Erceg, Diane
Description
In 1966, American tour operator, Lindblad Travel, began
small-scale tourist cruises to Antarctica. Over the course of the
next 50 years, what began as an offbeat travel destination
transformed into an iconic tourist attraction. Annual tourist
visits to Antarctica grew from a few hundred to tens of
thousands; modes of transport to the continent diversified to
include yachts, cruise ships, icebreakers and aircraft; and the
activities available to Antarctic...[Show more] tourists ranged from one-day
scenic flights to multi-month mountaineering expeditions and ski
tours to the South Pole. Antarctic tourism numbers trebled in the
1990s, with an influx of Russian ice ships into the tourism
fleet.
This thesis chronicles that 50-year history of Antarctic tourism
growth and diversification. Its narrative centres on the efforts
of enterprising tour operators to secure their footing on a
physically and politically formidable continent. Government
officials and a mounting environmental movement invariably
resisted these efforts. And the safety, environmental integrity
and self-sufficiency of the industry were challenged in the wake
of a series of environmental emergencies. Even so, Antarctic tour
operators were successful in forging a robust industry through
technical ingenuity and political nous. By underscoring their
environmental ethos, and their influential role in raising public
awareness of Antarctica, tour operators presented themselves as
the responsible stewards of an innocuous practice that was
consistent with Antarctica’s governing principles.
Each chapter in this 50-year tourism history also offers some
insight into the Antarctic tourist imaginary, a theme that is
explored further through a series of reflections. These
reflections reveal that the Antarctic tourism industry draws
strongly on the dominant image of Antarctica as a pristine
wilderness, frozen in a perpetual age of heroic exploration. By
suppressing its own history, the Antarctic tourism industry
strives to maintain a perception of the continent as an enduring
blank space available for perpetual discovery. According to this
image, the heroic age explorers remain the touchstone of
Antarctic experience even now, more than a century after the
era’s conclusion. The explorers’ narratives of physical and
moral struggle against a relentless environment continue to serve
as the benchmark of authentic Antarctic experience. They also
inspire the sustained imagining of Antarctica as a masculine
sphere for ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure, a legacy most poignantly
illuminated in the endeavours of Antarctica’s modern explorers.
Such an imagining of Antarctica as pristine and untouched—as a
continent apart—is challenged by more recent understandings of
Antarctic ice. We have come to realise that the world’s sea
level is principally controlled by the state of the Antarctic ice
sheet and that we may be destabilising that ice sheet without
ever leaving home. These emerging climate change narratives
threaten to undermine dominant images of Antarctica as an
untouched wilderness frozen in time. For now, tour operators
continue to present climate change narratives in a manner which
does not fundamentally challenge this wilderness ideal; an ideal
which forms the imaginative foundation on which the Antarctic
tourism industry has been built.
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