Mining Heritage and Tourism

A Global Synthesis

Michael Conlin, Lee Jolliffe, Michael Conlin, Lee Jolliffe, Michael V. Conlin, Lee Jolliffe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415560900
• eBook ISBN: 9781135229054
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Many former mining areas have now lost their industrial function and are now turning to tourism for regional revitalization and community economic development. The transformation process of these industrial, and in some cases derelict, mining sites and landscapes into an area of interest for tourists is a major challenge both for planners and for tourism managers. It involves complex consideration to both the preservation of the physical site and community mining heritages as well as the health, safety and environmental factors inherent in opening these vast sites to the public.

Mining Heritage and Tourism includes contributions from internationally recognized authorities and is the first book to focus on the issues, challenges and potentials in redeveloping mines as cultural heritage attractions which are explored thematically throughout the book. It draws on multidisciplinary research to consider the dichotomy between heritage preservation and tourist development goals for mining heritage sites as well as to explore the practical challenges of developing these sites. These themes are illustrated by case studies from a vast range of geographical locations around the globe to offer operational insights into the planning and management of these sites for both heritage and tourism purposes, as well as innovative site management techniques.

There has never before been a more comprehensive book on mining heritage tourism representing the latest developments in strategy, policy and practices. This book serves as an invaluable guide for students, researchers, academics and practitioners in the areas of Tourism and Heritage Management.

PART I
Introduction

1
What happens when mining leaves?

Michael Conlin and Lee Jolliffe

Introduction

Around the world, mining has been a basis for the development of industrial societies. Now there is something new in terms of mining – the conversion of mining valued for industrial purposes to mining valued for its heritage and tourism aspects. As the societal and communal values related to mining change, a new type of tourism related to industrial heritage has developed including the establishment of visitor attractions related to mines. These developments have produced a wide variety of visitor attractions ranging from the opportunity for tourists to visit working mines, to the creation of mining based visitor attractions of varying complexity many of which are located at or near defunct mine sites, through to the more traditional formation of community based museums that preserve and celebrate local mining heritages and extending to the bundling of mining attractions into heritage routes. The development of cultural attractions related to mines and minerals is universal, growing and important from both historical and economic perspectives, as reflected by the establishment of the UNESCO Global Geoparks Network and other regional consortiums of geotourism activity such as the European Geoparks Network.

When mining leaves a community, there are invariably negative impacts, most notably in terms of the decline in economic activity and the resultant loss of employment. Transforming mines into attractions will never replace the level of economic benefits created by mining or replace all the jobs lost, but it can contribute to the development of tourism as an alternate economic activity and can also preserve mining heritages for the benefit of communities. The development of defunct mines into visitor attractions can result in direct and indirect revenue generation by tourists, funding by governments and other authorities for economic diversification activities and through the creation of alternative employment, albeit usually on a much smaller scale than was available through mining directly. Retired miners, for example, act as tour guides at the Hollinger Gold Mine in Timmins, Ontario which provides employment and, at the same time, lends authenticity to the tourism experience of visiting the decommissioned mining site (Kauremszky, 2009). This process can be found around the world at mining heritage visitor attractions and a number of examples are described later in this book.

Why then a book about mining heritage in relation to tourism? There is definitely a need to understand the complexities of why and how mining heritage and mining sites should be preserved, interpreted and presented to the public, be it the local mining community or the international community of tourists. The need stems as much from the physical nature of mining sites as large and formerly industrial sites as it does from the variety of meanings and narratives associated with the act of mining, for example, including but not limited to indigenous, colonial, industrial and now post industrial subtexts. Visiting sites related to mining can be of interest to the industrial enthusiast as well as the purposeful cultural tourist (McKercher and du Cros, 2002). The activity of visiting areas of mineral occurrence and production can also be identified as a form of special interest or niche tourism (Novelli, 2005) called geotourism (Hose, 2005). While the book’s title purports to provide a global synthesis of the state of the connection between mining heritage and tourism, it is in fact only a beginning, surveying how mining heritage is interpreted (Part II), how mines are transformed into heritage attractions (Part III), the development of mining heritage destinations (Part IV), the growth of mining heritage destinations globally (Part V) and finally identifying opportunities for the development of mining related tourism (Part VI).

The preservation vs tourism issue

The following chapters examine mines and mining heritage as the basis for the development of tourism. As we have discussed, this process produces a wide variety of visitor attractions and activities. However, the common feature of most mining attractions is some form of a museum. These museums range from vast complexes of actual mines, smelters, equipments, buildings and supporting infrastructure through to single buildings or rooms which contain collections of documents and small artifacts. The British Columbia Museum of Mining at Britannia Beach at the headwater of Howe Sound on Canada’s West Coast, is a prime example of the former encompassing a large property with accessible mine shafts, numerous buildings housing extensive collections of documents and artifacts, a significant equipment collection, access to a small historic town site, and most notably the 26-storey tall heritage listed gravity-fed concentrator mill.

A good example of the other end of the scale is the collection of documents, photographs and small artifacts commemorating the smelter activities founded at Anaconda, Montana at the turn of the last century. This collection tended by a small group of volunteers is housed in a basement room in the old city hall, an historic property which was itself under threat of demolition in the near past. The smelter facilities at Anaconda processed the output of the large mines located at Butte, Montana. It is impossible when visiting the town not to know that it was a site of enormous mining related activity. After all, the 585 foot Anaconda Smelter Stack is visible from miles away and billed as the tallest free standing masonry structure in the world. The Stack is now on the US National Register of Historic Places and is a state park, thus assuring its preservation. However, the best any tourists can do is to view the Stack from a significant distance as access to the site is forbidden. Virtually, all other remnants of the town’s former industrial glory have disappeared. The town shows significant signs of economic decay and the collection described above is susceptible to abandonment as the municipality has not formalized its heritage value.

At first glance, the term mining museum may seem somewhat oxymoronic. After all, museums usually bring to mind images of quiet, clean, often scholarly repositories of documents, pictures, works of art and human artifacts. Mines on the other hand evoke images of noisy, dirty and dangerous holes in or under the ground. Museums are often considered to be elite and for the leisure class while mines bring to mind serious industrial activity where the working class use their trade skills and labour and risk their lives to earn a living for their families. Notwithstanding the obvious fallacy of these stereotypes, the world of the museum and the world of the mine would seem to be very far apart in cultural, sociological and economic terms. However, these perceptions all change when mines either exhaust their primary extractive purpose or when their operators look to expand the opportunities presented by both the mining infrastructure and artifacts and the activity of mining itself to generate revenue, interest and goodwill from visitors who are for the want of a better term, tourists. In these instances, the defunct mine site takes on significance as a symbol of cultural, social and economic heritage and the alternative activity provides the basis for the continuation or preservation of the mining site after its original economic raison d’etre ends. It is at this stage of a mine’s life cycle that this book focuses its enquiry. The fundamental purpose of this enquiry is to examine why, when and how mines are transformed into visitor attractions, be they museums, tourism complexes or informal collections.

The injection of the concepts of tourism, heritage preservation and interpretation, and financial sustainability into a discussion about mines and museums provides an ideal foundation for the fusion of the two activities. And it is this fusion within the context of what can be called industrial heritage tourism that is the focus of this book. The chapters comprising this book describe, analyse and critique the development of mines and mining sites as visitor attractions. As we know, the process of developing these sites into visitor attractions is accomplished mainly through the creation of museums. However, as some of the chapters reveal, this process can and does take development well beyond the more traditional notion of a museum and into the realm of more contemporary tourist attraction as is the case in the development of the Sovereign Hill site in Australia.

That there are museums based on mines and mining should not be surprising when considered within the perspective of heritage preservation. The International Council of Museums in its standard definition of a museum makes it clear that heritage preservation is the fundamental objective of museums:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.

(ICOM, 2004)

Therefore, it is not surprising that given the pervasiveness of mines and mining throughout history, their value as symbols of heritage has been recognized in ways which among others, includes the establishment of mines as museums at appropriate points in their life cycles. However, much of this book discusses the inevitable conflict between the more traditional roles of a museum as a means of preserving heritage for the future with the inevitable challenges of funding this preservation and turning what, in most cases, are now defunct economic activities back into sustainable opportunities for their communities.

The chapters in Part II of the book provide ample evidence of this process, from a historical perspective and also in terms of the modern challenges facing heritage preservation. Issues of interpretation from anthropological, sociological and political perspectives abound in the history of mining-based visitor attraction development. What becomes clear, however, from the contributions to this book is that these challenges of interpretation are impacted by more modern and arguably mundane challenges such as funding and future preservation efforts. In reality, however, these modern challenges are not mundane since they threaten the concept of the mining attraction if not resolved and discussions with practitioners in the mining museum field invariably highlight the competing perspectives of historical preservation and interpretation and current and future survival. Much of the discussion in the chapters found in Part III highlights this conflict and examines approaches to resolve the dilemma which preservation and funding produces.

In terms of tourism development, the concept of mines and mining museums is not new and the chapters in Part IV illustrate a number of these historical developments. However, this development is increasing and around the world, communities are realizing that their mining heritage has value, both culturally and economically. The chapters in Part V of the book illustrate how dramatic this development is. What becomes clear from this extensive discussion is that the fusion described above produces a very complex range of developments full of opportunities and fraught with challenges. Chapter 20 summarizes these opportunities and challenges in a typology of mining visitor attractions that provides lessons for development and sustainable management.

Outline of the book

The chapters in Part II (Chapters 2–5) deal primarily with issues related to historical interpretation. As such, Chapter 2 is an excellent launching point for consideration of the historical perspectives which have given rise to the formation of museums dealing with industrial heritage and in the case of the northeast of England, specifically coal mining. Howard and Hannam, in their comprehensive discussion of the founding of two mining museums, The John Bowes Museum and the Beamish Open Air Museum, highlight the sometimes conflicting interpretations which can be made of the historical development of the mining industry. The authors contrast the aristocratic (as they label it) motivation of the Bowes family in the nineteenth century, to provide an educational opportunity for workers in their mines, with the late twentieth century goal of a group of local government bodies of preserving and celebrating the local folk culture of the region. These two differing perspectives result in quite two different attractions, both of which have value and which, in these specific cases, are highly successful tourism attractions.

In Chapter 3, Reeves et al., discuss, among other points, the primary issue addressed by Howard and Hannam, namely differing interpretations of the same history, in the context of the changing interpretation of the role of Chinese migrants in the development of mining in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. The authors discuss the shift in interpretation of the role of Chinese migrants from a focus on negative elements of racism and exploitation to a more humanistic perspective based on the development of relationships between races and classes in the mine fields of the Pacific Rim. They point to, among other consequences, the growth of vibrant ‘Chinatowns’ in the mining regions which, for the most part, have survived the disappearance of mining and which provide the basis for tourism development. Complimenting this discussion, the authors provide a very comprehensive discussion of the development challenges and responses related to visitor attractions based on the Pacific Rim gold mining industry including issues of excavation, preservation of relics, site and location accessibility and the desirability of employing a cultural landscape approach to interpretation of these sites in order to capture the full significance of them, both historically and from a tourism perspective.

Gouthro and Palmer, in Chapter 4, approach the issue of historical interpretation from a perspective grounded in the anthropology of tourism. They make the argument that visits to mining heritage sites can be considered as a form of pilgrimage. Their argument compares historical and contemporary pilgrimage with tourism, both of which involve travel and visitation to historically significant sites. In their discussion of The Big Pit Museum in Wales and the Cape Breton Miners’ Museum in Nova Scotia, Canada, they use the results of research conducted at both sites to reinforce the notion that visits to such historical sites can, for families and individuals with a connection to the region or the mining industry, reinforce their cultural and national identity.

The first three chapters in Part II focused on the historical perspectives that have given context to the interpretation of mining attractions. The last chapter in this section, Chapter 5, deals with a completely modern influence, namely the impact of media on interpretation and its significance for visitor attraction development and management. Leanne White discusses the process of exploitation that took place following the accident at the Beaconsfield Mine in northern Tasmania in 2006. She chronicles the extensive news broadcasting that accompanied the disaster, the range of cultural by-products (songs, poems, plays and films) which have flowed from the incident, the role of national, regional and local governments in managing and a...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Tourism
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Interpreting mining heritage
• PART III Transforming mines into heritage attractions
• PART IV Traditional mining attraction destinations
• PART V Globalization and the future of mining attraction destinations
• PART VI Lessons learned
• Index