13 research outputs found
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
The geoarchaeology of land-claim in coastal wetlands: a sketch from Britain and the north-west European AtlanticâNorth Sea coasts
Sensual, material, and technological understanding: exploring prehistoric soundscapes in south India
Recent years have witnessed an increased interest within archaeology in the non-visual senses, and particularly sound. To date, however, most studies have focused on the evidence for musical instruments and the acoustic properties of special structures and spaces, like monuments and caves. This study reports on further evidence for special musical activities at the prehistoric site of Sanganakallu-Kupgal in south India, but then also moves on to a discussion of the acoustic dimension of more mundane Neolithic technological and productive activities, like flint-knapping, axe-grinding, and crop production. It focuses on the evidence for links between such activities at Sanganakallu-Kupgal, based on shared material, gestural, and acoustic properties, and argues that the hammering of ringing rocks to make music was only one aspect of a wider Southern Neolithic cultural propensity to address technological and ritual requirements by applying stone against stone. The article attempts to bring to recent discussions of the senses an awareness of the materiality of sensory experience, which, despite recent interest in the body, remains marginalized in theoretical accounts