Life after Hoges and Lara: The new faces selling Aussie holidays to the world

Behind the headlines heralding Tourism Australia’s latest cheerleaders, Nigella Lawson and Robert Irwin, there’s another story revealing how complex selling our nation has become. “Trying to distil a big, broad, beautiful country like this into a single, one-size-fits-all message is impossible,” says Tourism Australia’s chief marketing officer, Susan Coghill, from Shanghai, where she’s launching a more “nuanced” strategy. “We’re creating campaigns unique to each market.”

In 1984, largely thanks to America’s love for Paul Hogan, shrimp and “barbies”, Australia welcomed more than a million tourists for the first time. It’s now at 8.3 million annually and, by the end of the decade, nearly 12 million are forecast. And they’re spending: a record $53 billion in the year to March 30, apparently, but where that money’s coming from is changing.

New Zealand, albeit a “short haul” market, remains on top, accounting for 1.4 million visitors. Even as Robert Irwin follows in Hogan’s footsteps, America is in third spot with 715,000 visitors, which means it now ranks behind China, our second-largest market, with 948,000 tourists. Enter Chinese heart-throb actor and singer Yosh Yu, Tourism Australia’s latest ambassador, sporting an Akubra for his 7 million-plus Chinese social-media followers.

Thanks to her 8.5 million Insta followers, Indian influencer Sara Tendulkar, daughter of cricket legend Sachin, has also been enlisted to entice her 1.5 billion countrymen to “Come and say G’day”. Some 453,000 have done so over the past year.

Stand outside the Skye Suites building in Sydney’s inner-city enclave of Green Square long enough and you’ll likely catch excited foreigners taking selfies in front of it. As temporary home to the highly emotional couples who appear on Nine Network’s home-grown, global-hit-reality-TV-series, Married At First Sight, the apartment complex has become an unlikely tourist attraction. Nine [publisher of this masthead] says the series is currently screening in more than 100 international markets, earning a cult-like following with celebrity endorsements from the likes of Mad Max’s Anya Taylor-Joy and Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan, who posed outside the building during a promotional trip with Tourism Australia in June. Coughlan dubbed the apartments “Australia’s most impressive cultural monument” in her caption to her 6.1 million Instagram followers. Pristine beaches, cute marsupials and fluffy Irwins are clearly not all the world’s visitors are interested in seeing when they head Down Under.

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