This paper considers a lost Australian silent film and its re-emergence in a different format more than ninety years later, a case study of acknowledging non-existent heritage through re-imagining.
The 1921 film Blue Mountains Mystery is considered lost. Apart from documentation of those involved in its making, behind and in front of the camera, all that remains of the motion picture is a set of photographs taken during filming on set. However, Canadian filmmaker, Guy Maddin “rediscovered” the film, including it in a 2012 Pompidou Centre exhibition, Spiritismes, a live installation project involving reshooting on sets based on the surviving photos.
Combining Derrida’s concept of hauntology, where what is absent becomes present, and Claire Bishop’s recent examination of how we attend to the ephemeral (Disordered Attention, 2024), the return of a seemingly “non-existent” film disrupts the idea of absent heritage: What future does heritage have that was lost?

Bryozoa collecting and the social life of things.

This paper explores the scientific exchange and correspondence between Augustus Hamilton and Miss Eliza Jelly in the 19th century as an example of intangible cultural heritage and examines its intersection with the knowledge and values inherent in the scientific and cultural landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand, now. It connects heritage practices from the past with contemporary theoretical frameworks.
The exchanges between Hamilton and Miss Jelly show the global mobility of objects, specimens, information and ideas. The lists that Hamilton published in 1897 as a result of his lengthy correspondence and exchanges with Miss Jelly remain the earliest information about the changing bryozoan fauna in Otago Harbour and are an invaluable resource for modern scientists. This paper shows how the ‘social life of things’ connects people, performance and objects over time and through space in endless webs of relationships, meanings and knowledge.

How should we care for objects intertwined with colonial collecting and global museum practices? This question arises in Australia's colonial archive, particularly through stories of a small Taoist figurine found in Palmerston (now Darwin) in the late 19th century, passed among colonial elites, and ultimately entered a Sydney museum in the 1950s. This paper examines how such artefacts move through colonial contexts, highlighting colonial privilege while often masking their original metaphysical significance. By acknowledging these layered histories, we enact a form of decolonisation that preserves the figurine's intended meaning for those who brought it to Australia. Considering both its origins and current status in a museum, the figurine becomes more than a historical object; it exists at the intersection of Chinese Taoism, colonial dynamics, and modern museum practice.

This paper examines how live performance can “queer” historic houses to create relational, embodied forms of heritage. Focusing on The Magic of Her Body: Queer Readings of Katherine Mansfield at Katherine Mansfield House & Garden, it explores how site-specific performance weaves together people, place, memory, and affect in ways that challenge heteronormative narratives and reconnect queer histories to their cultural contexts. Through movement through rooms, guided narration, live music, and Vixen Temple’s embodied readings, the event transformed the house into a living archive where queer presence could be felt as well as understood. The paper argues that such performances offer powerful models for reimagining heritage practice—fostering connection, social inclusion, and ethical relationships across past, present, and future.