Felicity Picken

From tourist looking-glass to analytical carousels: navigating tourism through relations and context.

This paper contributes to debate about how tourism is conceptualised. It takes a discursive approach to understanding some of the rules and relations that have influenced the way tourism has been defined ‘conventionally’ with particular attention to a way of seeing tourism that has the hallmarks of a tourist looking-glass. From here an examination is made of more contemporary movements that undermine conventional discourse. In searching for some common ground between these different approaches to tourism, a synthesis can start to be developed around the idea of relations and context. Tying these contemporary analyses to a relational and contextual basis invites some coherence in the search for new directions for tourism discourse.

Tourism, design and controversy: calling on non-humans to explain ourselves.

This paper explores the kind of stories non-humans enable us to tell about tourism. It introduces a ‘relational materialist’ approach to investigate tourism through the early life of a building called Zero Davey. In providing upmarket hotel accommodation, Zero Davey imported tourism into a place that is well established as the postcard image of Hobart, Australia’s southern-most city. In adding tourism stock to the Sullivans Cove precinct, Zero Davey acted as an importation device for tourism; however, this was only the first story. The building also delivered a controversy among ‘the people’ who deemed its appearance to be ‘out of keeping’ with Sullivans Cove. While this began to mirror a fairly common dialogue between ‘hosts and guests’, neither the provision of tourist accommodation nor the architecture of the building held any significance to the importation logistics or planning approval for Zero Davey. Instead, this was founded on the building’s ability to respond to a more expert reading of Sullivans Cove and another set of norms associated with ‘geological and urban integrity’. Consequently, there were three ‘buildings’ and no final ‘body’ who could arbitrate or adequately explain Zero Davey because the tourism object, the object of controversy and the object of design were not related to each other except through the building itself. Beginning with this claim gives Zero Davey an interest in the events of its own controversy, a role in its own design and a portion of the explanation for how tourism happens.

Home and away from home: the urban-regional dynamics of second home ownership in Australia

Despite the growth of domestic and international markets in second homes, there has been relatively little research on this issue in the Australian context. Yet several features of this context present interesting ways of extending the debates about second home ownership that have characterised social and policy discussions to date in the UK and Europe. In this paper we consider the overall extent, regional distribution and broader impacts of a form of second home ownership that has risen rapidly and which is facilitated by a range of fiscal and macro-economic settings. We present the results of two national surveys that asked about the ownership of holiday homes and which reveal extensive ownership across a range of social groups. We then move to a discussion of a case study in the island state of Tasmania and to the growing commodification of its holiday ‘shack’ market to add depth to discussions about the localised ramifications of second home ownership. We conclude by discussing our results in the context of the international literature and by considering the public policy issues that our data raise.

‘So much for snapshots’: The material relations of tourists as cultural dupes:

Academic publishing houses tend to be in the business of words not images, but is this any reason for tourism scholars to be remiss about photographs themselves? It is a curious fact that very few tourist photographs are included in tourism research despite the importance of the claims that are built upon them. One of these is that cultural dupes are made from tourist photography – that their photographic practices cast them as such – but the duping process is far from convincing or satisfactory particularly in the absence of the photographs themselves. This article tracks down the missing tourist photographs by following the material relations that constitute the duping process and the remarkable, immaterial life of the tourist photograph as a resource for tourism scholarship. Once rediscovered, these photographs can be redeployed and increasingly are deployed in digital forms of materialism that are comparatively flexible, public and mobile. This new material configuration simultaneously casts the cultural dupe as an artefact of the analogue age and this invites examination of the power of digital contexts to trouble existing assumptions. Stengers’ use of the ‘idiot’ can be fruitfully employed to demonstrate a tourist who misbehaves in new technological freedoms, and challenges existing scholarly interpretations and frameworks.

Characteristics and future intentions of second homeowners: a case study from Eastern Victoria, Australia

Underpinning much of the literature surrounding lifestyle migration, counter-urbanisation and second-home use is the question of motivations and future intentions. In this paper, we explore the characteristics and orientations for future use of land by second-home owners in two locales in Victoria Australia, Phillip Island and Inverloch. Using both qualitative and quantitative survey data we find that there are three areas of second-home governance which ought to be considered strongly for future planning in these areas, health, roads and infrastructure and climate change or sustainability. Using data from permanent residents and second-home owners from these areas in collaboration with demographic data, we argue that underlining these areas is a primary concern, that of ageing. However, while these issues burn brightly for both users of property in these places, the ability for the local government authorities to deal with them is limited because of a lack of resources.

Diving with Donna Haraway and the Promise of a Blue Planet

It has been two decades since Haraway spoke about the ‘promise of monsters’, and seventy years since a novel kind of sea monster was created through the Aqua-Lung, giving ‘underwater worlds’ better access to humans. By revisiting and examining the combinatory effects of these historical moments, this paper illustrates the ‘promise of scuba divers’ who are somewhat monstrous in their potential to disturb common ideas about being human and life on land. In exchanging ‘sacred ground’ for submersion beneath the sea, scuba diving redefines the limits of human experience and emphasises the historical and largely forgotten primacy of land-based coordinates in theorising human life. Under the sea, these coordinates are vastly altered so that even preconscious markers, like breathing, are transformed through a circuitry that includes humans, science, technology, and nature in a ‘body-incorporate’. ‘Immersion’ becomes a threshold beyond which humans and nature, society and space are discovered anew in the reversal of the significance of territory to planetary life.

Ongoing and future relationships of second home owners with places in coastal Australia: an empirical case study from eastern Victoria.

Many of Australias second homes are located in peripheral locations along the coast, away from suburbia and cities. Many of these areas have specific challenges relating to a declining or consolidating agricultural sector and the need to diversify economies in a climate of uncertainty. This offers specific challenges for coastal local governments, who are often resource poor, managing transitional economies with unclear futures in terms of current and projected populations. This article begins with this broad landscape and focuses on two southeastern Victorian coastal areas that are known second home hotspots. Our article presents the findings of a residential survey conducted in Inverloch and Philip Island that specifically captured second home owners to discover who they are, why they have a second home in that area, what local area concerns they have, and what they intend to do with their second homes in the future. Within the limitations of our data, we find ambivalence among second home owners as a group, supporting the scholarship that identifies the difficulties of pinning this phenomenon down. That said, there are some discernible patterns among second home owners, particularly when they are put in contrast with the permanent residents of these communities.