The tourist and tourism gazes upon Cradle Mountain and Freycinet National Park

Abstract

The natural aesthetic resource is an important element of natural and cultural heritage and an attractor of tourists. It is important for heritage management to understand the scenic attractors of tourists. Photographs of Cradle Mountain (150) and Freycinet National Park (149) were collected from a range of sources to determine whether there is a constancy of gaze between those who promote tourism and those who tour, and between the two visually distinct destinations. Publicly available images from four different sources were used to compare content attributes and mise en scène attributes between localities using Chi-square and ANOSIM. The photographs were then ordinated using the same attributes, and the results were displayed using photographic average composites. The Discover Tasmania and Google Images photographs were similar, both better conforming to advanced compositional principles compared to the Instagram and promotional images, which were similar, especially in the featuring of people in landscape foregrounds. There may be a reciprocal interaction between promotional and tourist images, rather than a one-way process. The contrasting features in the images from the two places were largely a product of the very different physical environments. However, the photographs at Freycinet were taken from several geographic locations, whereas the vista of Dove Lake and Cradle Mountain dominated all image sources at Cradle Mountain. The content analysis of the images was consistent between places, except where a feature of an artefact or natural feature created opportunity for artistic expression.