Disasters, market changes and 'The Big Smoke' : understanding the decline of remote tourism in Katherine, Northern Territory Australia

This chapter examines the decline of tourism in Katherine, one of the Northern Territory's iconic remote destinations. While the decline coincided with severe floods damaging much of the town and its tourism infrastructure in 1998, other factors such as the overall decline of Outback tourism in Australia and changes in key markets such as backpackers and self-drive tourists contributed to the difficulty in reviving Katherine's tourism industry following the floods. Katherine tourism demonstrates characteristics consistent with the Beyond Peripherymodel of tourism development in remote or sparsely populated areas. The chapter argues that Katherine has become even more distant and disconnected from tourist markets, investors and policy makers since the floods. Key issues for future development include an increasingly uneven relationship between Katherine and the capital city of Darwin, and an inability to identify alternative markets and development paths independent of the dominant tourism structures in the Northern Territory. Katherine is an example of a remote destination which initially had substantial competitive advantages because of its location and levels of local investment in tourism, but has since lost those advantages due to a failure to respond to changing market forces. The chapter thus emphasises the fragile nature of tourism in remote locations, and its vulnerability to exogenous shocks and changing government priorities, reminding us of the broader challenges for economic development in remote resource peripheries

Natural caprine whey oligosaccharides separated by membrane technology and profile evaluation by capillary electrophoresis

The functional food market is growing rapidly and membrane processing offers several advantages over conventional methods for separation, fractionation and recovery of bioactive components. The aim of the present study was to select a process that could be implemented easily on an industrial scale for the isolation of natural lactose-derived oligosaccharides (OS) from caprine whey, enabling the development of functional foods for clinical and infant nutrition. The most efficient process was the combination of a pre-treatment to eliminate proteins and fat, using an ultrafiltration (UF) membrane of 25 kDa molecular weight cut off (MWCO), followed by a tighter UF membrane with 1 kDa MWCO. Circa 90% of the carbohydrates recovered in the final retentate were OS. Capillary electrophoresis was used to evaluate the OS profile in this retentate. The combined membrane-processing system is thus a promising technique for obtaining natural concentrated OS from whey. Powere

Surface and Self-Aggregation Properties of Bis-Benzimidazolones Derivatives of d-Glucose

The surface and self-aggregation properties in water of a new series of amphiphilic homologues, bis-benzimidazolone derivatives of D-glucose, were investigated. Parameters such as the maximal surface excess concentration, minimal area per molecule at the interface, and critical micelle concentration (CMC) were found to be significantly dependent on the hydrophobic alkyl chain length. The synthesized compounds form micelles at remarkably low concentrations, and CMCs derived from surface tension measurements show a minimum as a function of the alkyl chain length; this unusual trend can be attributed to the formation of submicellar aggregates in compounds with long alkyl chains, as evidenced from fluorescence probe spectroscopy data. At high surfactant concentrations, lyotropic liquid crystalline phases with hexagonal structure are formed. Small angle X-ray scattering measurements indicate that the characteristic nano-scopic lengths increase with water swelling and alkyl chain length.The authors thank Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique et Technique (CNRST) for research support within the frame of the bilateral cooperation program (P2007MA01). The authors are also grateful to the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain (Project CTQ2008-01979/BQU) for fundingPeer reviewe