By Kalinga Seneviratne

SILVERTON (IDN) – With more than 9.3 million international visitors spending nearly $ 34 billion in Australia last year, Tourism Australia executive director Bob East forecasts a beautiful picture for the region’s tourism sector, in his annual report for 2018-19 released in early. This year. He said the sector had seen “extraordinary achievements” in the past year, and thousands of tourism operators “made their living from a strong and sustainable industry”.

Even before that encouraging report could be well distributed, the tourism sector collapsed, when Australia became the first country in the world to close its borders in January this year. It was just before the peak of international visitor arrivals during the lunar new year holidays in Asia.

Tourism is Australia’s largest export services industry and the travel industry itself is big business with millions of Australians traveling abroad each year. As strict border closings and local lockdowns ensue, and arrivals of Australian tourists from Asia, Europe and North America come to a halt, with the aviation industry essentially banned and many travel agencies laying off workers and closing shops, there are fears that tourism could suffer a fatal blow.

However, in the short term locking Australia’s population within its borders has provided assistance to Australia’s tourism sector.

Earlier in December, using the rarely used Biosafety Emergencies Act, Australia extended its ban to March 17 next year for nationals traveling abroad on holidays. Under this prohibition, Australian citizens and permanent residents cannot leave Australia unless you have an exemption from the Department of Home Affairs.

It is only given for official travel, essential business trips or for professionals involved in the Covid-19 assistance program. Australia has so far avoided approaches from countries such as New Zealand, Singapore and Fiji to create a travel bubble, but all of the country’s internal borders that were closed to stem the second wave of Covid-19 have now opened.

In a media release on December 4, Australian Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment Simon Birmingham urged Australians to “gift holidays” to the domestic tourism sector this Christmas. He called on Australians to help fill the void until international borders reopen and overseas visitors can come. “By visiting a tourist attraction or experience, you will support tourism jobs as well as the thousands of tourism businesses around Australia who have been doing it very hard this year,” he said.

During the Christmas holidays, most Australians take a 2–4 ​​week holiday break and millions of them travel overseas to destinations in Asia such as Bali and Thailand, and even further afield in Europe or America. Every full-time employee in Australia is entitled to four weeks of annual leave for each year they work, and under some industry awards, they also get 17.5% of their pay load for this period. Thus, the holidays in December-January are a national pastime.

Australia Daily Telegraph featured the front page header of “A Complete Sellout” earlier this month saying that a horde of Australian holiday makers forced to spend their Christmas holidays at home have booked every house, room or inn available in some of the popular coastal towns along Australia’s east coast.

“Accommodation operators are unable to provide hotel rooms or holiday rentals at the height of the closure, but now that we appear to have beaten the pandemic, it is unlikely to find them,” said the Telegraph, pointing out that accommodation prices on beaches have jumped 5 to 10 times, and people- people even venture into the interior in search of vacation spots.

Meanwhile, however, stormy weather and flooding in coastal resort areas in Northern NSW and the state of Queensland have boosted the huge revenues expected from the tourism sector over the Christmas holidays. Also the latest outbreak of Covid-19 cases in Sydney suburbs threatens to derail the tourism industry’s recovery with state governments considering reimposing border restrictions.

Locked inside, many Australians have ventured into various regions to explore their own country. This month (in December), I’m off to explore the old mining towns of Broken Hill and Silverton in the Australian outback – where the Central Australian Desert began. This inhospitable area is not an attractive holiday destination for summer where temperatures can reach between 40-45 degrees C from December to February.

Broken Hill is a 12-hour high-speed train ride from Sydney and during the trip of fellow travelers Hugh and Erina Littlewood, two Australian retirees said they had chosen to visit Broken Hill for the holidays because they had to cancel their overseas cruise due to Covid19. “We have booked a week-long cruise in South America and a week’s journey in the area, but that is not possible this year,” Hugh told IDN. “We’ve never been here, although this is a historic place where the Australian mining industry started.”

Silver was discovered here in the late 1880s and until about the 1990s the Broken Hill area was believed to contain the largest deposits of silver, lead and zinc in the world. Most of it is now used up even though the mining is still here. Known as Australia’s “Silver City” and the heart of the developing mining industry in Australia, mining revenues here were essential to the nation’s early development. As such, the area is now considered Australian Heritage, particularly the small community of Silverton, 26 km from Broken Hill.

Silverton flourished in the late 1800s, when mining claims – for silver – were ubiquitous as new seekers arrived, with the population peaking at 3,000 in the mid-1880s. Today, it would be a ghost town if it weren’t for tourism. The mining boom associated with Broken Hill actually started here.

“In the early 1900s there were about 300 people, now we have 35 people and 4 donkeys…. we run the tourism industry, ”Peter Price, owner of Silverton Hotel, told IDN. “We are closed for 9 weeks. When we open on June 1st, in a week we are very busy… we soon have 300 lunches a day. There are people everywhere, people from Sydney coming here to look at their backyards. “

Price said when the Covid-19 lockdown took place in March, there was a feeling of gloom and doom in society. But he called the post-June 2020 tourism revival a “Covid boom”. He said during the winter tourist season from March to November they get around 120,000 tourists, who are the lifeblood of the community. “After November things got quiet, but this year we still have tourists,” he said, adding, “they are not international tourists”.

In recent years, Silverton has also risen to prominence as the filming location for Mad Max 2 (a 1981 Australian action film featuring Mel Gibson). British migrants Adrian and Linda Bennett founded the Mad Max 2 Museum 10 years ago which exhibits memorabilia including various vehicles used in filming.

“We used to have a lot of international tourists who came here because of Mad Max,” Linda told IDN, “but that has stopped now.” He said they were closed for 12 weeks from March because of the lockdown. “March to July is the busiest time here and it costs us a lot of our income,” he lamented. But after they reopened in July “it really went berserk” he said with a big laugh.

“We’ve been here for ten years and we’ve had the busiest August and September since we started. We didn’t have any income during the lockdown, so we were very busy, ”explained Linda when a group of school children entered with their bodyguards. “This time it was very quiet because of the heat, but many people came here. The clear closures have extended our tourist season ”.

However, economists warn that the current domestic tourism boom will not last once Australia opens its borders to people going abroad for holidays. This is more of a “jump” than a long-term trend warned Australian Regional Institute chief economist Kim Houghton spoke recently on national ABC TV. [IDN-InDepthNews – 17 December 2020]

Photo: (Top) Silverton Hotel (in Text) Mad Max Memorabilia by Kalinga Seneviratne | IDN-INPS

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