Trends in Australian tourism studies

Since the seminal paper on tourism research in Australia by the late Bill Faulkner, Phil Pearce, Robin Shaw and Betty Weiler (Faulkner et. a I., 1994), there has been limited academic attention given to the trends in tourism studies in Australia (Wells, 1996; Sofield and Lee, 1998; McKercher 2000). This may be explained by the pressure on Australian tourism universities to increase their output of research in response to the emergence of new themes (sustainable tourism, ecotourism, events tourism etc) as well as the establishment of new means of funding tourism research in the 1990s (ARC and CRC). At the micro-level, academic demands and workloads have determined that tourism research opportunities are pursued in a pragmatic and immediate sense, with little time or thought given to the strategic and long-term direction of academic tourism research.