Ninth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Drawing on scholarly literature on travel and transformation and my own empirical research, this paper explores whether visitors to places of recognised Aboriginal cultural heritage can experience processes of change, or what Bawaka Country et al. (2015, 270) call “an ontology of co-becoming”, when they travel to Australian protected areas, recognising the agentic nature of Country itself in these hypothetical transformations. For some visitors this can involve developing a (self-identified) connection with Country and a deeper self-perceived understanding of Aboriginal cultural heritage. My ethnographic research with visitors revealed that this enhanced understanding of Aboriginal cultural heritage most frequently occurred in cultural tours developed and led by Aboriginal peoples, particularly longer-term immersive experiences. However, this is not to say that visitor transformations are inevitable or even straightforward, as some visitors’ cultural tourism experiences simply reinforced pre-existing stereotypes of authentic and inauthentic Aboriginalities that they brought with them. Settler-colonial discourses about Aboriginality thus represent very real barriers to tourist transformations, discourses which are to some extent reinforced by the tourism industry and some Indigenous cultural tour providers themselves.