"Teasing Out" What Cultural Heritage Landscapes and Historic Sites Have "To Say": A Probe Using Opportunities from Epistemological Pluralism

The principal purpose of this article is speculative in that it experiments with an approach to "teasing out" what cultural heritage landscapes and historic sites have "to say" and to overcome what has been described as a circumstance in which landscapes and sites do not tell their stories clearly. An approach to "teasing out" has been fashioned to examine how the cultural dynamic of a previous historical period has come to be "a" cultural dynamic of the present as it is presented through historylinked and heritage-based tourism and as it becomes a constituent of "consuming history" through popular culture. Fashioning the "teasing out" process has drawn on the opportunities and skill sets from geography and semiotics as they have been reconfigured as a combined investigative and interpretive entity and as a form of epistemological pluralism. The special aptitudes of these disciplinary areas have been twinned to expose many of the important symbols of the story of the Australian bushranger-cum-outlaw Ned Kelly, matching the original disposition of them to the modern telling of the story through tourism, and in so doing achieving enhanced levels of perception, comprehension, depth, richness, and utility, and inclusive of both principal issues and subtle nuances. A concluding assessment of the opportunities that can be attributed to epistemological pluralism is accompanied by caveats; the purpose of these is to promote awareness about the need for due diligence in forging suitable disciplinary combinations.