Closing the Climb: Refusal or Reconciliation in Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Environmental Philosophy, 2010
Recent decades have brought environmental justice studies to a much broader analysis and new areas of concern. We take this increased depth and breadth of environmental justice further by considering restorative justice, with a particular emphasis on reconciliation efforts between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens. Our focus is on the reconciliation efforts taken by the indigenous/non-indigenous joint-management structure of Uluru-Kata Tjula National Park. Using a framework of restorative justice within a bivalent environmental justice approach, we consider the current management policies at the Park, particularly as it pertains to the controversial climb of the rock, Uluni. Our exploration of restorative environmental justice depends upon narrative analysis of embodied ecotourism affects in order to determine the capacity and obstacles of reconciliation efforts in the current management policy. Interviews with tourists from the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area supply us with cases that provide affective experiences and a postcolonial narrative analysis of touring practices that we argue are imbued with nationalism and colonial naturalism that must be transformed in order to meet the requests of the Park's traditional indigenous owners. We argue that restorative justice, within a bivalent environmental justice framework that already emphasizes other distributive and recognition measures, is vital for over-coming these obstacles for Australian environmental heritage.
Fissures in the rock: rethinking pride and shame in the moral terrains of Uluru
Transactions of the Institute of …, 2007
Joint management strategies of national parks are extending the pedagogical arm of reconciliation. We explore how this process is operating in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Through our concept of moral terrains, we examine whether the embodied knowledge derived from travelling, witnessing, climbing, walking, touching and being touched by Uluru opens moral gateways between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Our argument relies upon ethnographic materials derived from semi-structured interviews conducted around photographs taken by recently returned non-indigenous metropolitan Australians. Our results explore how moral gateways are either opened or closed through the emotions of pride and shame.
Constructing the Climb: Visitor Decision‐making at Uluru
Geographical Research, 2007
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia's Northern Territory continues to be a contested site, as half of its 400 000 visitors continue to climb Uluru each year against the wishes of the Traditional Aboriginal Owners, the Anangu. Since being opened to tourism in the 1950s, Uluru has come to symbolise the ‘heart’ of the Australian nation. The influx of tourists also marked the beginning of contestations over control and access to this site between settler Australians, who wished to photograph and climb it, and the Anangu, to whom it is sacred. That visitors still climb Uluru could be seen as evidence that this site continues to symbolise a split between settler and Aboriginal Australian concepts of place and appropriate actions in relation to Uluru. To explore whether the continued climbing of Uluru was indeed evidence of an irreconcilable ‘clash’ of cultures, a survey of visitors to Uluru and interviews with both tourist operators and National Park staff were undertaken regarding visitor decision-making processes. This research found that rather than entrenched, fixed perspectives on the issue of the Climb, both non-Aboriginal visitors and tour operators showed an openness to the Anangu view of Uluru and their wish that it not be climbed. It also indicated, however, the importance of tourism and other media in conveying the Anangu view to visitors before they arrived at the site of the Climb itself, a point considered to be ‘too late’ by many visitors. These findings suggest the potential for change in the actions of many visitors in regard to the Climb through a more proactive representation of the wishes of the Anangu to visitors before they reach Uluru.
A Journey to the Heart: Affecting engagement at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park
This paper examines how Indigenous cultures and their connections to country are presented to the public in protected areas through a textual analysis of interpretive signage. In protected areas, different representational tropes are used to interpret colonial/settler, natural heritage and Indigenous landscapes and places. This paper begins by exploring the extent to which these contrasting interpretive strategies signify to visitors a hierarchy of place value in protected areas. It then asks whether the signage at Indigenous places alienates contemporary communities from country and history through a distant and detached view of culture, authorised via the template of scientific objectivity. These questions will be explored through an account that concludes with a consideration of the affective registers afforded to visitors within the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.
Journal of Tourism History, 2011
Debate surrounds the process through which the climbing of a rock located beyond the frontier of an Aboriginal Reserve, known to White Australians as Ayer's Rock and Aboriginal Australians as Uluru, became the focal attraction within the first Outback national park during 1958. Contrary to the view that it was by chance that Uluru was transformed into a tourist playground rather than an Aboriginal State, this article argues that the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) actively drew Uluru into tourism's grasp with a net of meaning and rites to commemorate the achievements of a new pioneering nation. Focusing on the brokerage of travel traditions and tourist gazes to set tourists in motion to honour explorers, prospectors and naturalists atop Uluru, this inquiry traces Australia's national tourism organisation's launch of The Centre as a tourist destination. This development characterised the first phase in the struggle over the ‘heartland’ of Australia. The second concluded when Anangu's customary rights to Uluru were restored during the 1980s. Today, Anangu seek to balance tourism with self-determination. I conclude by outlining present efforts to dismantle climb-based touristic expectations and behaviours formalised by ANTA, and argue that while tourism has been a force for conflictual change, it might foster conciliation between former colonising and colonised peoples. Key words: Uluru, Ayers Rock, The Climb, Cultural Traditions, Ceremonies of Possession.
Tourist Studies, 2010
This paper discusses the capacity of Aboriginal cultural tourism to effect change in the perceptions and attitudes (and lives) of Australian tourists towards Aboriginality and their own national identity. Following research, it was found that the relational effects of the experience between hosts and tourists often surpassed the tourists’ enjoyment of the expected material displays of Aboriginal cultures. These displays are what most tours are based on, yet this relational context was based on degrees of intimacy that some tourists reported valuing more than simply experiencing demonstrations of a different culture. The importance of intimate engagement on the ‘meeting grounds’ of these cultural camps has a significant role to play in the current sociopolitical relations between Aboriginal people and settler Anglo-Australians. By visiting these camps, Australian tourists can engage (even if unintentionally) in practical and personal instances of reconciliation that can additionally effect a transversal, or becoming-minor, of the tourists’ subjectivity and thus potentially reordering the tourists’ sense of national identity and belonging.
Travels in 'becoming-Aboriginal' - Mark Galliford.doc
Critical Arts, 2012
While undertaking research for a PhD on Aboriginal cultural tourism, I began to wonder how the strategy of reflexivity – or an awareness of one’s own presence, one’s “positioning” – could be employed to further enhance an analysis of the connections between experience, data and theory. This paper presents an experimental effort in opening up more orthodox or conventional analyses of tourism to include personal experience, of researcher, tourists and operators, as a means of understanding how desire operates in the field of cultural tourism. In doing so, an interplay between anecdotes and theory attempts to demonstrate how the social and political forces inherent in desire motivate and impact upon people in their roles as travellers, tourists and tour operators. The opportunity for personal intimacy available in the (inter)cultural tourism experience is invaluable for people to reflect upon not only their own (perhaps mistaken) perceptions and attitudes towards Aboriginality, but also to consider their own subjective positions as Australians. This has significant relevance in the contribution to, and perhaps reordering of, wider socio-political discourses such as reconciliation that frame Australian intercultural relations.
Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2013
Abstract For many protected areas, sharing benefits with local indigenous communities is an important management requirement. This paper explores indigenous involvement in and benefits from tourism, using a study of Australia's World Heritage–listed Purnululu National Park and the nearby Warmun Aboriginal Community. Interactions between the Community, the Park and tourism were explored using semi-structured interviews. The results illuminate an ongoing cultural connection to the Park providing indigenous people with intrinsic, non ...
Anthropological Forum, vol. 28 (3), 2018
Based on ethnographic research conducted with Bardi and Jawi people, two Indigenous groups from the Northwestern Kimberley region of Western Australia, the aim of this paper is to approach the complexities related to Indigenous tourism in Australia through the politics of knowing and not-knowing as embodied by Indigenous tour guides and non-Indigenous tourists. It examines the notion of knowing (or not-knowing) and its usages by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the context of their tourist encounter. ‘Knowing’ represents an important aspect through which Aboriginal people and their non-Indigenous guests negotiate their interactions. In particular, the paper shows how Indigenous and non-Indigenous expectations from tourism lead actors to adopt divergent positions and to assert renewed claims in relation to knowledge or knowing, casting new light on issues of self-representation and empowerment in the domain of Indigenous tourism.