More Than Meat: Rediscovering the Cow beneath the Face in Urban Heritage Practice

Abstract

I walk fantastically with the cows along the stock route of the former Newmarket saleyards and abattoirs, through what have become the regenerated residential estates of Lynch's Bridge/Kensington Banks in Melbourne, Australia. I challenge the practice of heritage conservation as a closed story of the past ‘as it was’, which projects a set of sanitised meanings that allow for neither subtext nor counter readings. I problematise the concrete machine of heritage protection utilising Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of faciality, where reassuring mosaic faces of cows going to the saleyards belong, but anguished faces of cows at the slaughterhouse do not. I call upon the cow's face as potential probe head to forge connections between past—present—future in hot heritage practices which challenge people to question their values and actions. Rediscovery of the cow beneath the face at Newmarket saleyards and abattoirs could intervene in people's habitual patterns of thinking and acting, triggering renegotiation of cultural meanings of ethics, welfare, and rights, regarding not only nonhuman animals, but also Othered humans, such as those penned in detention centres. Through experiential experiment rather than controlled interpretation, hot heritage practices may create evental spaces for thinking and acting otherwise.