So much more Down Under

Tourism chiefs are looking beyond the Crocodile Dundee cliches in order to sell Australia to the world.

Alan MascarenhasOctober 2, 2009 06:13Updated May 30, 2010 12:09

A topless sunbather talks with her friend during a sunny morning at the Bondi Beach area of Sydney, Dec. 30, 2008. (Daniel Munoz/Reuters)

SYDNEY, Australia — Even if you’ve never visited Down Under, you can probably imagine it: ochre-red landscapes, sun-baked beaches and the occasional lizard or kangaroo. It’s the lazy “no worries” lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of — if only you could stomach the 24-hour flight.

The picture-postcard image of Australia harks back to countless tourism campaigns and hit films like “Crocodile Dundee” and “Mad Max.” It’s a cliche, of course. Australians actually work some of the longest hours in the industrialized world and most live in cities similar to Boston or Chicago with nary a reptile in sight.

Now, with visitor numbers dropping, there is a new realization that Australia needs to sell itself with more than just cliches. In an increasingly competitive market for tourism, business and trade — perhaps it’s time for something more sophisticated than a leathery-skinned Paul Hogan putting “another shrimp on the barbie.”

The Australian government is sufficiently alarmed that it recently announced a $20 million competition for a new marketing label to promote Australia overseas. Creative agencies are being encouraged to submit tenders. The winning bid — complete with a new catchphrase and logo — will be launched internationally in May at the World Expo in Shanghai.

Meantime, Trade Minister Simon Crean has been out in the world pressing the point that Australia has won 10 Nobel Prizes and bursts with ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, but too often downplays its achievements.

“The tourists already know this is a great place to come and have a holiday”, he told ABC radio last month. “What we’ve got to convince people is [that] it’s a great place to invest, it’s a great place to come and be educated … to live … to build your business base from.”

The global economic downturn has certainly put the skids on visitor numbers. In the period July 2008 to July 2009, the total number of international visitors to Australia fell 4 percent compared with the preceding 12 months. Visitor numbers from Japan and Korea plummeted more than 20 percent. About 450,000 people visited from the U.S. — making Americans the third biggest group of tourists to Australia by country, behind New Zealand and the U.K. — yet this also represented a 2 percent fall.

Australia's poor performance in the tourism market also highlights the embarrassing failure of recent campaigns.

In 2006, Tourism Australia poured 180 million Australian dollars into advertisements featuring a bikini-clad model posing the now-notorious question: “So where the bloody hell are you?”

In the U.K., authorities ruled that the word “bloody” was obscene and restricted airing of the commercial until after 9 p.m. Roadside billboards featuring the slogan were also removed. Canadian authorities objected to the word “hell”, while in Singapore, the slogan was modified to the comparatively vanilla: “So where are you?”

The Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, later described the campaign as an “absolute rolled-gold disaster.”