Background to the Case Study

Tasmania – originally called Van Diemen’s Land – is Australia’s smallest state, a temperate island about the size of Ireland 240 kilometres off the continent’s south-eastern corner separated from the mainland by a rough stretch of ocean called Bass Strait. It is reasonably decentralised but most of its 500,000 residents live in one of two population centres – the capital, Hobart, on the Derwent River close to the south-eastern coast, and Launceston, on the Tamar River close to the mid-north coast. The island’s Aboriginal inhabitants arrived between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago. In the 1800s they suffered terribly at the hands of the British, who established Hobart – Australia’s second-oldest city – as a penal settlement in 1804. Despite massacres, introduced disease and forced removal of children from their parents, a small Aboriginal community of mixed heritage survived and today actively promotes its culture and political interests. Nevertheless, a myth of total Tasmanian Aboriginal annihilation – originating partly out of recognition of white Tasmanian culpability and expressions of remorse – has

Although Tasmania’s dramatic and beautiful landscape has attracted tourists from mainland Australia since the 19th century, the island has struggled economically, and traditionally relied on agriculture and extractive industries such as mining and forestry for export income. Its population remains on average poor and undereducated by Australian standards, despite a thriving arts sector and notable achievements in the physical sciences. In the mid-20th century extensive dam construction created cheap hydro-electric power that attracted heavy industries. However, in the early 1970s proposals by the state

government’s Hydro Electric Commission (HEC) to inundate a unique body of water in the remote and mountainous south-west of the island called Lake Pedder led to the formation of the first Green political party in the world. Environmental activism did not save Lake Pedder, but a decade later an intense and protracted campaign by the Wilderness Society to protect the wild Franklin River from damming, led by a medical doctor named Bob Brown, brought widespread media attention to the vast tracts of wilderness through which the river flowed. During a blockade of associated dam works on the state’s west coast in the summer of 1982-83, Brown and 1271 others were jailed for their activism (Lester and Hutchins 2009). Also during the campaign, the river and huge tracts of surrounding national park were inscribed on the World Heritage List. When, in 1983, this listing provided the basis for a High Court judgement preventing the HEC from proceeding with the dam, the state government turned its attention from fighting the environment movement to helping the tourism industry take advantage of the publicity the campaign had generated for the island’s

wilderness (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2006; Evers Consulting Services Pty Ltd, 1984; Tideman 1988). Ecotourism was encouraged, and a small number

of regulated commercial tourism operations were permitted in national parks for the first time. In 1989 Brown – by then a state parliamentarian heading the Tasmanian Greens – successfully advocated doubling the size of the World Heritage Area. However, even as wilderness and the island’s other natural attractions became the cornerstone of the state’s tourism brand (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2006), fierce battles over the fate of its forests began commanding media attention locally, nationally and internationally. Those battles continued throughout the first decade of the 2000s, occasionally drawing the attention of international travel journalists. Until recently, Brown was the most prominent voice in Australian environmental politics, sitting in state parliament until 1993 and leading the Australian Greens as a senator in the Australian parliament from 1996 until 2012.

Meanwhile, in the 1990s a visiting journalist program (VJP) conducted by the Tasmanian government’s tourism office brought national and

international travel journalists to the state to experience its natural attractions first hand and in 1995 Tasmania adopted the logo “Discover your natural state” for all its interstate marketing (Tasmanian Department of Tourism, Sport and Recreation, 1995, p. 8). A focus on place branding that began in Tourism Tasmania was formalised in 1999 with the establishment of a joint government and industry Brand Tasmania Council with its own VJP targeting news

journalists, including foreign correspondents. Among the industries that were part of Brand Tasmania were tourism and forestry. The government business enterprise Forestry Tasmania manages just under 40 per cent of the state’s

“market Tasmania as a desirable tourist destination”. For much of the first decade of the 2000s the “essence” of Tasmania’s place brand was “Tasmania is natural” (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2006). Tourism Tasmania and Brand Tasmania had a range of slogans and logos between 2000 and 2010. Nevertheless, late into the decade “Australia’s natural state” was still appearing on websites and brochures Tourism Tasmania produced for its overseas markets (Department of Premier and Cabinet 2006; see, for example, Tourism Tasmania 2008, and Tourism Tasmania North America 2008) and on many vehicle number plates on Tasmanian roads. Even following the launch of a new overarching place brand in 2009, nature and purity remained crucial identifying features of Tasmania’s marketing and public relations communications, and “natural

beauty” continued to be listed first among its “brand attributes” (Brand Tasmania 2009b).

Tourism Tasmania’s VJP has been a powerful tool by which the

government has sought to gain media endorsement for framing of Tasmania as “natural”. In the 1990s wilderness and/or nature were repeatedly identified as the state’s biggest tourism asset (see Chapter 6), and further interstate research conducted in 2010 found “the greatest trigger to influence intention to visit Tasmania was [still] Wilderness” (Tourism Tasmania 2011a, p. 6). Although international visitors make up only around 15 per cent of Tasmania’s total visitation, in the first decade of the 2000s Tourism Tasmania was funded by the government to maintain representatives in Germany, England, the United States, Canada, Japan and Singapore. Successive Tourism Tasmania annual reports record that the VJP has enjoyed considerable success over many years in

attracting travel journalists writing for prestigious travel publications in Britain, the United States and many other countries.

Throughout the period of my case study, Tasmania was governed by the Australian Labor Party. The other major party in the state was the Liberal Party. Both had been in favour of the Franklin dam proposal in the 1980s and were supporters of the forestry industry during the case study. Following an election in March 2010 the Labor Party retained power only with the support of the Greens, who gained Cabinet positions for the first time in Australian history. Although Tasmanian tourism thrived for much of the case study period, the global financial crisis and a high Australian dollar have caused it to struggle in recent years. Meanwhile, following a collapse in demand from Tasmania’s biggest woodchip market, Japan, forestry has become dramatically less competitive than it was in its heyday, and since the 2010 election the industry has been engaged in government sponsored talks with the environment

movement aimed at resolving the state’s “forest wars”. In September 2012, the state’s biggest timber company, Gunns Ltd, which had been operating in

Tasmania since 1875, and since 2005 had been planning to build a controversial 1.9 AUD pulp mill in the wine-tourism region of the Tamar Valley, went into receivership, never having secured the “social licence” it belatedly came to recognise was necessary to attract the financial backing it required to proceed (see Neales 2010).

During the case study, Tasmania’s most heavily marketed tourism attributes in addition to its natural environment were cultural heritage, food and

had seen homosexuality decriminalised in the state after a nine-year local, national and international campaign involving the United Nations and Amnesty International. In late 2008, Tasmania’s natural attraction of the Bay of Fires was named one of international guide-book company Lonely Planet’s top

destinations in the world for 2009. In 2012, the same company made Hobart the only Australian place in its list of the Top 10 cities in the world, in large part as a result of the popularity of a multimillion-dollar private gallery, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), that had opened in 2011 and had soon become the state’s most popular individual tourism attraction, gaining valuable attention from travel journalists in Australia and overseas, and increasing the emphasis on culture in Tasmania’s branding.