Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
animals for visitor attention. Third, they are said to be perhaps the 'purest'
remaining group of dingoes in all of Australia, attributed to the fact that
many mainland dingoes have crossbred far more with domestic dogs than
the island dingoes.
For all these reasons, by the late 1990s around 300,000 people each year
were coming to Fraser Island for ecotourist experiences. The island was, and
remains, managed by the Queensland Parks & Wildlife Service (QPWS).
After the UNESCO World Heritage listing in 1992, the Service oversaw the
planned expansion of facilities for visitors. Private companies were permit-
ted to offer accommodation, food, drink, travel and recreational provision
for paying tourists in designated sites. Today, eco- and adventure tourism
are the major activities on the island. Visitors can go on sightseeing tours,
or go whale- and dolphin-watching, fishing, hiking, and so on. They can
camp or else stay in a resort, like Kingfisher Bay, built to certified ecological
standards. By 2011, over 700,000 people were visiting Fraser Island for both
short- and long-stay experiences. As the
Lonely planet
travel guide website
says in the first sentence of its page on Fraser, 'The local Aboriginal people
call the Island “K'Gari”, which is very fitting as it roughly translates into
The nature that now attracts visitors in large numbers was not always seen
as something to be conserved or showcased. Settlers from Europe began
to harvest trees on Fraser Island from the 1860s onwards. Much later, this
extractive industry was supplemented by another: sand mining (sand being a
valuable resource for the construction and landscaping industries). Through
the 1970s and 1980s, what happened later to the Clayoquot and Great Bear
regions in Canada happened to Fraser Island: it became the focus of envi-
ronmentalists seeking to protect and preserve 'natural heritage'. This was
both a reflection of, and a contribution to concretising, the wider post-
1950s surge of environmental concern in the West. During the era when
both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth came into existence, an NGO
called Fraser Island Defenders Organization (FIDO) was founded in 1971.
Through its lobbying and awareness-raising efforts, it was instrumental to
Fraser Island achieving World Heritage status 21 years later. Since 1992, the
island has therefore undergone a practical and presentational switch. It is
(now seen as) a space of nature conservation and preservation rather than
a space of resource extraction. Fortunately, logging and sand removal only
affected select parts of Fraser, meaning that the QPWS has been able to
focus on managing visitors so that the biophysical wonders they come to
experience are not degraded by those visitors' activities.
Dingoes, danger and death
During the 1990s, there were somewhere between 180 and 220 dingoes res-
ident on Fraser Island. The QPWS actively managed visitor behaviour in
order to ensure that they were left in as wild a state as possible. This was
