There’s Nothing Like Australia
Tourism Australia have premiered their new ad… and not everybody likes it. Count me in with Nick Bryant though: I think it’s pretty brilliant. As he puts it, “the rest of the world loves the very clichés which make many Australians cringe.” Yes, there’s more than a whiff of bogan about it. But there are a lot of tourists in the U.S. who don’t care about our sophisticated coffee culture or wineries or modern architecture. They want the postcard, and that’s what the ad is. When my family came to visit, they wanted to see kangaroos, dammit! There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not saying we have to perform some Epcot-version of Australianness for the tourists, but we do have to acknowledge that this stuff is a draw for them.