Abstract
Aboriginal tourism entrepreneurs operating in remote regions of Australia draw on their 60,000 years of heritage to offer unique and distinct cultural experiences to domestic and international tourists. Living and operating in remote climates presents challenges to achieving successful and sustainable enterprises, including extreme weather, substandard infrastructure, distance from policy makers, distance from markets and the commercialisation of culture, which is customarily owned by and for use by traditional custodians, to produce and deliver a market-ready tourism product. However, many remote Aboriginal tourism entrepreneurs nevertheless achieve success and sustainability. This paper builds on the work of Foley to identify the characteristics of successful remote Aboriginal tourism enterprises and Aboriginal entrepreneurs in remote areas and the resourceful and creative business practices used by remote Aboriginal entrepreneurs to overcome barriers to success and finds that ongoing connections to community and culture are a key factor in that success. It also draws on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals to identify how the characteristics of remote tourism entrepreneurs and enterprises promote or inhibit the achievement of sustainability and suggests that they offer a framework for effective support of remote Aboriginal entrepreneurs. It concludes by noting that the industry would benefit from further investigation of the contributions made to sustainability by remote Aboriginal tourism enterprises and their stakeholders.
Highlights
The Indigenous Peoples of Australia are the oldest continuing living culture on earth [1], and diverse cultural groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have cared for the land known as Australia for more than 60,000 years
The data on entrepreneurial characteristics and actions found in this paper were ordered by their relationship to the entrepreneurial traits discussed by Foley in his work on urban Aboriginal entrepreneurs—as previously mentioned, these traits are Positivity, Face, Chaos, Education and Industry Experience, Networking, Immediate Family and Discrimination [10]—and are presented by theme below
This paper identifies key characteristics of successful remote Aboriginal tourism entrepreneurs operating on Country in Australia and highlights the importance of connection to community and culture in creating sustainable enterprises in this area
Summary
The Indigenous Peoples of Australia are the oldest continuing living culture on earth [1], and diverse cultural groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have cared for the land known as Australia for more than 60,000 years. Their caring for and inhabiting the land for this length of time, which includes practice of production [2] and international trade [3], is evidence of the longest form of sustainability practice in human history, a practice that has continued to the present day, including in the tourism industry, making Aboriginal Australian tourism enterprises an example of sustainable tourism. Increased focus on the mechanisms and goals of sustainable tourism has combined with academic discourse to link sustainable tourism with other forms of tourism
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