Summary

An excerpt from the Introduction:

The Whitsundays region is one of Queensland's major tourist destinations. The Whitsunday Islands are a chain of drowned mountains or continental islands situated off the North Queensland Coast between Mackay and Bowen. Originally named the Cumberland Group in 1770 by Captain James Cook, the island chain has often been divided into smaller subgroups throughout its tourism history. For instance, southerly islands such as Carlisle and Brampton were commonly separated from a so-called 'Whitsunday Group', consisting of islands from the Whitsunday Passage area. However, the Whitsundays' tourist operations have increasingly been characterised by a considerable degree of interaction. In his 1985 publication, 100 Magic Miles of the Great Barrier Reef, David Colfelt observed that the generic term 'The Whitsundays' had emerged as the popular name for the entire chain of Cumberland Islands. The tourist destination area of the Whitsundays, therefore, consists primarily of the Cumberland Island Group, with major resorts on islands such as Hayman, South Molle, Lindeman and Hamilton Islands. Shute Harbour and Mackay are departure points for the region's cruising services which operate tours both to the outer Reef and throughout the Islands. Mainland centres such as Airlie Beach and Cannonvale also provide seaside accommodation.

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This book is a contribution to the emergent subdiscipline of Tourism History and has drawn on theoretical writing inspired by the great expansion of the tourism industry in the twentieth century, not least in Australia. It is also an exercise in North Queensland history balancing the traditional focus on the Gold Coast in historical writing about Queensland tourism. This work calls for further studies of the development of Queensland tourist destinations - Green and Magnetic Islands come quickly to mind - to test the extent to which the Whitsundays' pattern of tourism development was replicated in other destinations. In this way substantial progress will be made towards accumulating the knowledge required to undertake a general history of Queensland tourism.