Visiting settlers: Anna Dunn, Barry Judd, ‘Indigenous-settler relations at work in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park’s tourism industry’, Tourism Geographies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Visiting settlers: Anna Dunn, Barry Judd, ‘Indigenous-settler relations at work in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park’s tourism industry’, Tourism Geographies, 2025

11Oct25

Abstract: The Australian settler government has repeatedly promised indigenous peoples (Anangu) of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park that they will benefit from settler government’s use of their lands as a significant tourism destination, yet the anangu community of Uluru remains one of the poorest communities in Australia. this article utilises historical analysis and qualitative interviews with Anangu, Parks staff, and tourism staff to chart key dynamics in the relationship between the tourism industry and anangu over 39 years of Joint Management in the Park. We show how the prioritisation of settler logics of tourism and work over Anangu benefit is not just an arbitrary cultural decision meted out in day-to-day interpersonal relations but is built into the geographies and temporalities of work in the Park. highlighting how anangu benefit is deferred through settler logics of work draws attention to the possibility for alternatives that are founded on indigenous lifeworlds. this article’s analytic focus on quotidian, relational dynamics in intercultural contexts brings insights from indigenous and settler colonial studies into tourism research and demonstrates a new way of identifying opportunities for transformation in indigenous tourism industries in settler colonies. From a practical perspective, these insights underscore the importance of developing shared understandings of what meaningful and good “work” is in intercultural industries and highlights possible interventions into entrenched dynamics between indigenous and settler peoples in these contexts.

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