Since their early encounters with European settlers, Australian Aboriginal people have allegedly been on the brink of extinction. As was popularly assumed, their ‘cultures’ would not be able to deal with the onset of modernisation that the arrival of the settlers in 1788 had heralded. The trope of culture loss has persisted ever since, and continues to exert its influence into the present. A prominent frame within which a process of ‘losing culture’ is entertained and through which it may be countered today, can be found in forms of Australian cultural tourism. Invigorating culture in a tourism context ostensibly works to preserve a vital Indigenous ‘heritage’ as well as to educate younger generations in the value of that ‘heritage’. Furthermore, cultural tourism is presented as a key to providing non-Indigenous Australians and overseas visitors with a constructive introduction to the diversity of Indigenous Australian cultures.

Notwithstanding the appropriateness of this faith in certain benevolent effects of tourism as well as in the kind of knowledge that can be disseminated in such settings, the encounter between tourists and Aborigines has emerged as a significant context in which a conception of ‘Aboriginal culture’ is cultivated and performed in continuous reference to a non-Indigenous presence. Merlan (1989: 106) notes that an emphasis on ‘‘culture’ objectified as goods, products and performances’ has become increasingly prominent, as has the idea that ‘culture’ ‘as a distinctive repertoire… differentiates Aborigines in general from Europeans’ (106). The point I wish to develop in this paper follows onto Merlan's observations (1989; see also 1998). Seen from the Indigenous perspective, the presence of tourism, I argue, helps to forge and sustain a sense of identity and to gain recognition as an Aboriginal person in relation to non-Indigenous others in a valuable way. In a time in which much of Indigenous affairs and policy development is discussed negatively in Australia the value of an affirmative interface with non-Indigenous people becomes great. I suggest that the rather trouble-free nature of ‘Aboriginal culture’ in tourist performances provides an appealing notion, serving as a type of ‘antidote’ to the far more obstinate nontourist practice as well as the non-Indigenous scrutiny of the transmission and maintenance of knowledge in, for instance, issues of land rights and Native Title that continue to affect Aboriginal people's lives (cf. Merlan 1998; Povinelli 2002).