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.
In tourism people interact routinely with a wide range of objects and material environments; they bring their gendered, racialized and aged bodies into play when performing leisure and tourism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.