Abstract
This paper focuses on Australian Indigenous rock art tourism, a field that has received limited research attention. Our aim is to identify aspects which are invisible in tourism promotions. We note trends in rock art tourism and related research, survey the Australian situation, and employ a case study approach to outline the development of Indigenous rock art tourism in Kakadu National Park (KNP) and parts of the Quinkan (Laura Cooktown) region. In both regions, Aboriginal communities inherited legacies of top down decision-making and bureaucratic methods. Although the Laura people transitioned to a community-based system and a successful ranger program, they face challenges in achieving their aspirations for sustainable rock art tourism. KNP communities, subsumed into an unwieldy joint management arrangement for the World Heritage listed National Park, are faced with competing values and perspectives of the dominant government system. A centerpiece of the Balnggarrawarra tourism initiative is the ranger/tour guide system of the type which operated for some years at Laura and was introduced briefly at KNP. The model incorporates key elements of sustainable Indigenous tourism–traditional owner control and jobs, land care, conservation, cultural preservation, partnerships, and public education. Notwithstanding contemporary challenges and realities, a unifying theme is caring for rock art.
Highlights
For Australia’s Indigenous peoples, rock art retains its ancestral values as a symbol of cultural identity and continuing connections to land (George et al 1995)
As a national industry, rock art tourism suffers from inadequate information from which to draw policy
As in the case of wider studies of Indigenous tourism (Whitford and Ruhanen 2017, pp. 14–15), there is a need for reliable data and realistic market analysis in order to provide useful industry support for both existing and potential Indigenous rock art tourism providers and stakeholders
Summary
For Australia’s Indigenous peoples, rock art retains its ancestral values as a symbol of cultural identity and continuing connections to land (George et al 1995). This same rock art is promoted by Tourism Australia (Henley 2019) as a “breathtaking” component of “Aboriginal Australia”, the latter being “a key point of differentiation in today’s highly competitive international tourism market”. There is, a growing body of international research into the social contexts of rock art tourism and its relationships to communities.1 In their global study of rock art tourism, Duval et al (2018) outlined impacts of rock art tourism upon postcolonial. Fundamental to our discussion is the premise that rock art is a unique type of Indigenous cultural heritage which, beyond its mysterious value as “art”, functions very as a symbol of cultural identity and confers “rights to a place” (Duval et al 2018, p. 1035)
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