It\u27s not about believing: exploring the transformative potential of cultural acknowledgement in an Indigenous tourism context

This paper directly challenges the persisting argument that in the host–(uninvited) guest relationship of Kimberley coastal tourism in Australia\u27s far northwest, Traditional Owners (the hosts) have a pedagogic responsibility to first educate the tourism industry (the guests) of their impacts on them in order to facilitate culturally appropriate and sustainable tourism experiences. We contend that such an argument reflects a deeply entrenched context of erasure and power imbalance between Australian Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. We highlight, using three decades of public records, the fact that government and industry have ignored and continue to ignore knowledge and learning shared by Kimberley Aboriginal peoples in attempts to rectify serious issues of cultural impacts and risks to visitors arising from unsanctioned tourism activities on Traditional Owners’ land and sea country. We argue for the possibility of tourism operating in a mutually satisfactory hybrid space in which acknowledgement, tolerance and respect discharges the need for understanding different ontologies that operate within that space but provides the potential for learning. Using Bourdieu\u27s notion of transformative practice, we propose that the development of such a hybrid space could transform the problem of unsanctioned tourism access to the Kimberley coast into an iteration that could facilitate its taming and thus a shift towards sustainable practices based on mutual recognition and respect

The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics and the Artful Business of Creating Spaces for Kardiya to Hear and Feel Across Difference

Slater\u27s focus is settler Australia\u27s inability to hear Aboriginal people on their own terms. The chapter explores a five-day cultural immersion and knowledge programme-run at the KALACC festival, Kimberley, Western Australia-in which government and non-government agencies were invited to \u27listen in\u27 to how traditional owners envision the \u27problems\u27 and \u27solutions\u27 to pressing issues in their lives, and how the grant-makers might support community-driven solutions. The festival is an untranslatable space-an anti-festival-in which the Kimberley Aboriginal world is not readily accessible and understandable to non-Indigenous people. She examines the event as an invitation for non-Indigenous Australians to recognise their crisis of hearing and listen across difference. Ethical listening, and thus transforming the foundations of settler colonialism, requires creating spaces for respectful non-comprehension