Postcards and Frontier Mythologies: Sustaining Views of the Kimberley as Timeless

Abstract

In this paper we examine the role of postcards in disseminating and circulating Australian frontier myths. Cultural geographers have generally overlooked this mode of tourist communication. Yet, the postcard is an example par excellence of both a genre of popular art and an ephemeral cultural artefact. The ritual practice of selecting, writing, and sending a postcard is explored within the themes of souvenir, testimony, and anticipation. A report is provided of methods designed to reveal how individual tourists interpret these postcards as semiotic texts. Results suggest that postcards seem to perpetuate, almost unchallenged, experiences associated with Australian frontier mythologies. The Kimberley is experienced as a remnant of a former pristine environment and a place uninhabited or, at best, inhabited by ‘primitive’ people. This version of the Kimberley relies upon many of the categorical binaries between society and nature; human and animal; civilised and wild. The silences and priorities created by such textual imagery in the public geographical imaginary are argued to be far from trivial in a place subject to native land claims and proposed extensions to irrigation schemes.