Intercultural Communication Studies XVII: 1 2008 Song Indigenous Tourism – A Passport to Development for Indigenous Australians?

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Indigenous tourism in Australia. There has been enthusiastic encouragement of expansion of Indigenous tourism and a push in further Indigenous participation in the tourism industry is rooted on the belief that tourism holds the potential for bringing economic gains for local Indigenous people. This belief has been largely based on mere quantification of economic indicators such as tourist numbers, income increases and employment rates in Indigenous communities, with a lack of qualitative analysis of potential challenges and problems beyond figure increases. Against such a background, this thesis provides a qualitative analysis of the impacts of Indigenous tourism in Australia from the perspective of Indigenous Australians. While acknowledging the economic gains that Indigenous Australians have obtained from tourism, it challenges the popular over-optimistic perception by exploring the challenges and problems behind economic increases and identifying and analyzing some of the problems from the perspective of Indigenous communities that arise from association with tourism expansion