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This article examines advertisements for Mount Buffalo National Park, published in the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA)'s Walkabout magazine in the mid- to late 1930s. Situating these texts in the wider context of ANTA's documentary archive, I argue that they reveal how ANTA both intuited and sought to shape middle-class settler Australians' identification and interaction with nature and the nation. Furthermore, ANTA's estimation of what kinds of experiences middle-class tourists wanted demonstrates mid-century ideas around harnessing nature for development through mass recreation. These advertisements also evoked an idealised vision of Australian nature as an egalitarian and classless playground, where youthful and healthy settlers enjoyed the nation's great outdoors. The extent to which this vision was ANTA's alone and the extent to which ANTA produced it according to its perception of the values and aspirations of Walkabout's middle-class audience is a key consideration of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the representation of the Blue Mountains portrayed in a handful of tourist guidebooks (published 1885–1894) for the region. It argues that tourist promoters continued to depict the area in terms of the romantic sublime, not only because they believed tourists sought a transcendental experience, but also to accentuate the heroic achievements of the colonial explorers who had first attempted to cross the mountains. Finally, it suggests that tourist literature was an important medium for the dissemination of myths relating to a collective search for a settler identity, and therefore presented a one-dimensional vision of the past that did not properly account for the problematic history of settler-Indigenous relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]