Power in the virtual hands of the longest-living culture in the world: decolonizing indigenous heritage tourism in Australia
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2025-07-11
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en
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This thesis examines how Indijiverse, an Indigenous-led virtual reality platform, resists colonial frameworks in Indigenous heritage tourism in Australia. Using critical discourse analysis, the study investigates three key elements: performativity, 3D mapping, and Indigenous knowledge. Conventional heritage tourism often reinforces colonial narratives by presenting Indigenous culture as static, ancient, consumable, and performed. In contrast, Indijiverse reclaims Indigenous storytelling, space, and knowledge by using 3D mapping, gamification, and immersive design to engage users with pre-colonial landscapes and living cultural practices. Grounded in a theoretical framework of performativity, decoloniality, and heritage, this research argues that Indijiverse shifts power in the heritage tourism sector by resisting performative expectations, reconstructing access to sacred sites, and centering relational Indigenous knowledge systems. At last, this study emphasizes the importance of Indigenous-led heritage representation and challenges Western norms of cultural consumption in tourism.
Keywords: Australia, decolonization, digital storytelling, Indijiverse, Indigenous heritage tourism, Indigenous knowledge, performativity, virtual reality.
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