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Nineteenth-century outlaws (those who live ‘outside of the law’), highwaymen or bandits were known as ‘bushrangers’ in Australia. The myth of ‘bushrangers’ holds a strong place in Australia’s national identity and is often featured within popular culture. Many Australian rural/regional towns have a close affiliation with their bushranger past and have built tourist attractions showcasing the lives and exploits of these personalities. This chapter explores tourism sites that have been created around two iconic bushrangers within rural Australia: Ned Kelly (in NSW and Victoria) and Captain Thunderbolt (NSW). Tourism sites centred on bushrangers can also play an important role in creating ‘storyscapes’ of criminal activity across a broad geographical location, encompassing several towns and thus providing tourism opportunities for a region, rather than one specific town. As such, bushrangers offer rural and regional areas the opportunity for ‘trailscape’ tourism, and multiple merchandising prospects.
Carceral tourism encompasses criminal justice sites such as decommissioned prisons, police and courthouse museums. Despite the pain inflicted on inmates while being incarcerated, such dark tourism sites offer tourists a ‘lighter’ way to engage in criminal justice debates. The focus of the sites is often on educating visitors (following specific politically sanctioned narratives) in a light-hearted, fun-centric way that also offers multiple merchandise options. Visitors to these sites are often encouraged to participate in the criminal justice process – be arrested, sentenced, locked up and maybe even threatened with execution. At night, tourists are invited to participate in ghost tours and are told even more gruesome and confronting stories of justice being enacted (or evaded). This chapter explores a range of decommissioned prisons and courthouses in rural Australia, as well as a police museum in Sydney to explore crime and justice in rural areas (and the representation of rurality within the exhibits). Carceral tourism in rural and regional Australia has been highly influenced by a commercial ethic, with sites being preserved specifically because of the tourism interest in crime and justice.
Dark tourism surrounding colonial violence against First Nations populations often relates to ‘warfare tourism’, which can include travel to battlefields, memorials, cemeteries, sites of incarceration and enslavement, locations of frontier violence, and peace parks. This is an overlooked type of dark tourism travel, both by scholars and tourists themselves. Indeed, such sites tend to be less acknowledged or advertised, less developed and ‘commodified’ and, importantly, there has been a historical focus on silencing Aboriginal narratives of colonial violence, which has made the development of such sites ‘hidden’ or neglected. This chapter explores a range of colonial violence tourism sites in rural Australia including the boab trees (also known as ‘Prison Trees’) and memorials/monuments to colonial massacres. In addition, two museums are analysed to understand how colonial violence is represented and dealt with, with a particular focus on rurality.
While the narratives presented at rural and regional dark tourism sites are similar to those found in urban areas, rural and regional sites can offer a vastly different experience to the tourist, particularly those locations that have become dystopic among an idyllic setting. The remoteness of each location adds more experience and affect for the tourist by increasing feelings of isolation or heightening natural sounds that may take on a more sinister association at night during ghost tours – tourists are more fully immersed in such locations. This chapter reflects on the case studies presented throughout the book to identify the diverse features of rural and regional dark tourism sites. Specifically, the following common themes are explored: the possible benefits of dark tourism to remote areas, such as economic and cultural advantages to local communities; the unique constraints or considerations facing tourism providers in geographically isolated areas; the corrupting dystopian influence of dark sites in otherwise idyllic sceneries; and the potential for such tourism to be seen as problematic.
Australia’s cultural heritage is intricately linked to its convict past. Convicts were essentially transported to provide human labour resources for the creation of a European-based society in Australia. The buildings and sites that incarcerated convicts have become popular tourist destinations because they resonate with the popular ‘imagined’ or romanticised convict past. Within Australia, the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania is one of the oldest and best-preserved convict sites. It is also one of Australia’s first dark tourism sites. Despite its geographical isolation on the Tasman Peninsula, tourism to Port Arthur began while it still housed convicts and continues to this day. Such tourism often involves extensive (and expensive) travel requirements. The history of dark tourism to Port Arthur is explored in this chapter to demonstrate the ongoing fascination with incarceration (and the pain and suffering that accompanies it) despite political and community desires to forget what was deemed as an unsavoury past.
Bringing a unique rural lens to the analysis of dark tourism in Australia, this book covers a range of sites including convict museums, sites of serial killings and colonial violence, ghost tours and the emerging tourism of bushfire sites.
While some rural communities develop a ‘dark tourism strategy’ to maintain economic viability, others may distance themselves from what they perceive to be unethical tourism practices. Jenny Wise examines the roles geographical locations play in dark tourist sites, and how their histories are portrayed, considering how the concept of the rural idyll or dystopia plays a part in Australia’s national identity.
Notoriety can often overtake small towns. Impromptu tourism to sites of murder and crime continues to occur across the world, and the sites themselves become irrevocably intertwined with the name of the location. This chapter looks at ‘deadly towns’, ghost and crime tours, tourism associated with natural disasters and the growing nature of online dark tourism which may bolster knowledge of rural locations too remote to access in person. Many of the locations discussed in this chapter are not formally recognised tourist destinations, and some have an associated level of danger attached to visiting these sites (such as deadly towns or post-disaster tourism). The rural provides tourists with sites that explore death and destruction in a safe environment. As such, tourists can venture into the uncivilised outback to witness the horrors of nature (bushfires), human-induced catastrophes (deadly towns) or dystopian events (murders) against the beautiful landscape of the outback with the knowledge that the experience is transient and that they can return to the safety of the city.
Society has a growing fascination with dark tourism, with tourism to sites of death and atrocity becoming a ‘trendy’ form of leisure. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of dark tourism and explores the key issues associated with tourism to some of the ‘unhappiest places on Earth’. Dark tourism involves travelling to sites of death, violence, atrocity and pain. The motivations of visitors vary widely, from wanting to be educated, entertained and/or to memorialise a particular atrocity. Regardless of motivations, dark tourism is a cultural activity where tourists are immersed in a pre-selected narrative that shapes how tourists understand the site. In rural sites, this is often ‘sold’ as being a rural dystopia, where the idyllic rural landscape or community has been subverted by the evil act/actions to become sinister or monstrous. Tourism to rural areas is generally seen as beneficial for the local economy, however, not all local communities want to be associated with tragic events.
Travel to sites associated with serial killers (whether that be burial sites, sites of the murders or even simply where the serial killer lived or visited frequently) is another popular tourist activity worldwide. In many cases, sites associated with serial killers become impromptu dark tourism sites with visitors travelling vast distances to see first-hand where people were murdered or later buried. This impromptu tourism can turn into purposeful tourism where communities capitalise on the tourist interest. For example, communities may start to sell souvenirs related to the murders or offer guided tours outlining the crimes. Three case studies (Ivan Milat, the Snowtown murders and the Port Arthur massacre) are explored in this chapter to explore how sensational crimes linked to serial and mass killings can attract large crowds of tourists and how some communities capitalise on this tourism, while others try to distance themselves from the dystopic connections.
