'A continent that Australians must be proud to advertise' Nature, Tourism and the National Image, 1905-1988

Abstract

Since Federation, national tourism advertising campaigns have carried messages about Australia, its scenery and its people around the world. Tourism advertising has also served an important function as a bellwether for how the world perceives the nation from the outside. A unifying condition of twentieth-century Australian tourism advertising programs is their dependence on environmental imagery. Australia's crystal-clear waters, abundant sunshine, temperate climates, and unique and exotic flora and fauna are all recurrent and familiar tropes in the country's marketable image. Nevertheless, historians have paid scant attention to how advertising freighted Australia's natural and environmental symbols with the anxieties, values and attitudes of the wider settler nation. The question of how tourist advertising enrolled Australia's environmental and natural imagery in twentieth-century nation building, and how advertising images shaped and responded to contemporary discourses about the nation and identity of its people, remains unanswered. In undertaking a close analysis of the archives and sales materials of the nation's top national tourism promoters, this thesis fills a heretofore unexamined gap in Australian environmental and tourism history.

I argue throughout that an environmental dimension lays at the heart of the Australian tourist experience. Environmental imagery persisted across the century, even as values, tastes and opinions changed. Each chapter offers a case study of the nation's overall image, as well as of Sydney, Canberra, and the Great Barrier Reef. In each campaign, organisations and their administrators, particularly the Australian National Travel Association and the Australian Tourist Commission, recruited nature, whether of a specific destination or the continent as a whole, to enliven the wider image of the nation. Each organisation has left historians a vast record of sales ephemera (posters, brochures and television campaigns) as well as the internal correspondence, reports and memoranda that explain the decision-making driving advertising creation. But these organisations' commodification of nature went beyond the obvious commercial imperative to grow tourism as a profitable industry. Instead, the story of how promoters positioned Australian symbols of nature, scenic landscapes, and environmental attributes, like the conduciveness of the temperate climate for good health and mortality, belies a deeper twentieth-century narrative about how the nation imagined itself, and how it sought to be understood from the outside.

A careful analysis of these sources reveals a higher quality to tourism advertising than just driving up the bottom line of dollars and migrants for a productive economy. It is in drawing out what precisely this higher quality was that the original contribution of this work lies. The circulation of national advertising materials, in massive numbers at home and overseas, contains real insights into an intergenerational conversation between promoters and their likely audience about the nation and what its people aspired for it. Partly an effort to foster civic pride through the celebration of modernity and progress, and partly an effort to remediate colonial and racial anxieties and project a distinctive Australian identity, tourism advertising sought to legitimise the nation in the eyes of the world, but more importantly, in the eyes of its own people. Current affairs and shifting cultural appetites and opinions affected the psychology of national tourist advertising. But as this thesis systematically demonstrates, the proclivity of advertisers to appeal to a human desire to spend time in nature remained ever constant.