'Tourism is a major industry in Australia, employing six percent of the working population and directly contributing nearly five percent of GDP in the year ending June 20011. Despite setbacks nationally in provision of transportation and internationally with terrorism fears spooking a major source, the tourism industry appears to continue to develop2, and references to visitor surveys point to widespread and continuing interest in cultural tourism and especially Indigenous Australian tourism opportunities. Various federal, state and territory initiatives exist and are being advanced to support various tourism strategies, including, for example, development of websites as gateways to knowledge of visitor opportunities, and a federally-funded Indigenous Tourism Leadership Group, the latter being a ‘whole of government’ initiative involving co-ordination of the work of several departments, and drawing on a wide range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian experience and interests. The Commonwealth government released this year a discussion paper summarising a variety of proposals as a stage in the development of a ten-year plan.' (Editorial introduction)
'Every once in a while, a scholarly work comes along which, by its very innovation, resists comparison with existing works in the same field. People of the Rivermouth is, I consider, such a work. Taking as its foundation a series of texts developed by Anbarra elder Frank Gurrmanamana (itself an innovative and important enough move), People of the Rivermouth is an interactive, multimedia project which combines those texts with historical and ethnographic material on the Anbarra, and biographical material on the unique relationship between Gurrmanamana and his anthropological collaborator, Les Hiatt. The texts become both a metaphorical and an actual narrative thread which ties together the project’s many and varied elements.' (Introduction)
'On 28 November 2000 the Federal Court sat for a few minutes under a temporary shade outside the Tjuntjuntjara community in remote southeastern Western Australia. I was among the few visitors there, fortunate to witness the first determination of native title in Western Australia; one recognising exclusive possession by the Spinifex People of 55 000 square kilometres of their country against the South Australia border and on the north of the Nullarbor Plain. Displayed behind the Judge were two striking large paintings, the main ones from an exhibition that toured nationally in 2000 and 2001 as the Spinifex Arts Project (Anon. n.d.), reproduced in full colour in this volume.' (Introduction)
'Edwin Thomas, or Guboo Ted Thomas as he was better known, was many things to many people. My comments are restricted mainly to that period when I was most closely associated with him during the 1970s and 1980s in the NSW land rights struggle and the fight to save sacred sites on Mumbulla Mountain.' (Introduction)
