ABSTRACT
When travel journalist Stephanie Pearson (2014) wrote inOutsidemagazine that Tasmania is something of a petri dish for the rest of the world, she probably had in mind its small size, clearly demarcated island geography, well-documented history of intense and protracted environmental conflict, and development or refinement of campaigning tactics that have become mainstays of environmental activism around the world. In combination with its very early adoption of placebranding, they are the same factors that make Tasmanian tourism an ideal case study for investigating the political operation of discursive strategies in jurisdictional reputation management during times of environmental conflict. A history of the evolution of Tasmania’s place-branded discourse of accessible nature will facilitate a more nuanced analysis of the production of travel journalism in the rest of the case study. Tasmania’s “natural” branding can be traced back to tourism development and
destination marketing by a state tourism office that attempted to capitalise on national and international publicity attracted to the island’s wilderness by a campaign to save the wild Franklin River. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state’s attempts to harness wilderness as a brand asset found its government struggling to subordinate expectations of preservation to its own desire for something closer to ideas of conservation as “the wise and efficient use of natural resources” (Merchant 2005 in Cox 2013, p. 44). This eventually led to a lexical shift in government discourse from “wilderness” to “nature”. By representing tourism in World Heritage Areas and national parks as promoting environmental protection, then subsuming wilderness in a discourse of accessible nature that also embraced state forests using a frame I call “compatible sectors”, the government constructed wilderness, ecotourism and recreational forestry as complementary people-centred projects. Such manoeuvring cast the government’s tourism office and forestry corporation as colleagues in concern for the environment rather than adversaries in the fight for its protection. Over the long run, however, the tourism office disrupted the publicprivate, cross-sectoral and whole-of-government discourse of accessible nature by simultaneously continuing to capitalise on the marketing advantages of wilderness in the interests of its industry stakeholders. Thus, even as Tourism Tasmania and Forestry Tasmania were bound by place-branding, they were divided by wilderness. Ultimately, Tourism Tasmania’s reluctance to relinquish the marketing advantages
of wilderness would contribute to that symbol’s continuing salience and set the stage for its re-politicisation in the first decade of the new century.
