Further Travels in “Becoming-Aboriginal”: The Country of Oodnadatta, the Importance of Aboriginal Tourism, and the Critical Need for Ecosophy (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 Australian Indigenous Issues, 2015
While histories of tourism and heritage management have traditionally been told as white entrepreneurs and conservationists taking the initiative, historians since the late-1990s have contested this understanding by demonstrating that Aboriginal Australians were enterprising from the outset of colonialism, engaging in tourism for their own purposes. This inquiry draws on historical archives, visual culture, diaries of anthropologists and oral testimonies to examine the contribution made by Aboriginal peoples to the development of a more responsible national travel culture. It reflects on early organic Aboriginal cultural tourism, missionary and state attempts to control such independence, and Australia's national tourism organisation's launch onto global markets of organised tourism to the Great Central Aboriginal Reserve, before focusing on significant negotiated encounters between tourism scouts and customary knowledge-keepers at major ceremonial complexes in the early-mid-twentieth century. It argues that through voluntary and coerced engagement in tourism, Aboriginal Australians have long asserted claims to land and identity while seeking to control mobility into ancestral lands, preserve culture under threat, build new futures and educate visitors in more appropriate protocols of travel.
Encounters with Aboriginal Sites in Metropolitan Sydney: A Broadening Horizon for Cultural Tourism?
Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2003
This paper reports on a subject which has historically received little attention in tourism studies, namely, the place of Indigenous heritage in a major metropolitan centre. In Australia, a dominant discourse has promoted the perspective that 'authentic' Aboriginal culture is confined to the relativelyundeveloped, under-populated, and isolated, north of the continent. Images of 'tradition oriented' Aboriginality have played a central role in the promotion of Australia as a distinctive tourist destination. The dominance of such images has served to comprehensively marginalise the Aboriginal heritage of metropolitan areas. The paper explores some of the reasons why an ahistorical 'tradition oriented' construction of Aboriginality has retained its resilience in Australia. It discusses some of the events of the past decade, which have seen new Aboriginal perspectives beginning to be incorporated into the metropolitan landscape of Sydney and considers the implications of such developments for the visitor experience and sustainable tourism.
Indigenising Tourism: A Story of an Aboriginal-led Project in the Northern Territory, Australia
Critical Tourism Studies Proceedings, 2019
Storytelling is central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures in Australia. Aboriginal stories are communicated through various mediums; they are spoken in language, performed in dance and music, and communicated through visual arts. For Aboriginal people, the stories passed from generation to generation serve many purposes, including the sharing of spiritual narratives, cultural practices and landscapes, collective histories and life histories. Aboriginal stories are unique to country and nation and, prior to 'the invasion' (Langton 1996), there were between 200 to 500 different language groups around Australia with distinctive and unique cultures, identities, and beliefs. Given that only around 50 Aboriginal languages remain in contemporary Australia, the preservation of oral histories and traditional knowledges is essential to sustaining Aboriginal cultures and teachings. Tourism is one avenue through which Aboriginal stories can be shared. In this presentation, we tell the story of why an Aboriginal community in remote Australia sought to be involved in tourism, and how they engaged academic researchers to guide the development of a locally and culturally appropriate Indigenous tourism product. The Wagiman people of Pine Creek, a remote town in the Katherine region of the Northern Territory of Australia, possess distinct representations of culture, identity, and knowledge of country. Elders of the Wagiman community asked the researchers to initiate a project that recorded their stories, for the dual purpose of preserving Wagiman knowledges for future generations of Wagiman people, and to provide Wagiman interpretation of country for both non-Aboriginal residents of Pine Creek, and domestic and international visitors to the town. To this end, the Wagiman community worked closely with the researchers to create digital recordings of country, histories, language and culture over a series of extended fieldwork visits (McGinnis, Young and Harvey, 2016). Methodologically, an overarching goal of the Wagiman research project was to engage the Indigenous method of storytelling (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2012) in order to provide authentic interpretations of local knowledge. In particular, we engaged the practice of 'yarning' with Wagiman Elders to record their stories 'on country'. Indigenising methodologies allowed for the sharing of stories in ways that can foster community identity, pride and empowerment (
Blood and Soil: nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary
Journal of Australian Studies 35 (1): 1-18, 2011
Australia is a ‘young’ nation with a population that is one of the most polyethnic in the world. Australia’s ‘older’ Anglo-Celtic identity developed, it can be argued, out of a mythological relationship to the natural environment. This older form of cultural nationalism continues to be played out and contested in the contradictory denunciation of colonial attitudes and actions, and in the naturalisation of their resulting legacy. A key theme of Australian environmental texts is the idea that temporally and spatially, nature is simultaneously a place where settler Australians may find themselves and a place where they do not belong, precisely because they cannot yet imagine themselves as indigenous. The focus of this article is the historical co-development of Australian environmentalism and nationalism (eco-nationalism). Drawing on an eclectic range of sources including: environmental history texts; texts concerning the origins of nationalism; literature addressing the ‘national character’; educational resources produced by conservation agencies; natural science journals; newspaper reports; weekly news magazines, websites and other anthropological writing on environmentalism this paper charts the historical trajectory of nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary with particular reference to the ecological debate concerning ideas about what belongs (and what does not belong) in the past and present Australian landscape.
This article explores the social and cultural production of indigeneity in a wildlife sanctuary on the Australian Gold Coast. We note that the human and animal characters that form the displays of the sanctuary work towards the assemblage of a largely consistent underlying theme. The latter reproduces commensurability between two main figures associated with Australian settler history, namely the country’s precolonial indigenous species of animals and plants and the human Aboriginal population. We argue that the theatre produced in the park’s highly sanitized visitor contact zone has wider social and political ramifications for Australian society and modern society in general. By ceremonially re-enacting the historical myth of separation between modern civilization and primordial indigeneity, through a tourist enterprise, the sanctuary produces ambivalent meanings about the relation between ‘nativeness’ in nature and society. Our analysis addresses the simultaneous emancipation of contemporary human indigeneity as a revitalized cultural value together with the social distancing of Aboriginal people as one-dimensional caricatures of primordial nature.
Tourism dilemmas for aboriginal Australians
Annals of Tourism Research, 1989
Tourism is regarded by policymakers as a leading sector for the economic development of north Australia. Several key destinations in the Northern Territory are located on Aboriginal land and the culture is used to market the region. Tourism is frequently presented as the only option available to remote Aboriginal communities to both improve their marginal economic status and to reduce their high dependence on the welfare state. This paper, based on data collected at four locations, argues that while recent ownership of important destinations gives Aboriginal interests increased economic leverage, tourism will not provide an instant panacea. Economic, political, and sociocultural reasons for tourism's limited development potential are discussed. Keywords: Australian Aborigines, tourist trade, development dilemmas, tourism policy, land rights. RCsumC: Les dilemmes du tourisme pour les Aborig&nes australiens. Le tourisme est considCrC par les politiciens comme un des secteurs de plus grand potentiel pour le dtveloppement &onomique de 1'Australie du nord. Plusieurs destinations importantes sont situkes dans le territoire Aborigkne, et la culture Aborigine est utiliste pour la promotion de cette rCgion. Le tourisme est souvent pr&ent& comme la seule possibilit5 qui soit h la disposition de ces communaut& Aborig&nes pour amCliorer leur situation &onomique marginale et pour rkduire leur dkpendance de l'Etat-providence. Le p&sent article, bask sur des donnkes obtenues dans quatre localit&, soutient que le tourisme ne reprksente pas un rem&de instantant, bien que les droits de possession de destinations importantes r&emment reconnus donnent des possibilit& &onomiques aux interets des Aborigknes. Les raisons &zonomiques, politiques et socio-culturelles pour le potentiel limit6 du tourisme sont discutCes. Mots cl&: Aborig&nes australiens, affaires de tourisme, dillemmes de d&eloppement, politique de tourisme, titres de possession de terrain.