Assessing the tourism potential of an Australian industrial icon

Abstract

In 2015, the remote mining community of Broken Hill became the first Australian city to be inscribed on the National Heritage List. The City Council’s strategic plans reflect an expectation that the inscription will lead to an increase in tourism. A better understanding of the core dimensions of a successful and sustainable cultural heritage tourism product would enhance the effectiveness of this planning process. There are, however, few instruments designed to assess the tourism potential of complex and extensive industrial heritage landscapes like Broken Hill. Building on previous work by McKercher and Ho (2006), this paper identifies five core value dimensions for such an instrument – cultural, physical, product, experience and sustainability. The instrument is then tested on Broken Hill and three comparable industrial World Heritage sites. While Broken Hill’s cultural, physical and sustainability dimensions rate strongly, the product and experience dimensions rate poorly effectively precluding the city from functioning as a viable attraction in its current state. The city’s remoteness and isolation from other attractions, the complexity and deterioration of mining infrastructure, and the lack of a major mining-related tourist attraction exacerbate the weaknesses