Linking Culture and the Environment

228 Cultural Inscriptions of Nature
and philosophical ‘text’ to be learnt and understood. For the visitor to Mount
Dinghu, nature is the source of spiritual health (meditation and contemplation);
aesthetic health (the scenic beauty of the place); physical health (breathing
‘good’ air, swimming, walking, doing tai-chai and having a foot massage);
and moral health (right thinking and right living). There could be no better
illustration of a national park as a site of semiosis: every aspect of nature is
only visible via the interpretation of a number of sign-laden processes that
are grounded in the sociocultural contexts of southern China.
Minnamurra Rainforest, Australia
Minnamurra Rainforest Education Centre is located within Budaroo National
Park on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia. The national park is
within a 2 h drive from the city of Sydney and has 5 million potential visitors
from Sydney. The site protects an ecologically sensitive and important remnant
of the once extensive Illawarra rainforest and the scenically attractive escarpment
waterfalls of the Minnamurra River. Due to its recreational value and use
in the late 1800s, the site was proclaimed a reserve in 1896 (Worboys et al., 1995).
Minnamurra, an aboriginal word of the Wadi Wadi people meaning
‘plenty of fish’, is deemed ecologically important because of a number of reasons:
the diversity in the soils and topography; the site supports most of the
rainforest species found in southern New South Wales; it supports most of
the species of ferns found in New South Wales; the site contains many large
specimen trees, including some uncommon species; it is an important site for
rainforest fauna, and a number of species of plants and animals it supports
are nationally threatened including several of statewide conservation importance
(Mills and Jakeman, 1995). Minnamurra’s core function, after it was
taken over by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (New South Wales) in
1986, was deemed to be educational. The Centre provides numerous interpretative
programmes for school, special-interest tour groups and the general
public. Although the visitor centre is pivotal and acts as a transition zone
between the built and natural environment at Minnamurra, the rainforest
itself was always envisioned as the ‘real’ education centre.
The cultural dynamics at Minnamurra are fundamentally different from
Mount Dinghu although, at the level of tourism infrastructure and the design
of the tourist experience, there are many similarities. Minnamurra is a good
example of the way a forest is aestheticized within the traditions of European
neo-Romanticism. 36 The culture/nature interface sets up, and works within,
a series of associations that are activated long before the visitor arrives at the
gates of the Park. Promotional material is but one example. Tourist brochures,
the marketing literature of National Parks in New South Wales, television
nature documentaries and the recent explosion of coffee table books on the
‘natural’ world by highly professional photographers and design artists have
all conspired over the years to construct and widely circulate a particular
image of nature. This image is either one of breathtaking panoramic scenery,
where the viewer often soars above the landscape, or images of beautifully