The Great Barrier Reef and the Tropical North:Tourist Film from Edenic Scene to Precarity

Australia’s tropical north, including the Great Barrier Reef, is both a physical place and a zone of the imagination. The stories and images crafted and deployed in the interests of tourism promotion have been crucial in shaping the idea of the tropical north, especially since the 1930s. Tourist or travel films are designed to play a particularly powerful role in teaching travellers how to experience the islands, coral reefs, waterways and beaches of the north. They are important because they inform tourist behaviours while also shaping expectations and expectations, in turn, eventually shape material environments so that they might function to fulfil fantasies of place.

Australian Diary No. 4, Romantic Days In a Coral Wonderland (1949) – from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

By the 1960s, the national commercialisation of nature as tourist destination had been well iterated in film and other media. Not only the Great Barrier Reef, but Far North and Central Queensland more broadly had been vigorously promoted internationally by the Australian National Film Board (ANFB) and, later, the Commonwealth Film Unit (CFU) with a proliferation of tourist and migration films. The development of the tourist gaze as a central mechanism in the mission to teach travellers how to experience the tropical north rested on two enduring traditions or regimes of knowing and seeing. The first is the South Seas tropical island paradise that is tied to the myth of the garden of Eden and the second is a natural history paradigm, focused on natural wonders. Narratives exploited the island geography and the high seas as a stage for adventure, romance and escapism, leading to the racially and sexually codified South Seas cycle of literature, film and visual art in the 20^th century. While early in the 20^th century images of the Edenic paradise had projected an inaccurate image of the native bush and surrounds of island retreats, gradually, resorts were ‘remodelled’, to reflect the image of a Polynesian island, changing the nonhuman environment. Tourist film and photography played a crucial role in this cycle of expectation and remaking.

Anticipating the Future: The 1960s brought about cultural and technological developments that influences the inter-relationship between tourist film, environment and tourism. There were institutional shifts at the CFU that saw a move beyond the established and formulaic style of classical documentary. In 1958 Pan American Airlines introduced the Boeing 707 and this was the beginning of the consumer-oriented jet age, which replaced propeller aircraft. Speed of travel and increased capacity for passengers fuelled the growth of the tourist industry. Perhaps most importantly, the 1960s saw the revival of Australia’s environmental movement and the Great Barrier Reef was a crucial frontline. Once, as Ann Elias notes “a possession and jewel of empire,” it became a site of precarity and an ideological battleground. The threat of limestone dredging and oil exploration motivated the “Save the Reef” campaign (1967-1975).

In 1967 an application to dredge for limestone on Ellison Reef to supply cheap lime to the local sugar cane industry soon further rallied conservation movements. The dredging would have caused widespread siltation and water pollution along the currents throughout the reef. While a coalition of actors succeeded in blocking this application through legal action, it soon became clear that multiple applications for oil drilling on the reef were also pending. The “Save the Reef” campaign was properly mobilised in 1967 and resulted in the federal government successfully introducing the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act in 1975 protecting the reef. At this turning point, filmmaking about the reef changed. In this unstable time we see the production of, amongst others, the quirky, reflexive, scripted documentaries, From the Tropics to the Snow (1964) and Will the Great Barrier Reef Cure Claude Clough? (1967). These films might be seen as symptoms of a broader culture of change and destabilisation.