ABSTRACT
In 1982-1983 Australians spent 221 500 000 nights in beds other than their own. And those were only the ones recorded by the Tourism Commission. The desire to travel is not, of course, unique to Australians, though Australians do appear to experience it particularly strongly. It is common to the industrialised world, and rising levels of affluence are almost invariably reflected in increased tourism. The nation, the region, the neighbourhood seem increasingly inadequate as sites of social understanding or of social identity. Ayers Rock is a convenient symbol for this search: it stands like the Holy Grail of the Australian tourist: it is everything that the white suburbs are not, yet remains accessible to those suburbs. The ugly Australian is created by a response to the specific difference of the new context overseas, which mobilises certain aspects of nationalist ideology to assert what becomes a lack of respect for those differences.
