOMOS (6.00pm AICOMOS 2026 AGM)

Bookings

Trybooking
Admission - AICOMOS Members/concessions $25, students$20, non-members $30, CHMS PhD students and sponsors free.

Bios and Abstracts

Paul House: 

Welcome to Country Bio: Paul Girrawah House has multiple Indigenous ancestries from the South-East Canberra region, including the Ngambri-Ngurmal (Walgalu), Pajong (Gundungurra), Wallaballooa (Ngunnawal) and Erambie/Brungle (Wiradyuri) family groups. Paul acknowledges his diverse Indigenous history, he particularly identifies as a descendant of Onyong aka Jindoomang from Weereewaa (Lake George) and Henry ‘Black Harry’ Williams from Namadgi who were both multilingual, essentially Walgalu-Wiradjuri speaking warriors. Paul was born at the old Canberra hospital in the centre of his ancestral country and strongly acknowledges his Indigenous matriarch ancestors, in particular his mother Dr Aunty Matilda House-Williams OAM and grandmother, Ms Pearl Simpson-Wedge. Paul completed a Bachelor of Community Management from Macquarie University, Graduate Certificate in Wiradjuri Language, Culture and Heritage and Management from CSU and Graduate Certificate of Management from ANU. Paul provided the Welcome to Country for the 47th Opening of Federal Parliament in 2022. Paul is a member Indigenous Reference Group, the NMA and First Nations Advisory Group, the NGA and MoAD. Paul works on country with the ANU, First Nations Portfolio as a Cultural & Community Engagement Specialist.

Professor Yujie Zhu

Speaker Bio: Yujie Zhu is Associate Professor at the Centre for Heritage & Museum Studies, the Australian National University. An anthropologist and critical heritage scholar, his research explores how heritage, memory, place and identity are produced and transformed across communities and borders.
His books include Making Places Sacred (2025), China’s Heritage through History (2024), and Heritage Tourism (2021). He formerly served as Vice-President of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and is an Expert Member of ICOMOS’s International Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage. He currently leads research on memory politics and transnational heritage networks.

Address abstract

Heritage in Motion: Rethinking Place, Identity and the Future of Heritage

A central premise of heritage conservation is to understand place: its histories, meanings, associations and cultural significance. At a moment when Australia ICOMOS is reflecting on fifty years of practice and the continuing influence of the Burra Charter, this Address asks a simple question: how can heritage conserve place without fixing culture in place?

Heritage is often understood through inheritance: places, objects, practices and memories are received from the past, valued in the present and transmitted to the future. Yet such transmission rarely follows a single path. People migrate, objects circulate, knowledge and practices travel, and places are continually remade through forms of encounter ranging from colonisation and displacement to migration, tourism and cultural exchange. Heritage may be grounded in place, but it is also made through movement.

Drawing on critical heritage and anthropological perspectives, particularly research on transnational and transcultural heritage, I examine the tension between the mobility of cultural life and the relatively bounded categories through which heritage is often recognised and governed. Multicultural approaches have greatly expanded recognition of cultural difference, and transnational perspectives have revealed connections across borders. A transcultural perspective goes further by questioning the boundaries themselves: how are cultures, identities and places constituted through movement, translation and encounter, rather than treated as self-contained entities that subsequently interact?

These relationships are neither neutral nor equal. Colonisation, displacement, migration and cultural exchange produce very different conditions of mobility, while Indigenous relationships to Country remind us that cultural connection does not make all relationships to place equivalent. Drawing on comparative examples from Australia and internationally, the Address considers what a more relational understanding of culture might mean for conservation, interpretation and the assessment of cultural significance.

If heritage is simultaneously inheritance, transmission and future-making, how might we understand places not only through bounded identities, but through the connections and unequal histories that have made and continue to transform them? The challenge for the future, I suggest, is not only to broaden whose heritage is recognised, but to understand more fully how identities, places and forms of belonging are continually produced through relationships, movement and unequal histories.