Is Tourism a Joke?

Tourism Australia has had a potted history since the halcyon days of Paul Hogan’s “Put another shrimp on the barby!!!” TV advert from back in 1986, which in 5 years boosted Australian tourism figures from 800,000 to 2.4 million.

There is a perception that Australia is now less successful in attracting overseas tourists, yet there were 5.6 million visitors during the year ended 31 January 2010, unchanged relative to the previous year.

The media tend to measure our success by the advertising campaigns and the results they achieve.

Tourism Australia’s current effort is directed at public participation, through the use of social networking. Banking on word-of-mouth recommendations.

The new campaign will target digital marketing, video, TV, print and cinema and is intended to encourage people to visit small towns they may not normally go to.

Tourism Australia will ask Australians to upload photos of their favourite holiday spots and write 25 words starting with “There’s nothing like . . . “ about the destination on the website www.nothinglikeaustralia.com

Being announced within proximity to April Fool’s Day resulted in the idea being quickly hijacked by the parody web site nothinglikeaustralia.net

Satirising the ad campaign by taking pot shots at alleged Tasmanian inbreeding, the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin feeding a croc with one hand while holding baby Bob in the other and images of Lindy Chamberlain, a surfboard rider amongst sharks, a reference to Harold Holt, the Cronulla riots, Kiwis and boat people.

Tasmania is the only state of Australia that is separated from the mainland by water. Owing to the isolation and the small population base, mainlanders often joke that Tasmanians have two heads due to inbreeding. Needless to say, this is not true.

A controversial incident occurred during a public show on 2 January 2004 at the Australia Zoo in Queensland, when Steve Irwin carried his one-month-old son, Bob, in his arm while hand-feeding a chicken carcass to Murray, a 3.8-metre (12 ft 6 in) saltwater crocodile.

Lindy Chamberlain was at the centre of one of Australia’s most publicised murder trials, in which she was wrongly convicted of killing her baby daughter, Azaria. The conviction was later overturned.

The Daily Telegraph has an excellent web page which deals with the threat of sharks in Australian waters at… http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/indepth/sharks

Harold Holt was the 17th Prime Minister of Australia who disappeared in December 1967 while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, and was presumed drowned.

The summer 2005 Cronulla riots were a series of racially motivated riots and mob violence originating in Cronulla, New South Wales and spreading, over the next few nights, to additional Sydney suburbs.

The Cronulla riots followed an assault on two volunteer surf lifesavers by a group of eight Middle Eastern Men at North Cronulla Beach. At a time when there were almost daily assaults by young Lebanese men on Australian women, whilst trying to “pick them up” and denigrating them as being “Aussie sluts”.

New Zealand and Australia are neighbours and fierce sporting rivals. As a result there’s a lot of mostly good natured humour with each taking pot shots at the other.

New Zealand has a high sheep to people population, so the Australians joke about the Kiwis having sex with sheep. The New Zealanders often reverse this and depict Aussies having sex with kangaroos.

This may apply to illegal immigrants who arrive courtesy of people smugglers and when approved, often are the recipients of social welfare payments. The situation is then exacerbated if a number do not wish to assimilate with Australian society, yet expect Australian laws to be modified to adhere to their religious and cultural beliefs, particularly when they are at odds with mainstream Australian society. In some cases, deeming the western dress fashions of Australian women to be immoral and wanting changes so that Sharia or Islamic law becomes a part of our fabric.

It is understood the mock website nothinglikeaustralia.net was registered in the US just minutes after Tourism Australia revealed the new tagline – and the first ads lampooning the campaign appeared just two hours after the launch.

The web site administrators shield their identity using a Whois guard to block detailed searches on the site’s origin.

   Domain Name: NOTHINGLIKEAUSTRALIA.NET
   Registrar: ENOM, INC.
   Whois Server: whois.enom.com
   Referral URL: http://www.enom.com
   Name Server: DNS1.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM
   Name Server: DNS2.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM
   Name Server: DNS3.REGISTRAR-SERVERS.COM
   Status: clientTransferProhibited
   Updated Date: 30-mar-2010
   Creation Date: 30-mar-2010
   Expiration Date: 30-mar-2011

They emphasise that their site is not affiliated with Tourism Australia and that their use of Tourism Australia trademarks is for purposes of parody and satire only.

If that wasn’t enough, Tourism New Zealand tried to steal some of Australia’s thunder by buying online ads that accompanied news stories about the new Australian campaign.

For a period, the Australian campaign was also mocked by a Facebook page set up by Tourism New Zealand, where a caption stated: “Nothing like Australia. 100% betterer, 100% Pure New Zealand”.

Tourism Australia hope they have it right this time after the debacle surrounding Lara Bingle’s controversial “So where the bloody hell are you?” ads. It was a AU$180 million advertising campaign launched in 2006 and created by the Sydney office of the London advertising agency M & C Saatchi.

The commercial ends with bikini-clad model Lara Bingle at Fingal Spit stepping out of the ocean and asking, “So where the bloody hell are you?”.

Unfortunately, the advertising campaign was banned by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre in the United Kingdom, which would not allow the word “bloody” in television versions of the commercial. Later the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK ordered the removal of roadside billboards bearing the slogan.

The advertisement was also banned by regulators in Canada, owing to the implication of “unbranded alcohol consumption” by the opening line, “We’ve bought you a beer”. There was also concern in Canada at the word ‘hell’ being used as an expletive.

The campaign received massive press coverage, but it was soon deemed a failure and withdrawn.

News Limited newspapers pointed out that the campaign had hoped to attract visitors to Australia from Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom, but tourist figures show that during October 2006 the number of Japanese tourists visiting Australia fell by 5.7% in comparison with the same period in 2005. German tourists were down 4.7% and UK visitors dropped 2.3%, although there was a slight increase in tourists from the United States and the People’s Republic of China (where the advertisement was not screened).

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s satirical show “The Chaser’s War on Everything” had fun with it when they broadcast their version with the slogan “So get your fucking arse over here!”.

In contrast, Tourism Australia and the internationally renowned film-maker Baz Luhrmann coordinated efforts to coincide a sophisticated destination campaign with the release of his epic movie titled “Australia”, which starred Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

The message of the new commercials was, “Sometimes, we have to get lost to find ourselves. Sometimes, we gotta go walkabout.”

But then you can’t please all the people all the time when Australian actor and comedian Paul Hogan criticised the campaign, saying the country should be promoted as it was when he was involved – focussing on the ‘friendly residents’.

“I’m not crazy about it. If I go to your house for a visit and I want to come back, it’s because I enjoyed your company, not your furniture,” explains Hogan.

In 1986, it was a former Minister for Sport, Recreation and Tourism, John Brown who initiated the series of television advertisements for the Australian Tourism Commission, that were successfully marketed to America with Paul Hogan saying, “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you”.

According to Brown, the shrimp on the barbie ad, is in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington as an icon of advertising. There’s only four from around the world over all time and it’s one of them.

He said, “It took us from 1788 to 1983, which is 195 years, to get to 800,000 visitors a year. We put Hogan on TV in America, basically in America, and in the next five years we went from 800,000 to 2.4 million. And that was the basis of the Tourism Industry, the modern Tourism Industry, in Australia.”

Brown gives a lot of the credit to Paul Hogan for, “…improving our image, or giving us an image – we basically didn’t have one before that, we were seen as a zoo, you know, interesting marsupials and no people – and giving the world that view of Australia as a welcoming happy place and the Australian individuals as being laid back, irreverent and very happy – you couldn’t estimate what that meant.”

Meanwhile Robin Williams joked that Australians were just ‘English rednecks’ during an appearance on the Dave Letterman show in the U.S.

For an academic’s perspective on Australian tourism, please click HERE to view the observations of… Dr Robert Crawford, a senior Lecturer in Public Communication with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney.