Glorious in Spring, Exhilarating in Winter: Advertising Mount Buffalo in Walkabout Magazine, 1934–1939

Abstract

This article examines advertisements for Mount Buffalo National Park, published in the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA)’s Walkabout magazine in the mid- to late 1930s. Situating these texts in the wider context of ANTA’s documentary archive, I argue that they reveal how ANTA both intuited and sought to shape middle-class settler Australians’ identification and interaction with nature and the nation. Furthermore, ANTA’s estimation of what kinds of experiences middle-class tourists wanted demonstrates mid-century ideas around harnessing nature for development through mass recreation. These advertisements also evoked an idealised vision of Australian nature as an egalitarian and classless playground, where youthful and healthy settlers enjoyed the nation’s great outdoors. The extent to which this vision was ANTA’s alone and the extent to which ANTA produced it according to its perception of the values and aspirations of Walkabout’s middle-class audience is a key consideration of this article.

I am grateful to Andrea Gaynor, Nadia Rhook, Jess Urwin, Ruth Morgan, and the anonymous reviewers of AHS, who all contributed patient and detailed feedback on this work. Thanks also to Tim Rowse and Fiona Paisley, supportive editors who helped see this through to final publication.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston, Travelling Home: Walkabout Magazine and Mid-Twentieth Century Australia (London: Anthem Press, 2016); Mitchell Rolls, “Picture Imperfect: Re-Reading Imagery of Aborigines in Walkabout,” Journal of Australian Studies 33 (2009): 19.

2 M.E. McGuire, “Whiteman’s Walkabout,” Meanjin 52, no. 3 (1993): 517–25; Glen Ross, “‘The Fantastic Face of the Continent’: The Australian Geographical Walkabout Magazine,” Southern Review 32, no. 1 (1999): 27–41; Lynette Russell, Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Constructions of Australian Aboriginalities (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2001). See also Lynette Russell, “Going Walkabout in the 1950s: Images of ‘Traditional’ Aboriginal Australia,” The Olive Pink Society Bulletin 6, no. 1 (1994): 4–8.

3 Rolls, 28.

4 Paolo Magagnoli, “‘A Library of Photographs Covering the Entire Continent’: Walkabout Magazine and the Politics of Documentary in Post-War Australia,” Photography and Culture 13, no. 1 (2020): 29.

5 For an incisive argument on the value of advertising to historians see Paula Johanna Saari, “Marketing Nature: The Canadian National Parks Branch and Constructing the Portrayal of National Parks in Promotional Brochures, 1936–1970,” Environment and History 21 (2015): 401–02. Also, for works that deal with tourist promotion in North America, see Michael Dawson, Selling British Columbia: Tourism and Consumer Culture, 1890–1970 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); William Philpott, Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). For Europe see Rudy Koshar, “‘What Ought to Be Seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (1998): 323–40.

6 Andrea Gaynor, “Harvest of the Suburbs: An Environmental History of Suburban Food Production in Perth and Melbourne, 1880–2000” (PhD thesis, University of Western Australia, 2001), 8–10.

7 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 96–97.

8 On the influence of Inventing Australia see Jessica Carniel, “Richard White’s Inventing Australia: Revisiting the Invention Forty Years Later,” History Australia 18 (2021): 156–67. For other works that have explored visions of nature expressed in landscape photography, see Jarrod Hore, “‘Beautiful Tasmania’: Environmental Consciousness in John Watt Beattie’s Romantic Wilderness,” History Australia 14 (2017), 48–66; Melissa Miles, “Light Nation, and Place in Australian Photography,” Photography and Culture 6 (2013), 259–277; Rod Giblett, “Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 21 (2007), 335–346; Sue Rowley, “The Journey’s End: Women’s Mobility and Confinement,” Australian Cultural History 10 (1991), 69–83.

9 Jarrod Hore, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022); John Hirst, Looking for Australia: Historical Essays, (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2010), 87–90; Jane Lydon, “One People? A Visual Language of Australian Citizenship”, Australian Historical Studies 54, no. 2 (2023): 274–298.

10 Gaynor, “Harvest of the Suburbs,” 10.

11 Australian National Travel Association (hereafter ANTA), Picturesque Australia (Melbourne: W.T. Baker, 1935), 2.

12 ANTA, Australia’s Tourist Business: Coordination of Effort, December 1927, 3. National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA): B300, 7420, Part 2.

13 “Picturesque Australia,” Walkabout 1, no. 12 (1 October 1935): 11.

14 Ibid., 11.

15 Magagnoli, 31. Charles Holmes, “Advertising Australia: The Work of the Australian National Travel Association,” Australian Geographer 2, no. 5 (1935): 40–41.

16 Harold Clapp, Information Bulletin: Extracts from an address (wireless broadcast) by Mr. Harold W. Clapp (circa 1930), NAA: A458, AJ392/3 Part 1.

17 Ibid.

18 Neville Meaney, “Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography,” Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (2001): 81.

19 Ibid.

20 “An Export Commodity that Costs Nothing to Produce,” Walkabout 1, no. 2 (December 1934): 7.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 “Know Your Own Country,” Brisbane Courier, 23 May 1930, 10.

25 ANTA, Tourism in Australia: Necessity for National Advertising, Work of the Australian National Travel Association, Comments on Australia’s Travel Industry and Suggestions to Local Governing Bodies (ANTA, circa 1933–34).

26 Clapp.

27 Meaney, 80.

28 White, viii–ix.

29 Jane Lydon, “One People? A Visual Language of Australian Citizenship,” Australian Historical Studies 54, no. 2 (2023): 277.

30 Michael Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia (Adelaide: Duck Press, 1982), 128.

31 The source of this quotation is Mitchell Rolls, see Rolls, ‘Picture Imperfect’, 28. For works that explore reader agency further see: Dave Morley, “Texts, Readers, Subjects,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, ed. Stuart Hall and others (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 162–73; and Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Hall and others, Culture, Media, 128–38.

32 Melissa Harper and Richard White, “How National Were the First National Parks?: Comparative Perspectives from the British Settler Societies,” in Civilizing Nature: National Parks in Global Historical Perspective, ed. B. Gissibl, S. Höhler, and P. Kupper (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 52. See also Richard White and Caroline Ford, eds., Playing in the Bush: Recreation and National Parks in New South Wales (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012).

33 Melissa Harper, The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2020). Harper’s work follows Thomas Dunlap’s advocacy for a more local approach to human–nature relations. See Thomas Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 119–120.

34 Melissa Harper, “Locating Histories of Bush-Based Recreation in Australia,” History Compass 15, no. 4 (2017): 6.

35 Jacqui Durrant, “Mogullumbidj: First People of Mount Buffalo,” Victorian Historical Journal 91, no. 1 (2020): 30.

36 Ibid., 30.

37 See Russell, “Going Walkabout in the 1950s”; Rolls; McGuire; Jillian E. Barnes, “Resisting the Captured Image: How Gwoja Tjungurrayi, ‘One Pound Jimmy,’ Escaped the ‘Stone Age,’” in Transgressions: Critical Australian Indigenous Histories, ed. Mark Hanna and Ingereth Macfarlane (Canberra: ANU Press, 2007).

38 J.F. Murphy Memorandum, “Aboriginal Corroborees, Suggested Tourist Attractions,” 16 March 1937. NAA: A458, AJ392/3 Part 1.

39 Rolls, 22.

40 As Rolls points out (29), we cannot know how all contemporaries interpreted the magazine’s content.

41 As Nikita Vanderbyl writes, contemporary interest in Indigenous culture tended to be on reserves and missions where Indigenous people were confined to ‘neat cottages, school rooms and church services that provided a pleasurable mix of the familiar and the exotic’. See Nikita Vanderbyl, “‘The Happiest Time of my Life’: Emotive Visitor Books and Early Mission Tourism to Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves,” Aboriginal History 41 (2017): 96. See also Toby Martin, “‘Socialist Paradise’ or ‘Inhospitable Island?’: Visitor Responses to Palm Island in the 1920s and 1930s,” Aboriginal History 38 (2014): 131–53.

42 Josh Woodward, “Pioneers, Progress and the Sublime: Blue Mountains Tourist Promotion, 1885–1894,” History Australia 20, no. 1 (2022): 13–16.

43 Hore, Visions of Nature, 6.

44 Robert Crawford, “Selling Modernity: Advertising and the Construction of the Culture of Consumption in Australia, 1900–1950,” Antipodean Modern: ACH, 25 (2006): 114–43.

45 “Walkabout Geographic Magazine,” The Katoomba Daily, 29 November 1935, 2.

46 Roger Osborne, “A National Interest in an International Market: The Circulation of Magazines in Australia During the 1920s,” History Australia 5, no. 3 (2008): 1–16; Vane Lindesay, The Way We Were: Australian Popular Magazines 1856–1969 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1983). Rolls and Johnston, Travelling Home, 31.

47 Colin Symes, “Motion Pictures: An Analysis of the Posters of Victorian Railways during the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of Tourism History 7, no. 3 (2015): 210–27; Colin Symes, “‘Even Our 2nd Class Cars Are More Comfortable than Motor Buses!’: An Analysis of Victorian Railway Posters between the Wars,” Journal of Australian Studies 40, no. 3 (2016): 353–71.

48 Josh Woodward, “Selling Mount Buffalo National Park: Victorian Railways, Harold Clapp and the Blueprint for National Park Promotion in Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 45, no. 3 (2021): 371–84.

49 John Sinclair, “Agents of ‘Americanisation’: Individual Entrepreneurship and the Genesis of Consumer Industries,” Journal of Australian Studies 31, no. 90 (2007): 17–33; John Sinclair, “Making the Market Modern: Sir Harold Clapp, Engineer of Consumption,” in Consumer Australia: Historical Perspectives, ed. R. Crawford, J. Smart, and K. Humphery (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar, 2010) 27–38; Jim Davidson and Peter Spearritt, Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2000); Katie Holmes and Kylie Mirmohamadi, “All Aboard the Train for Modernity: The Better Farming Train,” Agricultural History 91, no. 2 (2017): 215–38.

50 Julia Horne, The Pursuit of Wonder: How Australia’s Landscape Was Explored, Nature Discovered and Tourism Unleashed (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2005); White, 85–109.

51 White, 108. White attributes McCubbin’s quote to Bernard Smith, ed., Documents on Art and Taste in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), 274–75.

52 A.M. Willis, Picturing Australia: A History of Photography (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1988), 61.

53 Ibid., 60–61.

54 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 396.

55 Woodward, “Pioneers, Progress and the Sublime,” 14. Siobhan Levelle, “A Tree and a Legend: The Making of Past and Place in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 89 (2003): 1–25; Grace Karskens, “The Blue Mountains Crossings: New Histories from the Old Legends,” Journal of Australian Colonial History 16 (2014): 197–200.

56 “Skiing in Australia,” Walkabout 4, no. 8 (June 1938): 13–18.

57 “Ski with Skardarasy,” Walkabout 2, no. 9 (July 1936): 54.

58 Ibid., 16.

59 Dunlap, 108–09.

60 Symons, 110–24.

61 Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 23.

62 Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 29.

63 Denning, 70.

64 Ibid.

65 For more on contemporary gender attitudes towards male and female activity see Melissa Harper, The Ways of the Bushwalker, 115. On women and consumer culture, see Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

66 On the difficulties of male practitioners intuiting female patterns of consumption in early Australian advertising, see Robert Crawford, But Wait, There's More! A History of Australian Advertising, 1900–2000 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 150–51.

67 Celmara Pocock, Visitor Encounters with the Great Barrier Reef: Aesthetics, Heritage and the Senses, (New York: Routledge, 2020).

68 Robert Crawford, “Learning to Say G’Day to the World: The Development of Australia’s Marketable Image in the 1980s,” Consumption Markets & Culture 13 (2010): 43–59.

69 See Andrea Gaynor, “Grappling with “Nature” in Australian Home Gardens, 1890–1960,” Environment and History 24 (2018): 27–28.

70 John Hirst, “The Pioneer Legend,” Australian Historical Studies 18, no. 71 (1978): 316–37.

71 “Ski-ing Season: Good Snow at the Alpine Resorts,” The Argus, 30 June 1936, 6.

72 “Railways’ News Bulletin: Inter-state Visitors for Mount Buffalo National Park,” Upper Murray and Mitta Herald, 2 September 1937, 4.

73 “News of the Day: Back to Work,” The Age, 29 December 1943, 2.