6 October

We’re just back from a short Queensland holiday. Visited Sea World again, to give Alice a taste of theme parks (she’s never been). We were all bored by everything except seeing some marine life, and winced at $13 servings of hot chips. Theme parks are interesting though because they’re the root model for all tourism. To transform a location into entertainment, for visitors. There’s an escalation of ‘thrills’ at tourism sites, to try to keep tourists stimulated. It never lasts, they move on, bored, to find other thrills, elsewhere, leaving a trashed location behind them. We consume the landscape in Australia, mostly with farming, mining and tourism. It becomes a resource. We wallow in a confected numinosity of our fantasy called the outback, or at one of our tens of thousands of beaches. It’s all in our heads, we’re travelling through our own fantasies, like leafing through postcards. The land is absolutely stunning, but we have no meaningful connection to it at all. We’re just ‘seeing’ it, literally like looking at/living in postcards. Camping in it doesn’t bring you any closer to it. That’s our Crocodile Dundee fantasy. Most campers have tens of thousands of dollars worth of gear. But even with just a swag, physical presence in a landscape creates no actual connection with it. Or people avoid the tourist hot spots, not realising they’re just creating the new tourist hot spots. Reproducing the same model. We enjoyed our time, mostly because it was us time together. But none of us really like invading places where other people, plants and animals live. I love just being in the Pacific Ocean for a while. But am always mindful that I live in a culture that is a tourist in its own land. That knows Australia only as one of many theme parks, even if only some are directly called that. Byron Bay is now a theme park. Where we retire to travel throughout the land, as permanent tourists. Tourists in our own land, it’s absolutely perverse. Thinking if we accumulate enough sights, we’re somehow closing this void of connection with it. But culturally, we don’t see it. That’s our problem to solve. We have no idea how.