Abstract
Uluru-Kata Tjuta and Tongariro National Parks are arguably Australia and New Zealand’s premier iconic landscapes. This article explores how the visual representation of the parks altered following the late 20th-century transformation of Australia and New Zealand into postcolonial nations. It compares 20th-century representations evident in archival posters, tourist guidebooks, and photographs with early 21st-century government branding strategies. This comparison reveals contrasting government motives concerning land rights, the conservation estate, and tourism. Whereas Uluru-Kata Tjuta was reconceived as a landscape of cultural and economic recovery for the traditional owners, including extensive representational revisions to present an enduring Aboriginal presence, imaging of Tongariro remains ahistorical. I argue that this outcome reflects the continuance of 20th-century colonial representations that minimized Maori cultural associations in order to maximize the landscape’s capacity as a site for tourist and filmic consumption.
Introduction
In 1994, W. J. T. Mitchell’s edited volume Landscape and Power argued for a more instrumental definition of landscape, advocating its conceptualization as a cultural practice rather than “an object to be seen or a text to be read” (pp. 1-2). Mitchell’s position extends ideas first proposed by Cosgrove a decade earlier in 1984, which introduced the idea of landscape as iconography. Both Mitchell and Cosgrove’s research (especially latter’s focus on the agency of mapping) has been extremely influential in postcolonial studies. Within Australia and New Zealand, their work has inspired many studies such as Simon Ryan’s (1996) The Cartographic Eye, which examines how the image-making and mapping of the Australian explorer operated as a colonial practice.
The agency of landscape representation has also informed discourse concerning tourist practices. John Urry’s (1990) pioneering work proposing the “tourist gaze” and the “hermeneutic circle,” provoked a more critical analysis of constructed relationships between the physical and representational landscape. David Crouch and Nina Lubbren’s edited volume Visual Culture and Tourism published in 2003 claims to be the first to focus on the “diverse ways in which visual practices and representations have been implicated in the rituals and experiences of tourism” (p. 1). Economic and media studies have extended this discourse through explorations of destination branding and filmic tourism.
This article offers a further contribution to the exploration of the agency of landscape representation. Through a comparative analysis of Australia and New Zealand’s most iconic national spaces, Uluru-Kata Juta and Tongariro National Parks, this article develops an analysis of landscape representation as both a colonizing and decolonizing practice. It traces how representations altered following the significant theoretical and political transformations of the 1970s, which repositioned Australia and New Zealand as postcolonial nations. This period was one of remarkable intensity for both countries. National revisions of identity, indigenous land rights, and, in the case of New Zealand, economic restructuring, coincided with international developments in conservation to fundamentally challenge government policy. These changes required both countries to reposition their conservation estate to acknowledge indigenous people’s cultural relationship and ownership of national parks.
Tongariro and Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Parks form excellent case studies for examining the impact of this change, given indigenous culture was integral to their formation. They present a shared anomaly in the history of national parks which, until the 1970s, were conceived as unoccupied natural landscapes. The volcanic landscape of Tongariro is simultaneously heralded as New Zealand’s first national park and the first national park in the world to be created through the gifting of land by indigenous people. Similarly the decision to declare Uluru-Kata Tjuta (formerly known as Ayers Rock) a national park in 1958 aimed to provide tourists a firsthand experience of a desert wilderness and a “timeless” Aboriginal presence. In 1992, Tongariro became the first national park to be listed in accordance with UNESCO’s new category of “cultural landscape,” with Uluru the second in 1994.
Despite this shared history, detailed comparative analysis of the two parks is rare. Examples tend to be either a broad-brush comparative analysis of national parks within settler societies or appear within research into native title and the conservation estate. This absence is replicated in the broader discourse of cultural and historic studies. Despite Australia and New Zealand’s shared origins as seven colonies of Australasia and their close geographic proximity, trans-Tasman analysis emerged as a scholarly focus only in the late 1990s. Previously, historians of both countries constructed national histories that neglected historical parallels and connections and instead focused on “what makes a nation distinctive” (Curthoys, 2003, p. 29).
This article’s comparative focus therefore provides a valuable perspective for exploring the evolving representation of landscape within national parks. The first part of the study draws on archival posters, tourist guidebooks, and photographs to establish the dominant narratives and shifting representations of landscape (and indigenous people) within the 20th century. I then turn to early 21st-century government branding strategies, to explore how these representations have altered following the transformation of Australia and New Zealand into postcolonial nations.
An Extraordinary Landscape
The prospect of scenic tourism rather than conservation inspired the declaration of Tongariro National Park as New Zealand’s first. An 1882 expedition led by Special Commissioner for the New Zealand Herald, J. H. Kerry-Nicholls highlighted the scenic potential of three volcanoes located on New Zealand’s North Island. Venturing into an “unknown region ruled over by the Maori King,” Kerry-Nicholls (1883) published a series of articles describing the majestic landscape qualities of the central plateau, “a region designed, as it were by the artistic hand of nature” (p. 6). Kerry-Nicholls suggested the Crown purchase the land, stating that “its purchase from the natives for a public domain should be one of the foremost duties of any government having the welfare of the State at heart” (p. 6). Paramount Chief Horonuku Te Heuheu Tukino however was reluctant to sell the land.
It was only in response to the actions of the Native Land Court in 1885 that Te Heuheu considered giving the land to the Crown, concerned that the neighboring Maniapoto iwi (Maori term for tribe or people) would infiltrate his lands and that the splitting of the lands into individual title would break up customary ownership (Harris, 1974, p. 50). On September 23, 1887, a deed signed between Te Heuheu and Her Majesty the Queen transferred ownership of the three volcanic peaks of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe, and Ruapehu to the Crown. Institutional histories persist in describing this deed as an unprecedented act of indigenous people “gifting” land, despite the well-documented duress that accompanied the act. This enduring description of the park’s origins in a gift is just one of many representational revisions that occurred throughout the 20th century.
The writings of journalist James Cowan (1901/2004) were particularly influential in defining the earliest representations of Tongariro National Park. Cowan worked for New Zealand’s Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, which was formed in 1901 and is considered the world’s first national tourist organization (McClure, 2004, p. 2). Cowan’s early writings clearly acknowledge the park as a Maori cultural landscape. In 1901, he produced Lake Taupo and the Volcanoes: Scenes from Lake and Mountain and Tales from Maori Folk-Lore, written as an alternative to regulation guide books that Cowan considered crammed full of “tabulated facts and figures, mileages, fares and chemical analysis of hot-springs and so forth” (preface). Cowan emphasizes Tongariro as part of a broader Maori cultural landscape associated with nearby Lake Taupo and describes “the quaint folk-lore of the Maori people” alongside accounts of the scenic beauties and the thermal wonderland of the region. According to Cowan (1901/2004), understanding Maori cultural connections to the landscape was vital. He believed that the inclusion of Maori stories within the guide provided the visitor with “that human interest with which the grandest scenery is in a manner unsatisfying” (pp. 5-6).
Over the next 30 years, Cowan published further accounts of Tongariro in national guide books. Links between Tongariro National Park, Lake Taupo, and Maori culture remain in Cowan’s 1907 national guidebook New Zealand or Ao-Tea-Roa: Its Wealth and Resources, Scenery, Travel-Routes, Spas and Sport. Cowan (1907) stressed the significance of the area as a natural and cultural wonderland reflecting the “strange manifestations of Nature’s untameable powers” while also “teeming with Maori mythology and legendary lore” (p. 121).
Cowan’s conceptualization of Tongariro as a cultural landscape, however, did not endure. It was instead replaced by a new focus on diverse recreational opportunities. This shift is exemplified by the park’s first official guidebook produced by Cowan in 1927. Whereas his 1901 guide book wrapped Maori stories and mythologies throughout the descriptions of the volcanic landscape, Cowan now describes the landscape features independently from their Maori cultural associations. He writes, Steaming craters, sulphurous pits, a boiling lake, ice-cold lakes, glaciers, snow-fields, alpine slopes inviting the master of what has now come to be called “snowmanship” in sport; torrents and bubbling springs, rapids and waterfalls, huge cliffs and rocky pinnacles, forests and wild fern gardens, mountain meadows bright with the leagues of flowers—to enumerate the varied scenes of Tongariro Park is almost to make a catalogue of all New Zealand’s landscapes. (Cowan, 1927, p. 10)
Significantly, Cowan’s 1927 guide highlights the story of the gift as the “first time fully written,” relegating Maori history, folklore, poetry, and place names to the back of the book.
The Parliamentary Debates over the Tongariro National Park 1922 Act provide additional evidence of the park’s erasure as a Maori cultural landscape. Parliamentarians limited the recognition of Maori connections to the production of “a book illustrated with photographs” detailing Maori legend as well as the construction of a monument to the “illustrious chieftain on some portion of the park” (Tongariro National Park Bill, 1922, p. 233). MP Dr. Thacker (Christchurch) also suggested developing a Maori village that would provide “a Mecca for the young Maori people of this Dominion” to cultivate all the “old industries” (Tongariro National Park Bill, 1922, pp. 238-239). Thacker’s proposal was not motivated by concern for the continuity of Maori culture but instead aimed to increase tourist income encouraged by the popularity of Maori tourism at nearby Rotorua.
Construction of a grand chateau in 1929, a short-lived exercise in elegant tourism, introduced a new image of the park as a “Mecca of Health,” a place of “invigoration and pleasure,” as well as part of a chain of tourist resorts planned for the North Island (Tongariro Park Tourist Company, 1929, p. 8). Tourist posters from this period feature the chateau and surrounding volcanoes and range in representations from a picturesque benign landscape to a mysterious sublime experience. These representations are evident in the two posters, shown in Figures 1 and 2. The first depicts a picturesque landscape, framing the chateau against the less-obvious volcanic form of Mt. Ruapehu. Featuring a foreground of golfers on a manicured cultivated lawn, the poster promotes a form of scenic recreation familiar to the European tourist, with the distant Mt. Ruapehu a benign mountainous backdrop. The second poster shows a side view of the chateau with a smoking Mt. Ngauruhoe behind, a representation of the sublime view of the park. The foreground image of a passionate rendezvous between two lovers completes the message that a visit to Tongariro is a mysterious and perhaps dangerous encounter.
Tongariro National Park, New Zealand: Playground of the North Island.
Château Tongariro National Park, best reached by rail [ca 1932].
Further posters emphasize interaction with the mountainous landscape through skiing, an example of which is shown in Figure 3. An active encounter with the mountains was also encouraged by a growing nationalistic framing of mountains as national icon. Popular magazines such as Wanderlust, published throughout the 1930s, reinforced the value of the mountain encounter. The first issue featured an image of Mt. Cook on its cover as well as an extensive article by Malcolm Ross describing early attempts to climb the Southern Alps. Ross’ (1930) article stressed the “trials of strength and endurance, patience and perseverance of the earliest New Zealand Alpinists,” (p. 1) reinforced by numerous photos of New Zealand mountaineers. A portrayal of the heroic mountaineer was consistent with the image of the New Zealander as self-sufficient and resourceful, attributes that extended into the national character. An escape to the mountains offered a continuation of the earlier pioneering experience that was fast diminishing, providing a counterbalance to the modern New Zealand industrial society characterized by growing urban populations and government bureaucracy (Davidson, 2002, pp. 54-55).
Winter Sports at Tongariro National Park, New Zealand [1930s].
The subsequent formalization of park management influenced by the U.S. national park system served to further erase Maori connections to the park. The passing of the National Parks Act 1952 was a turning point, the first time that agendas for national parks were formalized within legislation. The Act introduced the new conceptualization of landscape as wilderness, defined as areas to “be kept and maintained in a state of nature.” This concept was derived from American Aldo Leopold’s definition of wilderness, first proposed in 1921. According to Leopold, “land units” of wilderness were defined as “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state big enough to absorb a two week pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man, with a minimum area of 500,000 acres” (Mackey, Lesslie, Lindenmayer, Nix, & Incoll, 1998, p. 8). Two sections of Tongariro were gazetted as wilderness, defined as places where trampers could experience qualities of remoteness, self-reliance, and solitude, in contrast to the increasingly crowded ski fields of Mt. Ruapehu (Tongariro National Park Board, 1964).
Adoption of a wilderness classification thereby required the erasure of any prehistory. Although given Maori names (Hauhungatahi and Te Tatau Pounamu), these wilderness zones were premised on an unoccupied nature. Cowan’s earlier “catalogue” of landscape features including steaming craters, sulfurous pits, snow-fields, waterfalls, forests, wild fern gardens, and mountain meadows were now delineated by rationale classification as “special,” “wilderness,” “‘natural environment,” and “facility area.”
This conceptualization of wilderness was soon accompanied by new images which depicted the volcanic landscape of Tongariro as a vast and powerful nature. Aided by aerial photography and wide-angle lenses, these images are presented from above, rarely from eye level, a perspective that not only captures a broader sweep of the landscape but also constructs an awe-inspiring nature. These expansive images show no evidence of human interaction, presenting instead a land before Maori or European occupation. As Franklin (2006) observes of these images, wilderness is presented as a place where visitors are at the mercy of the power of nature with “humanity expunged from view” to construct “a sense of purity and timeless order” (p. 2).
In less than 70 years, the park was recast from a celebrated Maori cultural landscape to an unoccupied landscape simultaneously prized as a pristine wilderness and an active recreational wonderland. The reduction of Maori cultural connections to the celebration of the gift provided the park with a unique foundational narrative while leaving the landscape unencumbered to meet the recreational needs for skiing, climbing, and wilderness encounters. This rapid erasure of Maori connections differs markedly to the development of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, where instead for much of the 20th century, the traditional owners were considered by European Australia as ancient and timeless as the landscape itself.
A Living Museum
The desert landscape of Uluru-Kata Tjuta forms part of the homelands of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankuntjatjara people, who are collectively known as the Anangu. The first European sighting of the great monolith of Ulu
Ayers Rock, 1873 (artist Edwin Berry).
The first full photograph of Ayers Rock was produced as part of an 1894 scientific expedition into Central Australia to document the last living representatives of the Stone Age. Photography was viewed as more accurate than drawings and engravings, all of which were considered “interpretations of what had been seen rather than empirical proof” (Griffiths, 2002, p. 89). The photo is credited to scientist and anthropologist Baldwin Spencer who described the Rock in the expedition report as “probably one of the most striking objects in Central Australia” (Hill, 1994, p. 75). Nomination of Ayers Rock as an object rather than land form, landscape, or monolith says much about Spencer’s neutral scientific eye. His photograph, shown in Figure 5, lacks any attempt to construct a picturesque composition. This view of the rock, combined with artefacts collected on the desert expedition and subsequently exhibited in Spencer’s National Museum of Victoria, introduced the predominately urban population to this peculiar landscape and its ancient inhabitants.
Ayers Rock, 1894.
Anthropology had far more impact on the traditional owners than simply documenting the status quo. Scientists such as Spencer were influential in formulating government policies for the assimilation of Aboriginal people into European society, policies that assumed that half-caste Aboriginal people, according to the developmental stages of evolution, were able to be fully developed and assimilated into white society. Considered beyond change, full-blood Aboriginal people were relegated to Aboriginal reserves to protect them from the detrimental effect of White contact. These reserves were of great interest to anthropologists who considered them as outdoor laboratories or “living museums” (Bennett, 2003, p. 155). In 1920, the landscape surrounding Ayers Rock and its traditional owners were subsumed into such a reserve, named the Petermann Reserve, a vast tract of land in the south west corner of the Northern Territory. Many Aboriginal people left, relocating to cattle stations or Alice Springs, and by 1939 only 50 to 60 people remained (Layton, 1986, p. 74).
Early 20th-century revisions in nationalism, art, and literature combined to dramatically reinvent the desert as a quintessential modern Australian space. While Australia officially became an independent nation following Federation in 1901, it was not until World War I and the heroic Gallipoli campaign that nationalism emerged as a more popular expression. As historian Roslynne D. Haynes (1998) comments, “the sense of national identity emanating from the war far surpassed that generated by the purely political event of Federation” (p. 162). Images of Australian troops fighting in the Middle East introduced a new perception of the desert landscape. Popularity of paintings depicting a foreign desert, claims Haynes, “already sanctified by their religious and historical context and now claimed for specifically Australian reverence, obviously paved the way for representations of Australian aridity” (1998, p. 163). Considered the antithesis of pastoral prosperity, the desert landscape with its geometric form and patterning and exceptional qualities of light proved inspirational material for artists and poets to explore modernism.
Magazine articles, museum exhibitions, paintings, and poetry combined with improvements in road access led to demands for a direct experience of the desert. By the early 1940s, travel descriptions emerged in popular magazines such as Walkabout. One of the earliest articles by Frank Clune (1941) presented Ayers Rock as the new center of Australia and the “Red Heart of the Continent” (p. 11). Although claiming Ayers Rock as a White man’s symbol, Clune’s position relied on a construction of “deep Aboriginality,” describing the rock as “one of the last remaining sanctuaries where, unmolested by civilization, the aboriginal tribes may live and hunt in the fashion of their forefathers since the Dawn of Time” (p. 11). An encounter with Aboriginal Australia, a population still considered in danger of extinction, was therefore tightly woven into a desert encounter.
In 1958, 126,000 hectares of land was excised from the Petermann Reserve to form Ayers Rock–Mt. Olga National Park. This act however presented a quandary for park management. The experience of a desert wilderness and a “timeless” Aboriginal presence was vital to attracting tourists, yet according to the definition of a national park, the landscape was to be uninhabited, apart from tourists. Following the park’s declaration, the Northern Territory Reserve Board attempted to resettle the traditional owners outside the park’s boundaries on the surrounding outstations and missions. The erasure of an Aboriginal presence from the park however, was never complete. Improved roads, cars, welfare payments, and permanent water encouraged the mobility of Aboriginal people into and within the park, and sales of artifacts provided them with an income.
Tourist operators and rangers, such as Bill Harney, continued to promote the Rock as an Aboriginal place despite its reinvention as a national park. Harney’s 1963 book To Ayers Rock and Beyond contributed to further embedding the Rock in the national consciousness as an Aboriginal place. Harney recorded Aboriginal perspectives of the landscape, many of which he passed on to tourists. Harney’s published sketch map describes places of significance as told to him by his “two Aboriginal friends, Kudekudeka and Imalung” (p. 85). Similar to Cowan’s first account of Tongariro, Harney recorded versions of Aboriginal lore and stories that presented the landscape as a sacred place, offering “living symbols of those creative heroes who dwell within it in the same fashion as do the Gods and archangels in other heavens” (1963, p. 75).
Tourist interactions with the landscape were highly orchestrated, aligned with early European interactions established by Gosse, Spencer, and Clune. Climbing, viewing, and photographing Ayers Rock and the Olgas were central. These activities operated as part of a “circle of representation,” where images from selected viewing points are reproduced in guide books, post cards, and tourist literature, which are then replicated by tourists on their visit to the physical site. These activities emerged as rituals, with climbing the rock assuming prominence as an Australian rite of passage.
Viewing the rock from prescribed viewing points offered the least strenuous ritual. According to geographer Theano Terkenli (2002), visual spectacle forms one of the most significant traits of contemporary mass tourism (p. 248). Terkenli identifies “staging” as an integral component of spectacle, offering a temporally bounded, paced, and structured viewing “to reproduce the contours of emotion” (p. 248). Staging was integral to the viewing of sunrise and sunset, which concentrated tourists at prescribed geographic and temporal moments. Significantly, these viewing points were implicated in a circle of representation that stretched back to the very first photograph taken of Ayers Rock. For example, the sunset viewing point shown in Figure 6 replicates the same view produced by Spencer in 1894.
Photograph taken from the official sunset viewing point.
In less than 40 years, Ayers Rock–Mt. Olga National Park achieved national status as an iconic symbol of Australia. This symbolism was constructed on two levels. It recognized the early explorers’ heroic journeys to the Centre while also operating as a symbol of the real Australia as reflected by an authentic Aboriginal presence. By 1980, more than 77,000 tourists visited each year, compared with 4,332 in the 1960s (Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1982, p. 78). Unlike Tongariro, where management plans had regulated growth since as early as 1964, this tourism growth was largely uncontrolled. By the early 1970s, concern over the impact of tourism on the desert ecology, combined with an acknowledgement of the distress that tourism caused the traditional owners, led to plans for better management practices. A Parliamentary Committee report recommended the preparation of a management plan, and the resiting of all visitor accommodation and the airstrip outside the park boundaries (Parks Australia, 2000, p. 22).
An area north of the park was set aside for an airport and for a new tourist village to become known as Yulara. The task of developing Yulara was given to the Northern Territory government who capitalized on the opportunity to further discourage Aboriginal presence in the park. Initial plans featured an Anangu village that would not only supply accommodation but also provide tourist opportunities to view “authentic Aborigines.” Yulara therefore was formulated not only to empty the landscape of significant tourist infrastructure but to ensure no permanent Aboriginal presence at Ayers Rock. Twenty years after the declaration of Ayers Rock–Mt. Olga National Park, Yulara finally provided a means for erasing all permanent human occupation, both indigenous and nonindigenous, from the park.
Political Interruption
By the late 1970s, political events challenged the legal and conceptual framings of indigenous people in Australia and New Zealand. Despite the existence of the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, subsequent actions of the Native Land Court and other government agencies throughout the 20th century had resulted in loss of customary lands. By 1975, 95% of all New Zealand land was held in private ownership, leaving Maori in a marginally better position than Aboriginal Australians (Ruru, 2004, p. 120). As Denoon, Mein-Smith, and Wyndham (2000) comment, “closer observation of native title suggests that the experiences of Aboriginal Australians and Maori were not absolutely different, despite the Treaty of Waitangi” (p. 124).
The emergence of an indigenous land rights movement had implications for national parks. Recognition of native title, while a national concern, also formed part of an international movement to reestablish cultural and economic connections between indigenous people and land. The Zaire Resolution on the protection of Traditional Ways of Life passed in 1975 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature had requested that all members establish strategies to enable the lands of indigenous people to be incorporated into conservation areas without displacement, loss of ownership and tenure rights to live on and use the land (Lawrence, 2000, p. 244).
In the case of Australia, the Northern Territory conservation estate controlled by the Federal government offered the earliest opportunities to recognize native title. In 1985, Ayers Rock–Mt. Olga National Park was handed back to the traditional owners and a joint management arrangement negotiated between Anangu and the Crown. Hand-back, while premised on the land remaining a national park, was conceived as a means for instigating cultural and economic resurgence for Anangu. In a dramatic reversal of 1970s plans to relocate Anangu to a tourist village, the traditional owners were now able to reside within the park in the community of Mutitjulu. Furthermore, the park was reconceived as an “Aboriginal landscape” rather than a national park, considered a “significant place of knowledge and learning”(Uluru-Kata Tjuta Board of Management and Director of National Parks, 2000, p. x).
In contrast, Tongariro, like all the New Zealand conservation estate, stayed outside the scope of Maori claims to the Waitangi Tribunal. Instead, the park remained a national space to be shared by all New Zealanders, with the subsequent comanagement model only obligating the Crown to consult with Maori.
Despite these different degrees of indigenous autonomy, management plans prepared for both parks since 2000 demonstrate clear intent to control the visual and textual representations. Plans for Uluru outline aggressive and ambitious policies for controlling the commercial photography, tourism, and the branding of the landscape. These policies acknowledge the pain caused to traditional owners in earlier historical representations as well as the role of the tourist industry in shaping inappropriate tourist expectations and interactions with the park. Compulsory tour operator accreditation was introduced as well as the control of intellectual and cultural property through film and photography permits (Uluru-Kata Tjuta Board of Management and Director of National Parks, 2000, p. xxv). The 2000 plan stated, Promotion of the Park plays an important role in its protection. It helps to build peoples’ expectations before they visit, and it helps gain public support for the park through education. Photo libraries will be encouraged to withdraw inappropriate imagery of the Park. Publishers will be encouraged to replace inappropriate images in subsequent print runs of existing books and Tour operators are to be requested to explain Anangu views in their brochures. (Ulu
Commercial photographers were especially targeted. By 2000, commercial photography of almost 40% of Ulu
The final part of this article explores how these representational controls have been interpreted within early 21st-century government branding strategies. Despite a shared intent to control the visual and textual representations, this investigation reveals contrasting government motives concerning indigenous culture and tourism.
Representational Revision
A review of Australian campaigns demonstrates a significant shift in the representations of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. This is not surprising given the controls on representation outlined within post-hand-back management plans. Earlier representations of Uluru as a visual icon are now replaced with images and text, which construct a more dynamic desert landscape that includes recognition of an enduring Aboriginal heritage and contemporary presence. Representations of Tongariro, however, continue to present Maori connections to the park in an ambiguous manner, persisting with the significance of the gift as distinct from presenting living cultural relationships. Furthermore, the decision to permit Peter Jackson to film the Lord of the Rings trilogy (released 2001-2003) within the park led to its absorption into New Zealand’s global branding as Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This decision reflects the government’s desire to maintain the park’s capacity for reinvention as a site for tourist and filmic consumption, regardless of its cultural significance to Maori.
In contrast, Uluru-Kata Tjuta forms an integral part of the Northern Territory Commission and Tourism Australia advertising campaigns. Analysis of the strategies prepared for 2005-2007 reveals a strong alignment with post-hand park management values. The Northern Territory Commission’s (2005) strategy Share our Story emerged from research that established that travellers to the Territory resisted typecasting as either international or domestic and instead shared “a state of mind rather than a geographical location.” The strategy targeted “experience seekers” who stay longer in places and also seek “difference.” Share our Stories advertisements featured the iconic image of Ulu
Significantly, the advertisement shown in Figure 7 depicts Uluru during rain, which, combined with Wright’s (2005) quote, constructs a more dynamic representation of the landscape than the dominant historic representation of the rock as static artifact. This perspective was developed by a further phrase from Wright: You can see a painting or a photograph but nothing prepares you for the first time you see Uluru. Everyone goes away with something special and great memories. It brings you back to the basics.
This landscape changes everyday.
The incorporation of Wright’s words, who is clearly identified as an Aboriginal ranger, emphasizes the landscape as an Aboriginal national park. Subsequent advertisements combined a focus on the “Spirited Traveller” with the Northern Territory through a clever play on words featuring “adveNTure,” “iNTrepid,” “iNTimate,” and “vibraNT,” with Ulu It’s been here for millions of years, yet this landscape changes every day. Nothing prepares you for the first time you see Uluru. I see new things every time.
MonumeNTal.
On one level, these images still feature the iconic image of Uluru, first captured by Spencer over a century ago. This repetitiveness is the consequence of cultural restrictions that prohibit the commercial photography of large sections of Uluru. The overlay of text in both advertisements however is significant, encouraging tourists to look beyond the spectacular visual icon to experience the cultural and ecological complexities of the desert. This message parallels the park’s management ambitions to realign the tourist experience with a new educational focus.
In contrast, the absorption of Tongariro into an international campaign based on filmic tourism, premised on being “another place,” is in conflict with the park’s management plan. This outcome reflects the aggressive manner in which the New Zealand government capitalized on New Zealand’s potential global exposure following Jackson’s decision to film the Lord of the Rings trilogy in New Zealand (Beeton, 2005, p. 81). Unlike larger countries, such as Australia and Canada, the small geographic scale of New Zealand encourages “a whole of country” approach to marketing tourism (Piggott, Morgan, & Pritchard 2002, pp. 211-212). The prominence of the New Zealand landscape in the films created a powerful medium for destination tourism, leading to the establishment of what is known as the Frodo economy.
The volcanic landscape of Tongariro was used to film the most sinister of The Lord of the Rings locales, Mordor, the stronghold of the dark lord Sauron. In an important distinction from destination tourism based on experiencing the real landscape depicted in film or television, Lord of the Rings involved significant digital enhancement of landscape scenes. The marketing of New Zealand (including Tongariro) as Tolkien’s Middle Earth therefore depended on the merging of the virtual with the physical. This ambiguous state is well demonstrated by an Air New Zealand campaign that promoted itself as “Airline to Middle Earth.” Advertisements stated “The movie is fictional. The location isn’t. Middle Earth is New Zealand.”
Subsequent tourist material was recast to overlay the physical space of New Zealand with Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Brochures encourage a visit to the scene of Tolkien’s Middle Earth located in Tongariro National Park. This collision of imagined and physical space has attracted immense scholarly interest. Cultural theorist Thierry Jutel (2004) observes, Aotearoa as Middle Earth constitutes the latest development in the production of space. It virtualises the geography of the country in the ways in which the convergence of narrative, digital effects, miniatures, promotion, marketing and the constant assertion that it is Middle Earth invoke a becoming other. (p. 64)
Similarly, Jones and Smith (2005) claim that the aggressive government rebranding of New Zealand as Middle Earth and the subsequent claims of New Zealand as the “world’s film studio” represents far more than simply a grab for tourist dollars. They argue that this government-driven rebranding recast New Zealand’s national identity as a place of “creative entrepreneurialism (p. 939). Constructions of landscape are central to this creativity, not for authenticity but for their potential for reinvention.
While I agree with Jones and Smith’s (2005) analysis, this article has demonstrated that this attitude to landscape is not a new phenomenon. This most recent absorption of Tongariro into the marketing of New Zealand as Middle Earth presents yet a further evolution of a historical pattern of maximizing the economic potential of the park. This agenda continues in regional tourist campaigns featuring Tongariro. For example, the 2006 Ruapehu Visitor Guide, Ruapehu: escape, energise, play (Ruapehu Discovery, 2006), constructs Tongariro National Park as two distinct places: a “National Park” depicted by an aerial shot of pristine wilderness accompanied by the caption: “the living heart of New Zealand,” and “Mt. Ruapehu” presented as an active recreational playground represented by an image of a snowboarder (pp. 4-7). This representation establishes a vague relationship between the national park and ski-fields and raises questions as to whether Mt. Ruapehu is part of the national park or a separate identity. Equally ambiguous is the status of Maori significance. The image of the snowboarder is accompanied by the statement “(I)n Maori legend, the mountains were once gods and warriors of great strength” (2006, pp. 6-7). The tense of the phrase is deliberately vague, casting doubt as to whether the mountains are still considered gods by Maori while the use of the term legend rather than culture questions its legitimacy. The primary purpose of this reference though is not as any form of cultural acknowledgement but instead to attract the brave and adventurous snowboarders.
This is not to assume that the representational revisions that accompanied the hand-back of Uluru-Kata Tjuta were not also motivated by financial gain. However, hand-back placed emphasis on cultural tourism, which offered economic benefits to the traditional owners. Within this model, previous colonial representations that emphasized the landscape and its indigenous inhabitants as exotic spectacle are now recast with a layer of cultural specificity through acknowledgement of the stories and culture of the Anangu. In contrast, representations of Tongariro remain ahistorical and consequently primed for reinvention.
Conclusion
This comparative analysis of Uluru-Kata Tjuta and Tongariro National Parks has highlighted the rapid pace in which shifts in representation can alter the conceptualization of both landscape and indigenous people. In the most dramatic instance, revisions in anthropology, nationalism, and aesthetics converged to recast the landscape of Uluru from an initial European perception as a harsh inhospitable desert into an iconic national space. In less than 70 years, the conceptualization of Tongariro shifted from an initial showcasing of a Maori cultural landscape to a focus on the extraordinariness of the national park, exemplified by its diverse landscape features and its unique origins as gifted land. These powerful representational revisions also demonstrate that while the imported colonial model of national parks assumed an unpeopled space, an indigenous presence (in various degrees) remained integral to the development of both parks.
This article has revealed that the late 20th-century recognition of indigenous land rights had minimal effect on the representation of Tongariro. This is surprising, given the park’s well-documented origins as a Maori cultural landscape and its subsequent listing as a World Heritage cultural landscape. This differs markedly from Ulu
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.