Tourism, Indigeneity, and the Importance of Place

The book presents a long-term ethnographic study of arguably the largest environmental protest action in Australian history: The Walmadany / James Price Point conflict. Carsten Wergin offers a detailed account of how local community members, Indigenous custodians, heritage preservationists, environmentalists, and tourists collaboratively joined forces to successfully oppose the construction of a $45 billion (AUD) liquefied natural gas facility on sacred Indigenous land. Tourism, Indigeneity and the Importance of Place is a close reading of Aboriginal ‘country’ and its living heritage. It follows the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, an Indigenous Tourism experience that would have been destroyed by the LNG project, to offer a timely discussion of the sociocultural and political relevance of heritage and tourism for ecological preservation and the wider decolonial project in Australia and beyond.

For more information, check out A Conversation with Carsten Wergin, author of Tourism, Indigeneity, and the Importance of Place: Fighting for Heritage at Australia’s Last Frontier