TASMANIAN TOURISM CHAMPIONS: CELEBRATING 25 YEARS OF THE INDUSTRY’S HIGHEST INDIVIDUAL HONOUR

While the 2022 Tasmanian Tourism Awards are a few months behind us now, the dust isn’t likely to settle on the excitement for any of our winners for some time yet. Amongst them was Alison Stubbs, who was recognised for being a true tourism stalwart, with a pedigree that includes establishing an awardwinning adventure tourism business, sitting on the Tourism Tasmania and East Coast RTO boards, and managing premium accommodation on Hobart’s waterfront. In being named the 2022 Tourism Champion, Ali became the 35th Tasmanian to join a list of local legends that goes back to the inaugural award in 1998. It’s the industry’s highest individual honour, conferred each year to acknowledge an outstanding contribution to the state’s tourism industry, through entrepreneurialism, investments, leadership, advocacy, and professional or voluntary service. As we celebrate 25 years of Tasmanian Tourism Champions, it feels an appropriate time to reflect on the honour roll, and highlight some of our past champions.

John Hamilton is known for being the pioneer of wildlife tourism in Tasmania, and was named Tasmanian Tourism Champion in 2012 for his contribution to nature-based tourism, the growth of tourism on the Tasman peninsula, and in promoting Tasmania in international markets. He established the state’s first commercial wildlife experience with the Tasmanian Devil Park, now the Tasmanian Devil Unzoo, near Port Arthur in 1979, where he continues to champion the conservation of threatened species. John says that his passion for sharing our natural environment with the world stems back to his childhood growing up in the Derwent Valley.

“My whole family had a passion for Tasmania,” he says. “My father was a great bushwalker, and we spent lots of time in Mt Field National Park, where

I got to know a lot about the mountains, plants and native animals.”

After studying agricultural science, John went on to be a broadcaster journalist for three years, and it was an overseas trip as part of a national journalism award that piqued his interest in wildlife parks. On a stopover in Brisbane, he saw a koala for the first time during a visit to the world’s first and largest koala sanctuary, Lone Park Sanctuary.

The property opened on a small budget as Tasmania’s first wildlife park experience. While its feature animal was the Tasmanian devil, it also accommodated other wildlife, and had a distinct focus on visitor immersion into the Tasmanian experience.

“I wanted people to be able to go for a walk in the bush and see native animals in their natural environment. It was always about showcasing Tasmania to tourists and locals alike.”

While John’s original plan was to harness the potential of the 25 acres of pear and apple orchards on the property to commercialise his venture, it became quickly apparent that the wildlife tourism experience itself was to be the main breadwinner.

In 2007, John joined a thinktank of likeminded wildlife experts from around the world, including American zoo designer, John Coe, who had worked with 150 of the best zoos around the world. Coe was impressed with the Tasmanian

Devil Park and proposed the idea of the world’s first intentional ‘unzoo’ on the site, referencing his 2006 paper, “The Unzoo Alternative” in which he suggested how mutually beneficial and rewarding encounters for animals, keepers and visitors alike could be achieved.

“He offered to do up a plan for the unzoo, and came to stay with us a second time,” John recalls. “I remember getting up early one morning and offering (Coe) breakfast, and he’d already been up for several hours and completed a masterplan.”

The plan removed all cages and boundary fences, allowing for wildlife to enjoy a more natural habitat, as well as to facilitate an even more authentic visitor experience. It came to life with the completion of the first stage of the transformation in 2010, and the eventual launch of the Tasmanian Devil Unzoo in 2014. A range of native Tasmanian animals and nearly 100 bird species with whom visitors can engage now live on the property.

Since opening the Unzoo, John has also been heavily involved in projects to save the Tasmanian devil from extinction. After hearing about a possible disease threat to Tasmanian devils about 20 years ago, John was invited to join a group of scientists to establish the first formal plan to save the species. As a result of the plan to preserve this iconic animal from what is now known as devil facial tumour disease (DFTD), he set up a vital Devil Tracker project, focusing specifically on the Tasman peninsula devil population. Automatic night cameras have captured more than 250,000 photographs over the past decade, and the peninsula remains DFTD-free, with the conservation of that status a priority.

Of similar importance to John is his passion for taking Tasmania to the world. With more than 40 international and national tourism trade missions, and 25 Australian Tourism

Exchanges, under his belt, John more recently established the Tasmanian branch of the Australian Tourism Export Council (ATEC), and chaired the council through Covid. His leadership was recognised with the ATEC National Excellence Award in 2022. John says Tasmania’s brand proposition is unrivalled by any other in the world.

“I’ve done more than 50 trips overseas and seen many corners of the world, but I come back to this marvellous place where it’s all about quality,” he says. “We must not trash it with mass tourism, but instead tread lightly, continue to do things exceptionally well, and set the bar high.”

It’s a sentiment with which 2013 Tasmanian Tourism Champion, Sarah Lebski, resonates deeply. Having spent the last 18 months undertaking a project that seeks to preserve the Flinders Island way of life through sustainable and regenerative tourism practices, Sarah is profoundly conscious of the pitfalls of over-tourism.

“We should constantly anticipate change within the industry, and we need to be proactive in ensuring that we ‘don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg’ by allowing the growth trajectory to get out of control,” she says. “It’s never been more important to look at destinations in a holistic sense; community and the environment should be the most important considerations in thinking about their management and long term resilience. Tourism doesn’t operate in a silo, it is part of the entire ecosystem of place.”

A former librarian, research is in Sarah’s blood, and faced with a lack of formal employment in the COVID era of 2020, she dove deep into reading and thinking about what tourism might look like in a post-pandemic world. She became convinced that a new mind-set was needed. With her deep understanding of and appreciation for Tasmania’s nature-based brand, Sarah became especially interested in regenerative tourism and its potential to build deeper, lifeaffirming connections between visitors and locals, to give nature ‘a voice at the table’, and where tourism was able to give back, in a very tangible sense, to the communities whose resources it uses.

She acknowledges that the reality of embedding the concept of regenerative tourism will involve a long road ahead, but feels that the Tasmanian tourism community has started the journey, particularly through the acknowledgement of ‘positive impact’ tourism as the way forward.

“It’s a very slow burn to change a whole way of thinking, and we need to see systemic change,” she says. “But this is an extraordinary place with extraordinary opportunities. We have the potential to be a global leader in responsible and sustainable tourism, but that will require some different ways of doing things.”

While Sarah’s current dayto-day is largely focused on her work with the Flinders Island regenerative tourism project alongside Dr. Dianne Dredge, her recognition as a Tasmanian Tourism Champion ten years ago acknowledged her decades-long service to the Tasmanian tourism industry as an industry representative, consultant and mentor. At that time, Sarah had already worked with dozens of local tourism businesses, as well as regional and state tourism organisations, with particular expertise in strategic planning, destination management and experience development. Her leap from librarianship to tourism was largely precipitated by her family’s restoration of several historic terrace houses which became visitor accommodation.

“After running the accommodation for a short time, I realised that wasn’t enough for me, and I needed a more holistic understanding of the industry I was participating in. I started talking to mentors, going to forums, and networking, so that I was not just working in the industry but actually involved in it.”

Before long, Sarah began consulting to other tourism businesses and, by the mid1990s, had been appointed to Executive Officer of Cottages of the Colony, a network of more than 60 heritage properties around the state. She was also involved in the development of some significant strategies undertaken by Tourism Tasmania. Reflecting on one of them, The Tasmanian Experience Strategy (2002) Sarah says that work remains critical to how our industry thinks about and markets the state.

“That was when we really started to look at connection to place, and the power of transformative experiences through storytelling,” she says. “It was an interesting period where you could see that the industry was starting to shift, and it set us up for the approach to tourism that we still have today.”

Since receiving the Tasmanian Tourism Champion award, Sarah has also represented TICT on the Tasmanian Heritage Council and she has just completed two terms on the Visit Northern Tasmania Board. In 2017, she took on the role of tourism educator, developing and teaching the inaugural tourism curricula for an Associate Degree in Applied Business – a surprising professional challenge that turned out to be one of her most enjoyable to date.

“I really love mentoring young people in particular because they really inspire me,” she says. “I saw teaching as further professional development, and an opportunity to bring tourism into the thinking of some who may never have previously considered it as a career.”

“Generational change is inevitably required in any industry, and it caused me to stop and think about the fact that so many of us have contributed to the Tasmanian tourism industry over such a long time, and now we get to see the next generation of leaders coming through.”

Do you know a Tasmanian Tourism Champion? Keep an eye out later in the year, when we call for nominations for the 2023 recipient.

Tasmanian Tourism Champion Honour Roll

1998 Jenny Cox

2000 David Reed

2001 Ken Latona

2002 Lloyd Clark

2003 Malcolm Wells

John Luscombe

2004 Richard Dax

Tony Park

2005 Christine Dwyer

Brian Inder

2006 Richard Sattler

Ian Rankine

2007 Peter Neilson

Donald Wells

2008 Karen Rees

Terry McDermott

2009 Kim Seagram AM

John Dabner

2010 Ian Waller

Ian Johnstone

2011 Robert Pennicott

Greg Farrell

2012 Richard Davey

John Hamilton

2013 Bill Lark

Sarah Lebski

2014 Brett Torossi

2015 Julian & Tracey Jacobs

2016 Peter Mooney

2017 Josef Chromy OAM

2018 Simon Currant AM

2019 Vincent Barron

2020 Margaret Morgan

2021 Mark Wilsdon

2022 Alison Stubbs