Intensifying the tourist experience: ‘Survenirs’ at Daly Waters Pub

Abstract

An experiment in both form and content, the essay lightly adopts an Australian storytelling style to perform its material as it narrates a road trip across central Australia. Arriving at the Daly Waters Pub in the Northern Territory, the travellers are taken by surprise by the strange décor. It is a place made significant by the multiple ‘authorships’ of hundreds of tourists. Visitors have left not only ID cards, pictures, and signatures, but also flags, number plates, thongs, caps, and bras. We analyse these traces left by travellers as objects of exchange that signify people’s desire to mark a place and use this phenomenon to introduce the idea of a complementary concept to that of the ‘souvenir’, and which we call ‘survenir’. The palimpsest effect of these survenirs (since none is erased) introduces time by accretion, rather than by chronology. The sociality generated through ‘survenirs’ is not just among humans but among all sorts of things, concepts and affects that assemble to create Daly Waters Pub as a tourist destination made not for, but by, its visitors. It is a materially interactive site composed by them.

Keywords

Australia colonialism Daly Waters Pub material interactivity ‘survenir’

In March 2012, we set out on a road trip from Sydney to Broome, and were just getting into the rhythm of 12-hour days on the road when we were taken by surprise by a remarkable place, the pub at Daly Waters. It is the main attraction in the tiny settlement located 620 km south of Darwin on the Stuart Highway. John McDouall Stuart reached the place on 28 May 1862 during his third attempt to cross Australia, and named its springs after the new Governor of South Australia, Sir Dominick Daly. The Overland Telegraph Line reached there 10 years later. A store was built in 1930, and a pub license obtained in 1938. About then it became a refuelling stopover for early aircraft en route to Darwin and Singapore, and was a centre for military aviation. As a significant communication crossroad, travellers probably started leaving their traces very early in the pub’s history, and modern tourists have continued to contribute to Daly Waters Pub in a significant material way. Visitors have left not only ID cards, pictures and signatures, but also flags, number plates, thongs, caps and bras, all of which cling to the edifice like so much debris from outer space.

Figure 1 shows some of the ID cards that are attached along the bar. Every visitor can browse the faces on display, maybe with the vague hope of recognising someone or something, a face, a birthplace, a country of origin. As this happens, the ID cards virtually connect future visitors with hundreds of former ones, and vice versa. The objects are metonymic, standing in for their human connection, but they have their own agency: they generate ‘a life of their own,’ intensifying the cultural consumption of the place where they reside, transforming it, for it is no longer ‘just a pub’, a business simply providing drink, food and lodging. The excessive signifiers extend to innumerable other places around the world in ways that can actually be traced by the observant tourist.

Figure 1.

Inside Daly Waters Pub.

It is the Daly Waters Pub itself (‘A Fairdinkum Outback Experience’¹) that benefits from such material deposits. The palimpsest effect they have (since nothing is erased) introduces time by accretion, rather than by chronology: John McDouall Stuart, 1862, is ‘real’ history, but it seems an ephemeral and even uncertain colonial imposition. The pub and the tourists participate in something more materially interactive and immediate, the creation of another kind of real, a patina of everyday accreted experience. The outback roadhouse thus becomes its own self-referential artefact. Reinforced by these polysemic traces, it inscribes itself in time and place. There is a curious intersection of fragments of subject- and object-hood, as these are ‘archived’ by thousands of transient lives coming through and thereby collectively authoring the existence of the outback roadhouse.

One form of such intersections is characterised by the notion of the souvenir, which has received much attention from tourism scholars. It refers to diverse objects that are taken home by visitors to commemorate a visit (Dougoud, 2000). These can include postcards, T-shirts, natural products, handicrafts, decorations or artworks. They may represent the image of a tourist destination (Schouten, 2006), and serve as evidence that a journey has been made when sharing that experience with family and friends. Shopping for souvenirs is also part of the tourist experience, while their purchase makes a financial contribution to the local economy (Jansen-Verbeke, 1998).

Drawing on the case of Daly Waters Pub, however, we argue that motivations for leaving things behind are quite different from those of taking something with you to commemorate a visit. We want to suggest a concept complementary to that of the souvenir: the ‘survenir’, in order to make this difference clear. In French, survenir as a verb, usefully for us, marks an event occurring. Our neologistic noun, replacing sous ‘under’ with sur ‘on’ changes its meaning from memories ‘coming under’ to things ‘coming on’. The intention behind the use of such ‘survenirs’ is not to remove culture, identity or meaning from a place, it is not commemoration by taking an object with you, as a souvenir, but instead to superimpose culture, identity, even oneself on a place. As such, in applying the notion of the ‘survenir’, this article presents Daly Waters Pub as a ‘tourist destination’ in its most literal sense: made not only for, but by, its visitors.

The traces left by travellers passing by, traces of subjects and traces of objects, intensify the tourist experience of Daly Waters Pub. As tourists and travellers we are by now so used to framings and technologies that, looking at Figure 1, we forget how unrealistic such an image actually is. For a start, it is still. It has artificially stilled a moving and evolving world, or rather worlds, moving in and out of each other. In a spirit of ‘keeping things on the move’ (Benterrak et al., 1984), our method of writing and analysis will engage with things in movement converging in Daly Waters Pub; the pathways they have taken through different worlds (as in the early days of telegraph, ‘wild blackfellas’ cattle drovers and early aircraft) to find themselves at this moment before moving on. Today, the Daly Waters ‘moment’ is a radical shift of chronotope, from the effect of heading down the road in one direction, to stillness, atemporality and the explosion of virtual identities through accreted semiotically laden materials.

Our story begins with a description of forces of attraction through real and virtual space and how they brought its authors to Daly Waters Pub. The section that follows this description introduces complementary examples to the traces left at the roadhouse, mainly drawing on Brent Lovelock’s (2004) discussion of ‘tourist-created attractions’ in New Zealand. It then returns to Daly Waters and applies the characteristics of such attractions as identified by Lovelock to the objects found in the roadhouse, before moving on to outline further characteristics, this time specific to Daly Waters Pub. In conclusion, we draw on these further characteristics and present the outback roadhouse as a product of colonial Australia with an expanding history, now told by tourists who visit it, that continues to overwrite local specificities, Aboriginal history in particular. But for now, we begin with a description of our own encounter with Daly Waters Pub.

Fuelling up

Driving along the Stuart Highway, in our beloved Commodore wagon, jokingly dubbed ‘the Commode’, Stephen gets a feeling that it would be a good idea to stop at Daly Waters Pub to spend the night. It is off the main road, so we have to turn left at the sign and drive for another 10 kilometres. Having been there before, and now remembering, Stephen tells his German friends Carsten and Lars, both in the role of tourist, thus casting him as local guide, that on the menu at Daly Waters Pub is a joke offer of a free-of-charge ‘Dingo Breakfast’: ‘A scratch, a piss and a look around’, hence Daly Waters. We are laughing as the Commode pulls up.

The three of us are thus drawn to the site by either previous experience or anecdote, not to mention history. Stephen takes out his smartphone and searches for some facts about the pub, the region, and about the construction of Australian history in this particular place. He reads out the following:

The area’s traditional owners, the Jingili people, believe the Dreaming tracks of the Emu and the Sun travelled through here on their way to the southern parts of the Northern Territory. John McDouall Stuart explored around Daly Waters in the late 1800s. He and his party got lost in the region’s thick scrub and became desperate for water. Thus the discovery of a small creek leading to a series of waterholes was particularly significant. He named the area in honour of the Governor of South Australia at the time. (http://www.wikiaustralia.com/destination/9039786/ (accessed 26 February 2013)

Based on this sketchy web site history, and being lazy and time-poor, Stephen searches for more on the Jingili, entering the search phrase ‘Jingili people, believe the Dreaming tracks of the Emu and the Sun’. This results in endless repetitions of exactly the same phrase across numerous similar tourist web sites:

Jingili people, believe the Dreaming tracks of the Emu and the Sun

Jingili people, believe the Dreaming tracks of the Emu and the Sun …

It seems that tourist promoters, similar to us, were also time-poor and could not engage further with the Aboriginal history of the Jingili. Instead, as usual, they copy–pasted existing, easy-access knowledge into their own descriptions of the place. This little intervention of tourist information makes our narrative take a turn, a turn for the worse from the point of view of the Indigenous people. Even before arriving we have scarcely been able to register the Jingili world because it is not signposted like that of the explorers (Figure 2). But it is signposted, alright, with the distancing verb ‘believe’ in the repeated web sites and thus dismissed to the shadows of the unreal.

Figure 2.

Road signs in front of Daly Waters Pub indicating directions to the nearby cattle station and the touristic ‘Explorer Highway’ (Stuart Highway). Also note ‘the Commode’ in the background.

So through movement and the moves the available narratives make, our touristic encounters are organised and intensified. Later, Carsten remembers something Jonas Larsen (2005) said on the topic:

Places are not only or even primarily visited for their immanent attributes but are also, and more centrally, woven into the webs of stories and narratives people produce when they sustain and construct their social identities. (p. 426)

So what are all these tourists doing converging on Daly Waters, for goodness sake, in ‘the middle of nowhere’? Following Larsen, one can say that among other things they are giving themselves stories, and for that they need action: something must happen that has enough of a point to be worth telling about. They need material for a story, a story about themselves. Something will contribute to their subjectivity that would not have been available by staying at home, story-less. Travelling to Daly Waters is an episode on a journey towards self-completion, paradoxically an outward-bound narrative to some remote place in ‘the world’ that will provide material that will intensify a sense of self, which upon return is more firmly bound to home with the new set of meanings that the tour has provided.

As they compose this story about themselves, a very common phenomenon is for tourists to gather souvenirs, tokens of authenticity, to deposit at home. As reminders for people, times and things that were encountered during a journey, each object becomes an active accomplice, a partner in the story that is later told to friends and family, and that begins, ‘Remember the time when … ’ or (holding up some kitsch object) ‘This is from when I was … ’ People can lose things too, bits of subject-hood, the trappings of naivety perhaps, the inadvertent racism or parochialism (see also Smith, 1996). These were part of their older story, before they were remade by their trip. The tourist en route thus has bits and pieces of self falling away in the slipstream, and then anxiously washes up in a place like Daly Waters Pub, in the ‘middle of nowhere’.

Things happen. A total of 130 kilometres before Daly Waters Pub, one of the tyres of the Commode exploded. Its remains are still scattered along the Stuart Highway. Luckily, the spare tyre was intact and we could move on: ‘On the Road Again … ’. Now, there’s a useful phrase for the standard outback narrative: The highway ahead shimmers like a mirage. It is incredibly hot, and changing the tyre, unloading and reloading the trunk, is exhausting. The more literate tourist might remember the phrase about explorer Stuart, ‘He and his party got lost in the region’s thick scrub and became desperate for water’, which inevitably takes a contemporary, touristic turn:

Desperate for water

Desperate for beer

Finally, the ‘Daly Waters’ sign. The ramshackle pub buildings roll into view like an oasis in an immense landscape that is devoid of meaning. Its isolation intensifies its very existence: a place in all this non-place. The fact of getting through so much ‘nothing’ to get here means something must happen here, and we, like most tourists, are determined to find the fuel and energy for something that could balloon out into significance. But by entering the pub another shocking revelation awaits us: everyone else has been here before! Thousands of past lives have left real markers that can make you wonder, looking at a card, what the accommodation might be like at Balangan, a surf spot in Bali, or if there are temporary jobs available for those on work visas up the road in Katherine.

The items speak to human observers, but they also relate to each other independently of human mediation. This possibility must, in a way, be the essence of the built environment or construction of any sort: hanging up all the bras here, putting the T-shirts over there, gives the ensemble a form. Without this coherence there would be no hope for the materials to intensify each other, or to intensify the tourists’ experiences. As the three thirsty travellers raise their first glasses of Emu Bitter, Stephen remembers that his anthropologist friend Ghassan Hage (2002) had made good use of the Deleuzian concept of intensity:

We all go through our daily lives knowing and/or feeling that some things leave in and on us a much deeper impression than others, that certain realities are experienced more intensely than others. Intensity as I will use it here is not primarily physical, although it is also that. It is primarily affective. An intensely experienced reality is not the same as ‘hard hitting’ reality. Intensity has more to do with the extent to which a reality is involving and affecting. The affect of a machine or a city street can be very strong on a migrant worker from a rural background, but we cannot say that she necessarily experiences them intensively just because of their strong physical effect. An intense reality is primarily an intense relation where the person’s engagement in reality contributes to construct its intensity. (pp. 193–94)

Hage confines himself here to the human experience of the world, in an anthropological fashion. The ‘city street’ is ‘hard hitting’ in a relational way, it depends on the human relation, and sociocultural coding of the humans involved. But is the city street mono-dimensional and acting in one direction only? No, other things also hit it pretty hard, like buses and trucks. And road workers care for it, they maintain its existence with durable materials. So a certain mix of gravel, bitumen, human labour, and knowledge intensifies the road in this existential sense, its components keep it alive as a road.

Even the pub web site invites intense affective involvement: ‘Wherever you look there is something interesting to read or ponder its origin’.² Encouraging a kind of ‘bush literacy’, the pub as museum/archive/junkstore thus shores up its local prestige as cultural centre, though very much defined by its whiteness, since there are cultural centres elsewhere dedicated to Indigenous material culture. Here it is not in evidence. Here, history and travelling identities ricochet across the space in a potentially bewildering array. ‘Wherever you look’, there is something that could make you take a little jump into another ‘world’. But it is never just a bilateral subject–object relation at play, for multiplicity, singularity and difference contribute to this composition as a whole.

The materiality of interaction among things is what we also notice in the Daly Waters Pub interior. The current population of the town of Daly Waters grows from 25 into the 1000s through the faces of former visitors on display, who left their IDentities behind.³ We call all these traces ‘survenirs’. Like souvenirs, they are people’s attempts to establish a variety of relationships with a place. But in contrast to those, tourists and travellers have used ‘survenirs’ at Daly Waters to create a sociality that is not only among humans but also among things, concepts and affects that assemble to make up a place that they themselves and those who follow consume. Daniel Miller (1995) has argued that ‘to be a consumer is to possess consciousness that one is living through objects and images not of one’s own creation’ (p. 1). David Graeber (2011: 502) adds to this, that instead of a given dualism between production and consumption, more attention should be paid to the ideologies and imaginaries that constitute our understandings of consumption. Daly Waters Pub presents a combination of production, consumption and creative appropriation of place by tourists and travellers. Like the free-of-charge ‘Dingo Breakfast’ on its menu, leaving objects, consumer goods like bras and thongs, is about appropriating these goods, detaching them from their original meaning – it is about using them to leave traces, to mark the territory.

Such production and consumption of a place through objects has been the subject of critical tourism studies for quite a while now. Many tourism scholars agree that objects are active agents in the production of tourism (cf. Franklin, 2003: 98). As in the case of Daly Waters, agency is accorded not only to humans but to the very objects that are left behind. So the answer to the first question we raised (what tourists are doing when they head to this remote place) is that they mark it. The next question then needs to be why this territory is so important to be marked. Is it its legacy of being a remote place in the outback? Does it signify in the memory of the traveller to have left a trace when crossing Australia on the Stuart Highway like the legendary explorer himself? Does it give a sense of following in his footsteps, of naming the place in one’s own way, but also of being part of a greater cause, a taming of ‘the wild’ that turns (the middle of) ‘nowhere’ into somewhere?

‘Marking the territory’: Thong trees, Bra Corners and other tourist-created experiences

The meaning of ‘participation’ in public life has significantly changed in post-industrial societies, driven by the new cultural economy and the new media (Florida, 2002). While the virtual has gained in significance to assist people to imagine themselves as part of collectives and wider social relations, Daly Waters Pub is a place in which to live out these imaginations and give material substance to them. Brent Lovelock suggests in this context to approach tourism not as a consumption-based but creative practice of people through which particular places come into being. Such places that he calls ‘tourist-created attractions’ are for him first of all marked by ‘aesthetics and permanence’ (Lovelock, 2004: 413). In his 2004 article ‘Tourist-Created Attractions: The Emergence of a Unique Form of Tourist Attraction in Southern New Zealand’, he discusses three examples for such places, two of which relate to Daly Waters.

The first is a shoe fence at Burkes Pass in the central South Island region of New Zealand. At the end of 1999, the fence counted 1182 shoes, sandals, gumboots, ski-boots and flippers (Davies, 1999).⁴ In early 2000, additional items started to appear on the Burkes Pass shoe fence. They inspired the creation of the second attraction: a bra fence beside the Crown Range Road, between the ski resorts of Queenstown and Wanaka, in the south of the South Island. At its peak, the bra fence supported about 500 bras, received from as far away as the United States and Europe (Lovelock, 2004: 414–15).

Daly Waters Pub is proud to accommodate, among others things, very similar tourist-created attractions, a Bra Corner and a Thong Tree. Lovelock suggests characteristics for the creation and sustainability of such attractions. Central to those are (1) the ongoing contribution of tourists as the only reason for why a site attains the scale necessary to transform into an attraction (Lovelock, 2004: 416–17), and (2) that the attraction is a local production of global concern, and also global in character (i.e. it involves global travellers) (Lovelock, 2004: 427). Lovelock continues to explain that what characterises the related type of tourism are play (as opposed to purpose), chance (as opposed to design), anarchy (as opposed to hierarchy), process and performance (as opposed to an art object or finished work) and participation (as opposed to distance).

Souvenirs assist in this transformation from tourist alienation (passive) to tourist agency (active). They are to fulfil a desire in tourists to impact on a place, to leave a trace, also to be part of something, be remembered, if only by oneself and through a possible return with friends and family. The Bra Fence for Lovelock (2004) suggests ‘that [visitors] are viewing the landscape […] as needing correction, e.g. through softening, civilizing or feminizing’ (p. 421). On a similar note, survenirs at Daly Waters Pub might have been left by tourists who also seek to correct its surroundings, ‘tame the wild’ and turn the ‘nothing’ of the outback into ‘something’. As for the significance of the shoes that people have donated to the Shoe Fence, Lovelock (2004) notes that without shoes one is generally ‘restricted in movement, prone to injury, vulnerable, especially in a new and often harsh environment’ (p. 424). He describes this as the exceptional value of shoes that might also be a motivation to leave them behind:

In the deposit of shoes on the shoe fence, we are saying that we are giving it all away, that we are making a huge sacrifice. And we are also coincidentally saying that we can survive – we are at once helpless, with no shoes, but also all-powerful with the provisions of the modern tourist at hand (credit card, fast vehicle, access to retail). (Lovelock, 2004: 424–45)

Lovelock’s conclusions are surely applicable to the Bra Corner and also in part to the Thong Tree at Daly Waters Pub, though travellers to Daly Waters almost exclusively arrive and depart in some sort of motorised vehicle and therefore run a much lower risk of injuring their feet when leaving their thongs behind than people who hike along the Shoe Fence in New Zealand. But there is a further dimension that needs to be added here, related to the particular history of Daly Waters within colonial Australia. To emphasise this, Carsten did a bit of research on Facebook with a brief online questionnaire.⁵ Annie, a 35-year-old woman born in Australia, described her first visit to Daly Waters Pub:

When did you visit Daly Waters for the first time?

Annie: New Years Eve, my boyfriend and I rode our motorbikes down to meet up with another couple riding from Sydney to Darwin. We spent two nights there. Have not been back. Thinking about going down for a long weekend with all in the club. Patriots motorcycle club next year.

What significance has it to you personally?

Annie: Pool and BBQ;) yeah man lol.

Have you had a chance to look at the things that are left in Daly Waters?

Annie: I got heaps of photos! Check my fb out;).

Why do you think people leave things at Daly Waters?

Annie: Because its cool to do so.

Which ones do you find particularly interesting and for what reasons?

Annie: I love history, to see all the antique items was fantastic, looking back in time, in person.

Much of Annie’s answers to the questionnaire are complementary to what other people posted as replies in the Daly Waters Pub Facebook page (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Excerpts from responses to the questionnaire on the Daly Waters Pub Facebook page.

The striking similarity in most of the accounts are the direct or indirect references to nationhood and what makes up Australian legacy and history, the Patriots Motorcycle Club, the RAAF epaulet but also typical Australian Outback inventions like the Bachelor and Spinster ball. And what about a sawn-off 12 gauge that was ‘left’ some years ago? ‘Only in Australia … ’.

As we have established by now that objects left behind allow for the place to be transformed by the people who visit it, the above feeds into a colonialist tradition in which so-called great explorers gave names to Terra Nullius, and in doing so inflicted it with (Western) meaning. As in the case of the Bra Fence in New Zealand, landscape is again thought in need of correction. Now that there is nothing left to explore – or that which had been explored, conquered and given meaning to (cattle stations, airfields, waterholes) has lost its significance or function – tourists re-colonise these traces of colonialism by adding to their collections of survenirs. Walter Benjamin (2005) linked the concepts of collection, objects and memory with his essay on the process of unpacking his library:

[Acquiring books] or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memory which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. (p. 486)

The Bra Corner, the Thong Tree and all the other survenirs become this what Benjamin calls a ‘dam against the spring tide of memory’. Without the dam, the spring tide would bring with it a very different story from what the visitors to Daly Waters Pub are experiencing, and in whose creation they participate by donating their survenirs. Those (visitors and survenirs/subjects and objects) also aim to overwrite other memories of a violent colonial past, of dead explorers, dead Aboriginal people, of destruction, and of a place that for the Whitefella would remain located in Terra Nullius, ‘in the middle of nowhere’, if s/he had not introduced his own artifice that turns it into ‘somewhere’.

In the case of Daly Waters Pub, survenirs then carry a double meaning: They are (1) for others to remember the person who has left them, and (2) a ‘dam’ that tells stories of patriotism, of heroes of the RAAF, of conquest, of celebration and freedom (from gun control). Such memory overwrites another memory embedded in the place, a memory that would remind its visitors of a history of exploitation and now decay, built on the suffering of others.

Reference to this other history is made indirectly across the street (Figure 4). Leftovers piled up there include a broken-down helicopter, some scattered white crosses and puppets dressed in army costumes turned into motley from the impact of the burning sun and monsoonal rains. And a reference that nothing in this place is made in China, all of this presents another face of Australia, an Australia of lost wars and the xenophobia of an economy taken over by the Chinese.

Figure 4.

Looking across the street from the entrance to the pub. Sign on the left (white writing on black) reads: ‘Everything here is NOT made in China’.

There is a final effect of such accumulation of stuff and that is its patina, that which retains indelibly the appearance of the passage of time. It is a way of marking history in quite other ways than chronology. The patina marks and holds time by accretion, rather than by time-lines or dates: this is the organic authenticity of growth that Deleuze (in Rajchman’s phrase) would call ‘multiple accretion through encounter’ where we can see that even philosophy ‘grows and acquires a coherence of its own’. Unlike in history ‘there is no great dramatic turning point’, dates that mark invasions and wars as if these were the great agents of history (Rajchman, 2000: 24).

Accretion dams the leakage into disintegration. It is not just matter that is building up in Daly Waters, it is meanings and forces (through their vectorial link to other places, other beings, other lives now lived back home, the pilgrimage now complete). That Daly Waters Pub is populated with these other lives, these lives from elsewhere, reinforces the contrast to the Aboriginal lives, which it is not marking in the very country the pub is overwriting. In popular knowledge, the Aboriginal history is reduced to one phrase that Google can find about the Jingili; ‘Jingili people, believe the Dreaming tracks of the Emu and the Sun’. They have belief. What we have is materials to prove our continued existence, intensified here but with global spread.

Moving out

It is the morning after. There are kangaroos in the distance grazing the lawn, and white cockies screeching overhead. Carsten and Stephen had got to bed reasonably early in one of the several cabins scattered around the pub. But Lars had tied one on and went looking to kick on at a party at one of the more permanent homes of the backpacker bar staff. Inspired, Stephen Muecke (1997) is discoursing to Carsten over breakfast about his thesis on ‘Australian potlatch’, drinking to excess as the dépense that is losing oneself in order to gain a narrative that is transportable and makes it possible to endure everyday toil and boredom:

Drinking, for white men, is an elaborate display of loss, a wastage of wealth producing prestige.

Shearers traditionally ‘blow the lot’ when they get paid for an itinerant season going around the sheds. Even now Australian drinkers put their money on the bar; when it’s their turn to shout the bar staff just help themselves (the luxury of not having even to think about money). Friday night is traditionally pay day followed by a ‘big night’, and for married men a proportion of the pay packet has somehow to be secured in advance; all this is a part of an Australian potlatch. There are no balance sheets in the fluid economy of Emu Bitter, only a passionate display of loss in the context of intense sociability. Reputations will be maintained in the morning-after narratives, where the adjective ‘big’ is likely to feature; a ‘big night’, or in contrast, a ‘quiet night’, quietness merely being the base line of normality and accumulation leading, inevitably, to another big one. (pp. 188–89)

By this time, Lars is making his way across the yard. Then there’s some ribbing to try to get his story out of him. ‘Irish girl, eh?’ He protests total innocence but his facial expressions remain ambiguous. The vagueness about his ‘big night out’ fuels his story and stimulates curiosity. A bit later, Stephen spots Carsten at the bar holding his ID card:

What are you doing?

My ID has expired. I wonder if I should leave it here.

Sure, why not? Plenty more where that came from.

Hmm, tempting; maybe at some point in time I’ll come back and check if it’s still there? But putting myself on display with the others? I’d rather hold on to it.

In Daly Waters Pub, tourists and their objects provide a story to a place that in various ways has been emptied of its meaning; that otherwise is no more than an airstrip and a seasonal waterhole. The days of the great cattle droves are over. The modern era of nation-building through white settlement has also run its course. Today, the pub is full of postmodern survenirs left by people who want to be remembered. They add (themselves) to the place, its story and its future. Daly Waters is also a survenir in itself, a trace left by Stuart, the first white traveller arriving in Jingili country. Some visitors can imagine this Daly Waters of Stuart. They add it as another extraordinary experience to their otherwise ordinary lives. That is arguably one of the main reasons for why they visit the pub. But the pub in its contemporary form is not the creation of Stuart but that of its countless visitors and the merging layers of subjects and objects they have left behind. As such, the same people who seek to find an extraordinary experience have in fact created this experience in the first place.

The traces of travellers that make up Daly Waters unite people from diverse spaces with a continued desire to enact what their everyday lives cannot offer them. The collectivity that the survenirs produce stimulates a sense of being in a place, of being able to impact on it, as part of a group. As such, Daly Waters provides for an imagined collectivity, even though no one can name all the members of this collectivity, and its members will never get together in Daly Waters simultaneously. These people have been there and left their traces, and it is these traces, these survenirs, that for them will guarantee the survival of Daly Waters, as a liminal space beyond time. While the Jingili, for whom this place has always been a cultural complex beyond the ken of most white Australians (and the scope of this essay), are still not invited to participate.⁶ This, despite the fact that since August 2012 they are the Native title holders over the entire town of Daly Waters and 30,000 square kilometres of the surrounding country.

As a tourist-created attraction, Daly Waters alters our understanding of the role of consumption in tourism. It presents an ecology which transforms the significance of objects, provoking in visitors more intense levels of reflexivity and irony. Similar to traditional bars, Daly Waters Pub provides room for liminal interaction experiences and imaginaries of collective identity (West, 2006: 149). But tourists and travellers go further and use the pub for what Clifford Geertz (1973) has called ‘deep play’. Daly Waters Pub presents its visitors with material that is ‘good to think with’. It presents an interior, here, ‘made over’, excessively decorated so that it can no longer be decoration in the aestheticising sense. It is so excessive that the interior of the pub is no longer a pub, as such, or simply an outback roadhouse, whatever that might be today. It is an interior that has been invaded by the exterior world, globalisation come home to roost, literally, for there are no metaphors in this excessive materiality. It is a cosmic makeover, then, a gesture towards folding the whole exterior into the interior, for in principle nothing would be alien, nothing un-postable in this non-digital accumulation of paraphernalia, except for Aboriginal history, whose traces are nowhere to be seen. Sure, you cannot put the pyramids of Egypt into Daly Waters Pub, but you can put a postcard of them. It would be welcome next to a discarded Kevin 07 T-shirt and a pair of pink panties. Contingency, heterogeneity and excess are key in this paraphernalia. Sparseness is not in seeming contrast to the landscape outside.

In the descriptive elements of this analysis of Daly Waters Pub lurks the possibility of unravelling untold complexities. They can orient different ways of thinking about tourist sites in general, and in this case tourist sites in the middle of the outback; the ‘middle of nowhere’ turned into a somewhere more like the middle of colonial Australia. For there is no doubt, this is a white outpost in Aboriginal country. In describing things, one is supposed to be realistic and materialistic, as opposed to idealistic. One translates what is there into words. What is there. That is, in the photograph, and in the experience of spending time in the pub.

Here, the tourist subject does not encounter ‘the world around us’ as a fully formed subject meeting a fully material inert object. The subject constantly discards and picks up bits and pieces, attributes, and objects that also trace movement from or towards other places in a lively and engaging fashion. The convergence of layerings of intensities in the place gives it a form that enables responses to go back and forth among things as well as among subjects. Repetition of things (a thousand different coloured T-shirts, thongs, etc.), as well as repetition of clichéd stories, contributes to the accumulative excess that characterises this kind of tourist site.

Footnotes

Funding

Carsten Wergin is generously supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship allocated within the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission.

Notes

Author biographies

Stephen Muecke is Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He works in the experimental humanities, with Indigenous groups in Broome, and on intercoloniality in the Indian Ocean. Recent publications include, with Max Pam, photographer, Contingency in Madagascar Intellect Books, 2012, and Butcher Joe, Documenta 13: 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken English/German, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 2011.

Carsten Wergin (Doctorate in Philosophy) is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. He works on tourism, mobility and transcultural connectivity in the Indian Ocean region, as well as cultural urbanism and musical performance in post-industrial city spaces. Latest publications include the Special Section ‘Songlines vs. Pipelines? Mining and Tourism Industries in Remote Australia’ for Australian Humanities Review (with Stephen Muecke, 2012) and the co-edited volume Musical Performance and the Changing City (with Fabian Holt, Routledge 2013).

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