Making a modern marketing machine: the New South Wales Government Tourist Bureau, 1905–1914

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the promotion of the Blue Mountains by the NSW Tourist Bureau from the organisation's formation in 1905 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914. It draws on archival material and promotional ephemera to detail how the Blue Mountains became an important destination in the promotion of New South Wales overseas and within Australia. Emerging beliefs about science contributed to the Bureau's construction of the Blue Mountains as a sublime landscape, as did emerging technologies in printing and photographic manipulation. As the Bureau constructed ideas about Australian nature and identity, they perpetuated the myth that Indigenous people were a ‘dwindling' race. Exploring the extent to which Hunter’s Bureau crafted an Anglo-Saxon vision of the Blue Mountains that advanced a settler claim to the land, whilst simultaneously expunging the claims of Indigenous people, is a central theme of this article.