Intensifying the tourist experience: ‘Survenirs’ at Daly Waters Pub

Abstract

An experiment in both form and content, the essay lightly adopts an Australian storytelling style to perform its material as it narrates a road trip across central Australia. Arriving at the Daly Waters Pub in the Northern Territory, the travellers are taken by surprise by the strange décor. It is a place made significant by the multiple ‘authorships’ of hundreds of tourists. Visitors have left not only ID cards, pictures, and signatures, but also flags, number plates, thongs, caps, and bras. We analyse these traces left by travellers as objects of exchange that signify people’s desire to mark a place and use this phenomenon to introduce the idea of a complementary concept to that of the ‘souvenir’, and which we call ‘survenir’. The palimpsest effect of these survenirs (since none is erased) introduces time by accretion, rather than by chronology. The sociality generated through ‘survenirs’ is not just among humans but among all sorts of things, concepts and affects that assemble to create Daly Waters Pub as a tourist destination made not for, but by, its visitors. It is a materially interactive site composed by them.

Keywords

Australia colonialism Daly Waters Pub material interactivity ‘survenir’

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Benjamin

(2005) Selected Writings 1931–34. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Benterrak

Muecke

Roe

(1984) Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology. Fremantle, WA, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

Davies

(1999) ‘The Shoe Fence’, NewsZine, December, p. 5. Available at: www.kiwinewz.com/html/newz1299.htm (accessed 30 November 2012).

Dougoud

R. C.

(2000) ‘Souvenirs from Kambot (Papua New Guinea): The Sacred Search for Authenticity’, pp. 223–37 in Hitchcock

Teague

(eds) Souvenirs: The Material Culture of Tourism. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Florida

(2002) “The Economic Geography of Talent”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92 (4): 743–55

Franklin

(2003) ‘Tourist Objects, Tourist Rituals’, pp. 97–135 in Franklin

(ed.) Tourism: An Introduction. London: SAGE.

Geertz

(1973) ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, pp. 412–53 in Geertz

(ed.) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Graeber

(2011) ‘Consumption’, Current Anthropology 52(4): 489–511.

Hage

(2002) ‘The Different Intensities of Social Reality: Migration, Participation and Guilt,’ pp. 193–205 in Hage

(ed.) Arab-Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging. Carlton, VIC, Australia: Melbourne University Press.

10.

Jansen-Verbeke

(1998) ‘The Synergism between Shopping and Tourism’, pp. 428–45 in Theobald

(ed.) Global Tourism. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

11.

Larsen

(2005) ‘Families Seen Sightseeing: Performativity of Tourist Photography’, Space and Culture 8(4): 416–34.

12.

Lovelock

(2004) ‘Tourist-Created Attractions: The Emergence of a Unique Form of Tourist Attraction in Southern New Zealand’, Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment 6(4): 410–33.

13.

Miller

(1995) ‘Introduction: Anthropology, Modernity and Consumption’, pp. 1–22 in Miller

(ed.) Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local. London: Routledge.

14.

Muecke

(1997) No Road: Bitumen All the Way. Fremantle, WA, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

15.

Rajchman

(2000) The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

16.

Schouten

(2006) ‘The Process of Authenticating Souvenirs’, pp. 191–202 in Smith

Robinson

(eds) Cultural Tourism in a Changing World: Politics, Participation and (Re)Presentation. New York: Channel View Publications.

17.

Smith

V. L.

(1996) ‘Indigenous Tourism: The Four H’s’, pp. 283–307 in Butler

Hinch

(eds) Tourism and Indigenous Peoples. London: International Thomson Business Press.

18.

West

(2006) ‘Consuming National Themed Environments Abroad: Australian Working Holidaymakers and Symbolic National Identity in ‘Aussie’ Theme Pubs’, Tourist Studies 6(2): 139–55.