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Coral reefs provide important ecosystem services as well as economic and cultural benefits to society. Yet they are under significant threat from anthropogenic and natural threats, including climate change. Australia's Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is one such reef undergoing significant change. More radical interventions that go beyond traditional forms of management are being considered to help repair and restore the GBR. These are based on science and technologies that have yet to be widely tested. This paper reports on a study that seeks to identify and understand support for such interventions, and to understand the antecedents that explain support. The Norm Activation Model (NAM) was extended with a sample of 468 domestic and international tourists to Cairns, Australia. Personal norms had the largest direct influence on support for interventions, followed by attitudes. Awareness of consequences had a large positive impact on personal norms and a smaller positive impact on attitudes. A negative relationship was found between information and attitudes. Personal norms and attitudes also acted as mediators between awareness of consequences, information and support. No differences were found between domestic and international tourists. The results are discussed and theoretical and practical implications outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable destinations must deliver products that perform better than their competitors and at the same time protect key environmental drawcards. This research explores the environmental–economic interface of a major destination, both as a case study in how to approach this complex relationship and as a contribution to the methodology of tackling the need for understanding competitive pressures as part of sustainable tourism strategy creation. Using the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA) as an example, the paper assesses 21 key environmental values, including Indigenous culture, against market-based factors, in terms of their importance for visitors as regional drawcards, satisfaction with them and the way in which changes in them might affect trip numbers and duration across different regions. While the natural values of the GBRWHA are found to be the most important drawcards, satisfaction scores were significantly lower than importance scores for a number of these values. Visitors responded more negatively to the prospect of environmental degradation than to the prospect of a 20% increase in local prices: the detailed impact depends, however, on location and visitor mix. Clear ocean, healthy coral reefs, healthy reef fish, and lack of rubbish were the top four most important values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the world's premier tourist destinations. It is promoted and marketed to tourists as part of an idealised Pacific island paradise. While the gardens and decor of island resorts mimic those of resorts elsewhere in the Pacific, the way in which Indigenous people are represented is markedly different. This paper presents an analysis of historic tourist ephemera to suggest that Australian Aboriginal people are largely invisible at the Great Barrier Reef, despite their role in establishing the tourism industry. It suggests that ambiguities of Aboriginal presence, in labour and performance, are a product of tourism ideals and colonial race relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between tourism, health and well-being is a complex one based on interactions between the motivations of the travellers and the opportunities provided by the destinations. Much of the discussion to date has been dominated by descriptions of emerging opportunities and services, a focus on the provision of services such as health spas and wellness retreats and definitions based on this supply rather than demand. This paper argues that the focus on the supply side can distort our understanding of the phenomenon and therefore focuses on the demand side of wellness tourism and explores tourist motivation in a series of surveys conducted with tourists to Australia's Great Barrier Reef region over a seven year period. An analysis of the changing patterns of travel motivation to this destination provides some evidence that tourist motives to this region have moved towards incorporating a greater focus on aspects of well-being. More detailed examination of the recent surveys revealed the existence of two motive clusters with links to wellness - one focussed on family well-being and the other one emphasizing the restorative elements of being in a natural environment. The results support the existence of two different expressions of an interest in well-being reflecting an inner-outer directedness dichotomy common in psychology. The paper concludes with implications for understanding wellness tourism and tourism motivation in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tourism literature offers a number of different themes related to defining and understanding the long stay, independent travel of younger people often, referred to as backpacking. This paper focuses on the two major themes of differences between backpackers and other tourists, and change over time in backpacking, through an examination of survey data collected from tourists to Australia's Great Barrier Reef in 1996, 2001 (prior to the event of September 11) and in 2002 (prior to the Bali Bombing). Backpackers were compared to Other Younger Travellers at each of these three times on a number of variables including travel party, motivations, type of reef trip chosen, and satisfaction. The results supported three main conclusions. Firstly, Backpackers differed from Other Younger Travellers on a number of variables and they retain some of these differences over time. Secondly, both groups changed over time, reflecting impacts of changes in international travel and contexts. Finally, although significant differences continued to exist between the two groups in each time period, over time tourists in the Other Younger Travellers group became more like Backpackers. The study concludes that the concept of backpacking as a rite de passage is worthy of further consideration and research attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edwin G. Bowen’sWhite Death(1936) is an Australian–American film about shark fishing that stars the American novelist and fisherman Zane Grey as himself. Set mainly at the Great Barrier Reef, it has a semi-fictional plot about Grey’s quest to kill a shark in the face of opposition from an anti-fishing activist, Newton Smith (Alfred Frith). AlthoughWhite Deathwas financially unsuccessful and has received little attention in histories of Australian film or Grey’s life, it is significant in several ways. The film is unusual among early Australian productions for combining elements of the genres of travelogue documentary, fictional adventure film and exotic exploitation film. It reflects an American perspective of Australia as an exotic location. White Death is also linked to the interwar development of tourism at the Great Barrier Reef and foreshadows the growth of the environmental conservation movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publically documented decline in health of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has led to its labelling, in media and academic literature, as a last chance tourism destination. That is, a place tourists travel to experience before it is gone. While the GBR has been labelled as such, no empirical evidence has identified that this is actually occurring. This article explores if tourists are motivated to visit the GBR to see it before it's gone, and examines the level of concern tourists have about the range of issues that are threatening the GBR. Drawing on 235 questionnaires with on-site tourists, the results indicate that tourists are seeking travel to the GBR in a bid to see the reef before it's too late. These tourists - identified as "seeking a last chance experience" - were also found to be more environmentally conscious, and have a higher level of concern about the overall health of the GBR. In terms of threats to the GBR, respondents indicated that they were mainly concerned about coral bleaching/disease and climate change, with tourism only considered as a moderate to low concern. The implications of this are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has become a hot topic for research, but the response of national governments has been relatively cool, particularly in their support for effective mitigation measures to combat the problem. A review of the scientific literature (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]. (2007). Summary for policy makers. In S. Solomon, M. Qin, Z. Manning, M. Chen, K. Marquia, M. Averyt, M. Tignor, & H. Miller (Eds.), Climate change 2007: the physical science basis. Contribution of working group 1 to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York: Cambridge University Press) paints a generally grim view of where the Earth is heading for by the end of the century if effective mitigation strategies are not implemented in the next few years. Mitigation measures of the type required to prevent major environmental damage in the future can only be effective if a global political approach based on agreed levels of climate change gas reduction is implemented. For its part the tourism industry is caught in a trap, unable to adopt meaningful mitigation strategies because of reluctance by consumers to bear the cost of changes that will be required but having to meet the cost of climate change mitigation and adaption strategies when they are introduced in the future. This article proposes a four stage problem definition and response framework with associated models that can be used by the industry to plan for and adapt to climate change both prior to and after the introduction of legislation and policies to combat climate change at the national and international levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]