Heritextuality : a study in an emergent discipline of touristic discource

This thesis defines a new transdisciplinary field o fheritextuality as cultural productions designed for touristic consumption containing elements of historical information. Its focus is on touristic discourse in and about Tasmania in the twentieth century. As such, the thesis identifies for analysis and study, heritexts like travelogues, tourist guides, promotional films, photographic essays, advertising media, and postcards employing a methodological approach that combines archival research, historical survey and textual analysis. In its discussion of heritexts, the thesis examines the convergence between history and tourism as evidenced in the variety of textual forms, including the visual, produced for touristic consumption. It argues that such touristically constructed heritexts constantly generate and inform distinctive and discrete versions of the past that influence and inform popular conceptions of history, and that define a touristic sense-of-place independent of scholarly historical discourse. Heritextuality facilitates specific negotiations of historical elements that are not accessible to, and that operate outside of, the usual constraints of conventional historical discourse. This study highlights the arbitrary relationship that allows heritexts to reconfigure historical events, particularly those otherwise considered problematic, for its own touristic purposes. The thesis examines how this process occurs. The study focuses on the inner workings of the Tasmanian tourist bureaucracy, highlighting early collaborative projects between the Tasmanian Government Tourist Bureau and producers of heritexts like Frank Hurley, Bill Beatty, E.T. Emmett, Charles Barrett and Michael Sharland. This research identifies the ways in which the production and consolidation of heritextuality continues to shape and inform contemporary uses of history in touristic contexts.