The earliest tourism marketing campaigns for Central Australia drew inspiration from Charles Holmes’ We Find Australia,[6] Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen’s Arunta: A study of a Stone Age People [7] and Charles Pickering’s Races of Man.[8] The newly established Australian National Travel Association (ANTA) drew from these literary sources and compiled a vast image bank, which it referred to, exhibited and made available to travel writers and advertisers.
Shortly after Holmes commenced his management of ANTA,[9] he toured Australia with a photographer to survey tourist sights and collect interesting stories for the association’s forthcoming tourism magazine, Walkabout. Holmes published an account of his adventures in We Find Australia the following year.[10] This book provides invaluable insights into the mind of the man who steered Australia’s most powerful tourism image-making institution for thirty years.
Holmes presented himself as a prophetic publicity man hunting for stories about settler Australians who had shaped the destiny of the new nation. His hero was John Macarthur, the man he claimed ‘blew the trumpet … on this country’s capacity to grow wool’.[11] We Find Australia described a modern industrious white race conquering primeval land, wrestling it into a promised land and replacing ‘Stone-Age’ savagery with British civilisation. He presented the inland as the ‘Real Australia’ where the wealth of the nation was being discovered and developed, and the period as the ‘breaking of a new dawn’.[12]
Holmes supported the principle of ‘White Australia’. He sought to foster the belief that the Australian population was already 97% white British stock and the ‘effacement’ of the remaining 62,000 ‘full-bloods’ or ‘wild savages’ was assured.[13] His chapter ‘“Stone-Age” People’ divided settlers and ‘the Aruntas’ into two separate groups inhabiting two distinct worlds: one ‘modern’, the other ‘primitive’.[14] The book promoted two distinct types of masculinity: white ‘manliness’ which was progressive, courageous and virile, and brutish Aboriginal hunter-warriorship which was innately ‘childish’, warlike, monstrous, purposeless and moribund. Echoing Baldwin Spencer, Holmes identified ‘blacks’ as archaic, static subjects who were incapable of change, and vanishing scientific curiosities that were worth studying before they died out.[15]
Whilst this was Holmes’ dominant view of Aboriginality, he occasionally slipped into a contradictory position by evoking romantic literature and describing ‘primitive’ Aboriginal men as the virile remnants of a ‘wild’ ‘original hunter state’. This was the case when he revived a description coined by Charles Pickering in 1851.[16] Holmes quoted Pickering verbatim to describe Jimmy as ‘the finest model’ of ‘human proportions I have ever met’, combining ‘perfect symmetry, activity and strength’ with a head like ‘the antique bust of a philosopher’.[17] His cameraman, Roy Dunstan, likewise framed his photographic images of Jimmy in conventional eighteenth century romantic language. A striking resemblance exists between a Dunstan photograph (Fig 5.3) and a sketch of ‘Bamboro-Kain of the Newcastle Tribe’, the man Pickering identified as the ideal Australian Aboriginal (Fig 5.2).[18]