SEMINAR: Tourism and Theatre: performing and consuming Indigeneity in an Australian Wildlife Sanctuary

The article explores the social and cultural production of Indigeneity in a wildlife sanctuary on the Australian Gold Coast. We note that the human and animal characters that form the displays of the sanctuary work toward the assemblage of a largely consistent underlying theme. The latter reproduces commensurability between two main figures associated with Australian settler history, namely the country's pre-colonial indigenous species of animals and plants and the human Aboriginal population. We argue that the theatre produced in the park's highly sanitized visitor contact zone has wider social and political ramifications for Australian society and modern society in general. By ceremonially re-enacting through a tourist enterprise the historical myth of separation between modern civilization and primordial indigeneity, the sanctuary produces ambivalent meanings about the relation between 'nativeness' in nature and society. Our analysis addresses the simultaneous emancipation of contemporary human indigeneity as a revitalised cultural value together with the social distancing of Aboriginal people as one dimensional caricatures of primordial nature.