Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome…

Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome and ‘experience it for themselves’. Many already do. I want to challenge that seeming a good thing to do, because doing that is what destroys these places. /1 https://t.co/HCYsfHasa9

We treat place with total disrespect, because we don’t even know what it means any more. If you found a home or person breathtaking, you wouldn’t turn up at the home and wander inside, or stalk the person (I hope). We know those things are not right. /2

But with places, we just automatically assume it’s our right to invade them, whenever we like. Economies encourage it, it’s ‘great for tourism’. We have absolutely zero conception of the sanctity of PLACE. We treat it all as space, a completely different thing. /3

Place is as much if not more sacred than the personal space of a human being, or the space of somebody’s home. If we admire those things, we do it from a respectful distance. But we don’t do that with places. We charge n there like a herd of rhinos, trashing it. /4

To feed our ‘experiences’. It’s ‘broadening our minds’! Pig’s arse. How many people have you met who became fundamentally different people, because they travel? Very few to none. This casual invasion of place is the exact way we don’t understand Aboriginal Australia. /5

We think their passion and connection to place is some archaic thing, a primitive throwback. We’re the primitives. Descendants of empire, with no respect for place. We accumulate it like stamps. ‘I’ve been everywhere, man’. 6/6