Interest in regional, particularly cultural heritage, tourism continued to grow throughout the 1980s and 1990s, driven by the ‘heritage boom’ (Hewison, 1987). The growth of international and domestic travel and the identification of cultural tourism as a form of tourism that both stimulate economic activity, often in a regional or rural setting in need of renewal or stabilisation but also conserve culture (Richards, 2018). In Australia, this growth in regional tourism was also marked by fragmentation into a number of emerging niches including for instance heritage tourism, wine tourism, gastronomic tourism, film tourism and creative tourism.
This paper draws exemplar regions to examine the current capacity for resilience through tourism. These areas include the Central Australian Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa World Heritage site and Yulara in the Northern Territory, the Australian Alps and the Upper Murray River region in North Eastern Victoria and South Eastern New South Wales and the Central Victorian Goldfields. It responds to the question; where do Australian destinations sit in regard to what Kordel (2016) along with Clark and Chabre (2006) call rural peripheral countryside tourism? We briefly examine the nature of cultural heritage tourism and the policy implications for embracing heritage or history tourism as a regional strategy. It argues that new approaches or regional tourism settings that incorporate or align community and commercial priorities are more successful in the long run.
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