Pioneers, progress and the sublime: Blue Mountains tourist promotion, 1885–1894

Abstract

This paper explores the representation of the Blue Mountains portrayed in a handful of tourist guidebooks (published 1885–1894) for the region. It argues that tourist promoters continued to depict the area in terms of the romantic sublime, not only because they believed tourists sought a transcendental experience, but also to accentuate the heroic achievements of the colonial explorers who had first attempted to cross the mountains. Finally, it suggests that tourist literature was an important medium for the dissemination of myths relating to a collective search for a settler identity, and therefore presented a one-dimensional vision of the past that did not properly account for the problematic history of settler-Indigenous relations.