J.B. Kirkpatrick

Professor, School of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Tasmania

A substantial group of people, from fields as disparate as the fine arts, park planning and ecology, statistically became tourists for a few days in the iconic Cradle Mountain area, while still fully engaged in their vocations. Their discourse focused on the connections between protean ‘nature', sometimes known as ‘the environment', the diversity of media and the recreational and economic activities we label ‘tourism'.

Media range from fine arts, that give pleasure and inspiration to the few of refined taste, to the coarsest forms of deceptive advertising masquerading as consumer advice, advice designed for the large portion of the population with a mental age of twelve. Somewhere in the middle of the media cats cradle there lies the reporting and dissection of issues. Portrayal in media can have both positive and negative effects on environment. The art of nature and the environment can permeate into environmental debate, allowing feeling to overwhelm dry economic factoids, sometimes even resulting in sacrifices of the interests of ‘The Economy' in favour of beauty, interest, history, quietness, solitude and natural majesty. However, ‘The Economy' is resilient. If it cannot feed off sawlogs and turbines, it can at least feed off, and reinforce, the image of natural and cultural heritage, while destroying the reality when necessary. Need to build a dam in a national park for an ecotourism resort. That's ok. Need to blast a road through a blackwood swamp in a national park so that you can build another ecotourism resort on an historic site. Cool. Need to replace local cultural activity at an iconic historical site with apartments or another café. Great. At least it will look like heritage in the pictures in the colour supplements and on tv, attracting all those environmentally conscious well off people to pay hundreds of dollars a day for the experience of not having papers, tvs or phones, or a view of other tourists sipping their lattes outside old buildings.

Place piracy, scenery mining and the politics and distortions of media depiction are visited in several of the papers in this volume. However, as befits the product of a largely academic gathering, a major theme is iconoclasm. The main focus is on wilderness and wilderness photography, particularly that of Peter Dombrovskis, who, apparently very dualistically, left people out of most of his pictures. In various papers wilderness is accused of being inaccurately portrayed as benign, as being equivalent to the hunting grounds of the aristocracy, as being a wish-fulfilment fantasy. From my unimaginitive perspective it seemed simply a word that described land without human inhabitants of fixed abode and not much different in its appearance than before the European diaspora. Little did I suspect the palimpsest of suspect meanings a simple word concealed.

In a further series of fascinating papers in this collection, various authors explore particular interactions between media, environment and tourism using widely varying approaches, from the theoretical to the phenomenological, from the liminal spaces between the Gold Coast and its hinterland to the interpretation interface.

Overall, papers with a wide variety of perspectives, insights and ideologies related to the spaces and flows between nature, tourism and the media create a great interdisciplinary outcome from a great interdisciplinary conference. Prepare to be stimulated.