Identifying Business Practices Promoting Sustainability in Aboriginal Tourism Enterprises in Remote Australia

Abstract

Aboriginal tourism entrepreneurs operating in remote regions of Australia draw on their 60,000 years of heritage to offer unique and distinct cultural experiences to domestic and international tourists. Living and operating in remote climates presents challenges to achieving successful and sustainable enterprises, including extreme weather, substandard infrastructure, distance from policy makers, distance from markets and the commercialisation of culture, which is customarily owned by and for use by traditional custodians, to produce and deliver a market-ready tourism product. However, many remote Aboriginal tourism entrepreneurs nevertheless achieve success and sustainability. This paper builds on the work of Foley to identify the characteristics of successful remote Aboriginal tourism enterprises and Aboriginal entrepreneurs in remote areas and the resourceful and creative business practices used by remote Aboriginal entrepreneurs to overcome barriers to success and finds that ongoing connections to community and culture are a key factor in that success. It also draws on the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals to identify how the characteristics of remote tourism entrepreneurs and enterprises promote or inhibit the achievement of sustainability and suggests that they offer a framework for effective support of remote Aboriginal entrepreneurs. It concludes by noting that the industry would benefit from further investigation of the contributions made to sustainability by remote Aboriginal tourism enterprises and their stakeholders.

Research in tourism sustainability: A comprehensive bibliometric analysis from 1990 to 2022

“…The development of indicators for sustainable tourism: Results of a Delphi survey of tourism researchers. Tourism Management , 22 (4):351-362 [ 50 ] Choi, H.C. & Sirakaya, E. (2006). Sustainability indicators for managing community tourism.…”

Social Life Cycle Assessment Used in Indigenous Contexts: A Critical Analysis

“…Western markets and economies, with their set regulations and processes, also routinely overlook that many Indigenous peoples are, because of colonization, left with lands that are non-urban which can increase challenges of achieving successful and sustainable enterprises because of facing issues such as extreme weather, substandard infrastructure, distance from policy makers and distance from markets. This in addition to Indigenous specific business issues such as expectations of commercialization of culture for business participation [64].…”

‘I Flip the Switch’: Aboriginal Entrepreneurs’ Navigation of Entrepreneurial Imperatives

“…Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entrepreneurship is a localised expression of Indigenous entrepreneurship in Australia that has its roots in pre-European inter-tribal trade (Bodle et al 2018;Foley 2004). Although international trade in boomerang, sea cucumber, shell ornaments and ochre between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entrepreneurs and the Makassan, Malay and Javanese took place in the mid-1700s (Akbar & Hallak 2019;Fleming 2015), systematic and institutional repression through colonisation hindered this Indigenous entrepreneurial activity (Shirodkar & Hunter 2019;Shirodkar et al 2018). Unsurprisingly, racism and discrimination feature prominently in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entrepreneurship (Denny-Smith & Loosemore 2017), manifesting, for example, in difficulties in obtaining finance due to inflexible criteria (Altman 2006), with the chances of loan approval increasing if the applicant has a non-Indigenous spouse (Foley 2000).…”