Linking Culture and the Environment

R. Staiff 229
crafted details positioned within cleverly textured settings. The images
employ a sumptuous palette of colours and an iconography that suggests
peacefulness, solitude and tranquillity (an iconography that powerfully sets
itself up against an urban ‘other’). This imagery is published with extremely
high production values. It is the aesthetics of seduction and the seduction of
the aesthetic. 37
Arriving at Minnamurra is, on one level, a matter of perceptually negotiating
between the images of nature and the ‘real’, a task considerably aided
by the array of posters in the visitors centre, pictures, display boards and a
video of Minnamurra Rainforest that is often played for tourists (and which
can be purchased). On the boardwalk, the visitor experience, like Mount
Dinghu, is highly orchestrated. The pathway cleverly exploits the scenic
properties of the site so that the bridges over the creek, for example, are
located at points which present for the visitor a scene that acts like an overdetermined
pictorial/photographic sensation: such views replicate the conventions
of European picture-making, and in particular, the aesthetic of the
picturesque. 38 These are the ‘spots’ which are instantly photogenic and the
act of photographing them an aesthetic response, albeit choreographed and
thoroughly learnt behaviour. And they are the same ‘spots’ which are reproduced
as postcards back in the visitor centre. It is this circularity which makes
the visual form of a nature aesthetic such a powerful and enduring phenomenon
– the brochures and posters, the actual scene, the photograph by the
visitor which replicates the brochure view and the purchasing of postcards as
mementos which, to complete the circle, then join the ‘archive’ of brochures
and posters. 39 Cultural processes and cultural productions like this – and visuality
and visual culture is but one example – contribute markedly to the
aesthetic determination of the natural environment. Consequently, the cultural
interplay between nature and the European Australian tourist/visitor
becomes a crucial means by which the experience of nature is both enriched
and understood. 40
Conclusion
In the context of sustainability, tourism and national parks, the discussion
illustrates the following propositions:
1. Tourism to national parks enacts (often by design) the deeply embedded
nature/culture doublet.
2. The ‘nature’ of the national park (i.e. the natural environment) is only
understood in its symbiotic relationship to ‘culture’.
3. The culture of nature is as much on display in national parks as the ecology
of nature (although to make this distinction overlooks the cultural mediation
even in the very idea of ‘ecology’).
4. The culture/nature relationship is a site-specific relationship – each culture
negotiates the equivalent of these terms in its own quite unique way, so
that the nature/culture doublet is not the same thing at Dinghushan in China
as it is at Minnamurra Rainforest in Australia.