Katherine, Australia (TAN): An AUD 355,230 contract has been awarded for an Aboriginal Tourism Strategic Plan for the Northern Territory in Australia and is set to be released in the coming weeks.
The Northern Territory Tourism department said the plan aimed to turn the territory into Australia’s leader in aboriginal tourism experiences.
Jamie Brooks’ ancestors were painting rocks near the Katherine River thousands of years before the first Olympic Games were played in Greece or the first stone cut for the pyramids of Giza.
The Katherine river is located in the Northern Territory. Its headwaters are in Nitmiluk National Park. It flows through the town of Katherine, and is a major tributary of the Daly River.
Brooks still points out the paintings to tourists as he tells them about the oldest living culture in the world.
But it appears 65,000 years of history are failing to attract many visitors from the rest of Australia.
Tourism to the Northern Territory, which has the highest proportion of aboriginal people in Australia, has been falling, with Kakadu National Park having 40,000 fewer visitors in 2017 than in did in 2008, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News.
Of those domestic tourists that did come, only 15 per cent took the opportunity to experience aboriginal culture.
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Data from the Northern Territory tourism department, however, showed that international tourists, 69 per cent of whom experienced the culture, are far more interested.
Brooks has worked as a tour guide at Katherine’s Nitmiluk Tours for the past 22 years. “You tell the people that you’re with these 8,000-year-old paintings, but they’re young compared to some of the art sites that have been dated more than 30,000 years. When they hear dates like that they’re just astounded — 8,000 years is before the pyramids was made. People just don’t think about how old or how long our people have been up here,” ABC News quoted Brooks as saying.
He said it was a fact overlooked even among Australian tourists. Yet Brooks did believe word was getting out, with some tourists travelling from as far away as Iceland specifically to interact with aboriginal culture.
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However, Northern Territory Tourism pointed out that visitation to Darwin’s Aboriginal Art Fair has almost tripled in the past five years — from 4,891 in 2014 to 13,932 last year.
Garma Festival — described as “Australia’s Indigenous equivalent of the World Economic Forum” — sold out last year and drew visitors from all states except Tasmania and South Australia.
While the Northern Territory government has also pledged AUD 106 million to develop an arts trail and set aside AUD 1 million to market it.
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Tourism minister Lauren Moss was also keen to showcase the “awe-inspiring artwork and other forms of expression of the world’s oldest living culture”.
“The territory’s rich art and culture is a major draw for national and international tourists and a key economic driver,” she was quoted by ABC News as saying.
“As a government it is these world-class art and cultural offerings being produced in communities right throughout the territory that we are particularly keen to nurture and showcase.”
