'New Age Trippers': Aboriginality and Australian New Age Travel Books

In the last two decades of the twentieth century Australia became an attractive travel destination for alienated middle-class Westerners in search of a spiritual utopia. In such texts Aboriginality is represented as a source of spiritual transcendence and as a remedy of the evils of modern consumerism and industrialisation. This article examines a number of books by white New Age spiritual travellers - James Cowan's Two Men Dreaming (1995), Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under (1994), and Harvey Arden's Dreamkeepers (1995) - that claim to (re)discover a lost, universal, sacred heritage within Aboriginal cosmologies. The discourses employed by recent Australian New Age travel texts are prima facie examples of postcolonial forms of cultural appropriation. Yet, the involvement of indigenous agents in the production, promotion, and critique of such texts complicates the argument that these texts are simply new forms of cultural colonisation.