Making a modern marketing machine: the New South Wales Government Tourist Bureau, 1905–1914

ABSTRACT

This article explores the promotion of the Blue Mountains by the NSW Tourist Bureau from the organisation's formation in 1905 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914. It draws on archival material and promotional ephemera to detail how the Blue Mountains became an important destination in the promotion of New South Wales overseas and within Australia. Emerging beliefs about science contributed to the Bureau's construction of the Blue Mountains as a sublime landscape, as did emerging technologies in printing and photographic manipulation. As the Bureau constructed ideas about Australian nature and identity, they perpetuated the myth that Indigenous people were a ‘dwindling' race. Exploring the extent to which Hunter’s Bureau crafted an Anglo-Saxon vision of the Blue Mountains that advanced a settler claim to the land, whilst simultaneously expunging the claims of Indigenous people, is a central theme of this article.

Acknowledgements

Andrea Gaynor and Nadia Rhook helped shape this article in its earliest stages as a chapter in my master’s thesis, written in 2020. Their contribution is not forgotten. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers, Journal of Tourism History editors, and a kind audience at the Australian History Association 2023 conference, who all provided sharp and supportive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘The Hotel Australia’, Daily Telegraph, December 13, 1890, 10.

2 ‘Mr. Percy Hunter: Valedictory Gathering’, Sydney Morning Herald, February 22, 1908, 12.

3 ‘Who’s who: Percy Hunter’, Sunday Times, May 31, 1925, 6.

4 Sydney Morning Herald, February 22, 1908, 12.

5 Percy Hunter, Daily Examiner, June 14, 1916, 2.

6 ‘What’s Become of Percy Hunter’, Smith’s Weekly, November 7, 1936, 13.

7 For histories that deal wholly or partially with tourist promotion in the Blue Mountains see: Julia Horne, The Pursuit of Wonder: How Australia’s Landscape was Explored, Nature Discovered and Tourism Unleashed, (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2005); Mark Tredinnick, The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir (University of Queensland Press, 2009); John Low, Pictorial Memories: Blue Mountains (Crows Nest: Atrand, 1991); and John G. Mosley, Battle for the Bush: The Blue Mountains, the Australian Alps and the Origins of the Wilderness Movement (Sydney: 1999). See also: Melissa Harper, ‘Battle for the Bush: Bushwalking vs Hiking Between the Wars’, Journal of Australian Studies 19 (1995); Colin Michael Hall, Wasteland to World Heritage: Preserving Australia’s Wilderness (Melbourne University Press, 1992); Spearritt and Davidson, Holiday Business; Melissa Harper, ‘Locating Histories of Bush-Based Recreation in Australia’, History Compass 15 (2017).

8 Percy Hunter, Notes for a Lecture on New South Wales, New South Wales Immigration and Tourist Bureau, (Sydney, 1909), 7–9.

9 Josh Woodward, ‘Pioneers, Progress and the Sublime: Blue Mountains Tourist Promotion, 1885–1894’, History Australia 20, no. 1 (2023): 65.

10 On the effect of the sublime and the rise of nature tourism in America see William Cronon’s influential article, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996).

11 Paula Johanna Saari, ‘Marketing Nature: The Canadian National Parks Branch and Constructing the Portrayal of National Parks in Promotional Brochures, 1936–1970’, Environment and History 21 (2015): 401–2. Rudy Koshar, ‘“What Ought to Be Seen”: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 323–40. For an example of work that deals with the contributions made by journalists to advertising see: Anne-Marie Millim, ‘Signifying the Small Nation: The Role of Tourists in Luxembourgish National Identity, 1913–1940’, Journal of Tourism History 8, no. 1 (2016): 19–46. For work that explores how private enterprises such as hotels conducted advertising in the Blue Mountains (and in other Australian spa resorts) around the turn of the twentieth century see: Richard White, ‘From the Majestic to the Mundane: Democracy, Sophistication and History Among the Mineral Spas of Australia’, Journal of Tourism History 4, no. 1 (2012): 85–108.

12 For works that privilege intellectual movements in the construction of Australian ‘nature’ see: Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981). On the enduring influence of Inventing Australia see Jessica Carniel, ‘Richard White’s Inventing Australia: Revisiting the Invention Forty Years Later’, History Australia 18 (2021); Jarrod Hore, ‘Capturing Terra Incognita: Alfred Burton, “Maoridom” and Wilderness in the King Country’, Australian Historical Studies 50 (2019); Melissa Miles, ‘Light Nation, and Place in Australian Photography’, Photography and Culture 6 (2013); Rod Giblett, ‘Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 21 (2007).

13 Horne, The Pursuit of Wonder, 225.

14 Hunter, Notes for a Lecture on NSW, 8.

15 Woodward, ‘Pioneers, Progress and the Sublime’, 64–80.

16 For histories that explain the significance of the Blue Mountains to Indigenous people see: Martin Thomas, The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains (Melbourne: University Press, 2003); Jim Smith, ‘Aboriginal Voters in the Burragorang Valley, NSW, 1869–1953’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 98 (2012) and ‘Illuminating the Cave Names of Gundungurra Country’, in Indigenous and Minority Placenames: Australian and International Perspectives, ed. Ian Clark, Luise Hercus and Laura Kostanski (Canberra: ANU Press, 2014), 83–96; and Shino Konishi, ‘Bennelong and Gogy: Strategic Brokers in Colonial New South Wales’, in Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory, ed. Tiffany Shellam, Maria Nugent, Shino Konishi and Allison Cadzow (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016), 34. See also: Chris Cunningham, Blue Mountains Rediscovered, Beyond the Myths of Early Australian Exploration (Kangaroo Press, 1996). For works that explore the connection between the displacement of Indigenous people and nature-based tourism, see: Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Carving Wilderness: Queensland’s National Parks and the Unsettling of Emptied Lands, 1890–1910’, in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspective on Race, Place and Identity, ed. Tracey Banivanua Mar, Penelope Edmonds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 73–94; Marcia Langton, ‘What Do we Mean by Wilderness? Wilderness and Terra Nullius in Australian Art’, The Sydney Papers 8, no. 1 (1996): 10–31.

17 For works that explore the relationship between nature or ‘the bush’ and the settler nation see J.B. Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, in Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for Identity, ed. John Carroll (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992); Richard Waterhouse, ‘Australian Legends: Representations of the Bush, 1813–1913’, Australian Historical Studies 31 (2000); Libby Robin, ‘Nationalising Nature: Wattle Days in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 73 (2002): 13–26.

18 Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt, Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2000), 67–70.

19 Davidson and Spearritt, Holiday Business.

20 ‘Our Neglected Tourist Trade’, Daily Telegraph, October 5, 1905, 4.

21 Tourism Tasmania, Tourism Snapshot: Year Ending September 2022, https://www.tourismtasmania.com.au/research/visitors/ (accessed January 17, 2023).

22 Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston, Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia (London: Anthem Press, 2016).

23 ‘Mr. Percy Hunter: Valedictory Gathering’, Sydney Morning Herald, February 22, 1908, 12.

24 Clara Zawawi, ‘A History of Public Relations in Australia’, in Theory and Practice, ed. Jane Johnston and Clara Zawawi (Allen & Unwin, 2000), second edition 2004, 25.

25 NSWA: NRS 14087, [5/3499B] Immigration and Tourist Bureau: Report for the Period Ended 31st December, 1909 (1910), 5.

26 Ibid., 8.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 Australian Star, November 30, 1907, 2.

31 Immigration and Tourist Bureau: Report for the Period Ended 31st December 1909 (1910), 12. NSWA: NRS 14087, [5/3499B].

32 Ibid., 5.

33 ‘Central Tourists Bureau’, Argus, May 19, 1908, 9.

34 Immigration and Tourist Bureau, Report … for the year ended 30th June, 1914. NSWA: NRS 14087, [5/3499B].

35 See: Richard West Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); and David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks (Seatlle: University of Washington Press, 2010).

36 Immigration and Tourist Bureau, Report for Year Ended 30th June 1913. NSWA: NRS 14087, [5/3499B].

37 NSW State Archives: Papers relating to Annual reports of the Immigration and Tourist Bureau, 1910–1919. NSWA: NRS 14087 [5/3499B] Report on the operation of the Immigration and Tourist Bureau for the year ended 30th June, 1914.

38 Immigration and Tourist Bureau: Minute forwarding report on the operations of the, for 1910 (1911), 12. NSWA: NRS 14087, [5/3499B].

39 Ibid., 12.

40 Daily Telegraph, November 14, 1896, 9.

41 ‘Color Photography’, The Sun, August 13, 1910, 8.

42 ‘Color Photography’, Evening News, August 15, 1910, 8.

43 Immigration and Tourist Bureau, Report for Year Ended 30th June 1913, 8–9.

44 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 104.

45 Horne, The Pursuit of Wonder, 225; Cronon, Trouble with Wilderness, 12.

46 New South Wales Government Tourist Bureau, The Blue Mountains (Challis House, Sydney: circa 1910), 5; See also: NSW A Holiday Ground for the Tourist, 1910, 49.

47 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, The Blue Mountains, 11.

48 Ibid., 11; NSW Government Tourist Bureau, NSW A Holiday Ground for the Tourist, 38.

49 Ibid., 13.

50 For works that explore how aesthetic notions of romanticism were applied to Australian landscapes, see: Ella Barnett, ‘Flirting With the Picturesque: The Effects of Romanticism and Romance’, in Playing in the Bush, 41–72. See also: Jarrod Hore, ‘“Beautiful Tasmania”: Environmental Consciousness in John Watt Beattie’s Romantic Wilderness’, History Australia 14, no. 1 (2017): 48–66.

51 The desire of settlers to connect with nature was not limited to Australia. See: Thomas Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

52 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, New South Wales: A Holiday Ground for the Tourist, 50.

53 Thomas Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139–64.

54 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, The Blue Mountains, 11; and, NSW A Holiday Ground for the Tourist, 39.

55 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, The Blue Mountains, 9.

56 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, A Holiday Ground for the Tourist, 1910, 39.

57 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, The Blue Mountains, 11.

58 Ibid., 15.

59 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, NSW A Holiday Ground for the Tourist, 1910, 53.

60 Hunter, Notes for a Lecture on NSW, 8.

61 See Richard Waterhouse, ‘Australian Legends: Representations of the Bush, 1813–1913’, Australian Historical Studies 31, no. 115 (2000): 201–21; Sarah Mirams, ‘For their Moral Health’ James Barret, Urban Progressive Ideas and National Park Reservation in Victoria’, Australian Historical Studies 33, 249–66; Harper and White, ‘How National Were the First National Parks?’, 54.

62 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868), 64.

63 Rod Giblett, ‘Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 337; Helen Ennis, ‘Postwar Australian Landscape photography: Olive Cotton and Max Dupain’, History of Photography 23 (1999): 136.

64 Jack Cato, The Story of the Camera in Australia (Melbourne: Institute of Australian Photography, 1977), 152.

65 Rod Giblett, ‘Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 337; Helen Ennis, ‘Postwar Australian Landscape photography: Olive Cotton and Max Dupain’, History of Photography 23 (1999): 136.

66 Sue Smith, Queensland Pictorialist Photography (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1984), 10.

67 Cited in Ibid., 10; See also: Giblett, ‘Shooting the Sunburnt Country’, 339.

68 Melissa Miles, ‘Out of the Shadows: On Light, Darkness and Race in Australian Photography’, History of Photography 345.

69 Hunter, Notes for a Lecture on New South Wales, 4.

70 Ibid., 3–5.

71 Ibid., 2.

72 Ibid., 7.

73 Fiona Paisley, ‘Federalising the Aborigines: Constitutional Land Reform in the Late 1920s’, Australian Historical Studies 111 (1998): 261.

74 Hunter, Notes for a Lecture on New South Wales, 4.

75 Jim Smith, ‘New Insights into Aboriginal Place Naming’, in Aboriginal Placenames: Naming and re-naming the Australian Lanscape, ed. Harold Koch and Luise Hercus (ANU Press, 2009), 92.

76 Jim Smith, ‘Aboriginal Voters in the Burragorang Valley, NSW, 1869–1953’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 98 (2012): 170–171.

77 Victoria Haskins, ‘“Could You See to the Return of My Daughter”: Fathers and Daughters under the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board Child Removal Policy”, Australian Historical Studies 34 (2003): 111.

78 Heather Goodall, ‘A History of Aboriginal Communities in New South Wales, 1909–1939’ (PhD, University of Sydney, 1982), 78, http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1601; For a detailed account of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board’s role in the dispersal and dispossession of Indigenous communities see Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney University Press, 1996), 104–15.

79 Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Carving Wilderness’, 86.

80 NSW Government Tourist Bureau, Achievements of the Government Tourist Bureau (Sydney: 1919), 2. NSWA: NRS 14087, [5/3499B].

81 Woodward, ‘Pioneers, Progress and the Sublime’, 64–80.

82 ‘Mr. Percy Hunter’s Appointment’, Farmer’s Advocate, February 1, 1923, 5.

83 Josh Woodward, ‘Selling Mount Buffalo National Park: Victorian Railways, Harold Clapp and the Blueprint for National Park Promotion in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 45, no. 3 (2021): 371–84.

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Josh Woodward

Josh Woodward is an Australian environmental historian whose research explores representations of nature in tourist advertising. He has published articles on the tourist promotion of Australian national parks and their emergence as important sites of the settler-nation. He completed his Master's at the University of Western Australia, where he was the 2019 recipient of the Frank Broeze scholarship for academic achievement. Josh will complete his PhD on twentieth century Australian tourist advertising at the Australian National University in 2025.