Pac Books
An Inside Look At Australian Travel
What Do Tourists Do When They Visit The Land Of Oz?
When this review is published, what some sections of the media were referring to as ‘the greatest event in Australia’s history’ will have come and gone. What’s the event you might ask? The ‘discovery’ of the continent? Its settlement by Europeans? The enfranchisement of its aboriginal population?
None of the above. The greatest event — so-called by its publicists — was the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. After more than 200 years of recorded history, and millennia of indigenous tradition, the greatest event has turned out to be a sporting contest, attended by drug controversies, political disputes and charges of incompetence and maladministration.
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What has all this to do with the subject of this review? Well, among the many claims made for the greatest event was that it would focus world attention on Australia, bringing it to the notice of everyone within range of a TV set, and the interest generated by the Games would become interest in the country as a whole, fostering an irresistible urge to visit the place. Consequently, visitor numbers would rise spectacularly, from the current four million annually to twice that within 10 years. The greatest event was, perhaps more than anything, an elaborate promo for tourism.
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This is not one of the predictions made by author John Richardson. In fact, he’s wary of making them, at least in hard statistical terms, though he does predict "with certainty that more and more people will travel." This somewhat uncontroversial view of the future of what is supposedly the world’s largest industry is characteristic of the book as a whole.
The author’s background is in journalism and tourism consultancy, and he was also assistant general manager of the Australian Tourist Commission, the body that promotes Australian tourism internationally. This is relevant, since he writes from a perspective quite different from that of a professional historian — that of a publicist for tourism.
Richardson traces the development of tourism in Australia from fairly remote beginnings. It starts with references to Sinbad the Sailor, Polynesian and Norwegian navigators, ancient Greek travel to Olympia (the Games again) and Marco Polo. This at least is something of a corrective to the usual view of tourism held by people within the industry, that it began the day before yesterday.
The rest takes on a more precisely Australian focus. This demonstrates not only the enormous amount of source material from more recent decades that needs to be assimilated, but also the authority’s greater familiarity with the contemporary period of mass tourism.
The book essentially deals with domestic and in-bound tourism: what Australians and others did in Australia. Not too much mention is paid to where Australians go when they travel elsewhere. One would think it hardly possible to write on Australian travel without mentioning two places of almost religious significance to Australian tourists — Bali and Fiji — but there you go.
Even so, there is much here to interest the student of tourism, to whom — rather than the general reader — the book seems directed. Practically everything that can be brought to ear on the subject gets mention: from colonial inns to trailer parks to multinational hotels; from horse-drawn carriages to cruise ships to wide-bodied jets; from beaches to eating to indigenous dance groups; and the relentless growth of institutionalized travel, from the more of less predictable movement of travelers to government involvement to the proliferation of travel wholesalers and agencies.
Richardson’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject leads him into the problem faced by many historians, professional and amateur: having acquired all this detail, what does one do with it? In this case, the peripheral stuff — rather than being edited out altogether — is put into footnotes, some of which make more interesting reading than the main text.
The value of the book likes in its detail, and the fact that it is the first of its kind: no one else has tackled the Australian tourism history so comprehensively. One wished occasionally, however, that the writing was at least as lively as the industry it seeks to represent.
