But surely they’re traveling to experience the culture, not hear the language - which personally I would view as a secondary ‘phenomenon’. Or is there actually such a profound difference between us little countries, and that of a largely monoglot landmass?
Yes, it’s hard to disentangle language differences from general cultural differences. But if an English person prefers to go to France or Germany, rather than to Scotland or Ireland, because they are more “different”, might not the language difference be part of the larger cultural differece that they are looking for?
Ah, man, these are absolutely hilarious! 
Warning: slightly silly post
See, I think the trouble tourists have with Australia’s image is that Australia is too damned big. All the things uniquely Australian are spread out over millions of square kangameters or kilomiles or walkabouts or waggadongs or whatever in the hell it is you measure with down there. You can’t get all those Australian things in one visit, any more than you could visit all of America in a weekend.
Tourist advertisements in magazines, at least in this country, tend to be focused more on cities (“come to New York and be honked at in five languages!”) or states (“visit scenic New Mexico! We’ve been a state longer than you suspect”) or even specific attractions (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, East River Mafia Storage Facility).
But when I think of Australian cities, I think of Sydney: it’s got the Opera House shaped like a box of Kleenex, and the harbor, and… there’s other cities in Australia too, I’m sure of it. Brisbane… and … uh, Cairns, Toowoomba, Perth, Townsville, Bundaberg… Alice Springs… Darwin… Derby… Canberra… Adelaide… but with a few exceptions, I can’t really tell you why I’d visit any of them except that they’re Australian. They’re all sort of mushed in with a general Tourist Identity of “we’re Australian! Kangaroos! Koalas! Funny hats! Visit any city you like, they’re all pretty much the same! No, not that one, it’s got spiders.”
Most other tourist-destination cities have something distinctive in the skyline that immediately leap to mind, usually with a unique name: London (Big Ben), Paris (Eiffel Tower), Athens (the Parthenon), St. Louis (the St. Louis Arch), New York (Statue of Liberty), Seattle (Space Needle), San Francisco (Golden Gate Bridge), Rome (Colosseum), Beijing (Forbidden City).
Sydney has the Sydney Opera House, the name of which is, to my mind, somewhat less evocative. (“Damn it, honey, we have a perfectly good opera house here in town!”) Call it something grander. And as a symbol, there’s Ayers Rock, nowhere near any city, which makes it hard to market.
More local identity, that’s what I’d say: something different and more distinctive than just Generic Down Under.
“Vous etes-ou, tabernac’ ostie?”
You really want people to reconsider their impressions of Australia? Stop exporting all your shite beer! We have enough crap beer here already.
Australia, along with SA is one of the two countries I’d like to visit the most – despite my hatred of traveling (anywhere) now a days, I’d go for it
Don’t change a thing and throw some more shrimp on the barbie.
AFAICT, you rock.
Hey, man, don’t feel too bad - there’s not even decent Mexican food to be found in the U.S. east of Texas or so. Of course, I’m spoiled, being a native Californian (and having been to Mexico on numerous occasions), but I stand by my statement. I’ve eaten at “Mexican” restaurants in plenty of midwestern and eastern states (as well as in London [!] and Dublin [!!]), and those poor bastards have no idea how they’re being ripped off. Trust me, it’s worth a day-long plane trip and however many hundreds of dollars it costs to fly over from Australia and experience the real thing yourself.
My folks, long-time Californians now back in the bosom of the Bay Area as of a year or two ago, lived in NYC/Jersey City for maybe 15 years before that. At first they couldn’t even find corn tortillas in stores out there, but they started popping up a few years later. “Mexican” was uniformly sucky until about three or four years ago, when a young Mexican couple from the Bay Area moved out to Jersey City and opened a tiny restaurant that my folks discovered in its first week of existence. My parents were ECSTATIC and told every transplanted western friend they could find and its popularity grew by leaps and bounds.
So things seem to be improving back east, just slowly. God bless our burgeoning Mexican and Central American population ( illegal and otherwise 
) and the spread of their superior cuisine.
I’m from California, home of killer taco joints, and that’s what I had in mind. I may have to marry a Mexican gal and bring her mother over.
If I was Jersey City, I’d put that restaurant in all my brochures - that’s the only compelling reason I’ve ever heard for visiting.
ETA: I agree - their legal status is immaterial as long as they bring their food/cooking skills with them. These people who want to build a border wall obviously never tasted authentic Mexican cuisine.
Along the lines of food, I thought I’d start a thread for an international cuisine exchange. 
Of course I’d want to see Sydney if I went to Australia.
But it’s not enough to draw me there. You need more than that. The problem is that EVERY big city puts on a very similar schtick. Why Sydney? Why not Tokyo or Buenos Aires or Vancouver? Gotta be more distinctive than just “Big city with lots of cool stuff.” Of course I expect fine dining in a city that big, but I can find fine dining in other cities that big.
Just an FYI but Cajun food is not Mexican. They aren’t even remotely related. Cajun is short for Acadian and they were a group of people that fled from France to Canada and then packed up their stuff again to flee to Southern Louisiana. Somehow they developed a cooking style with an influence that is hugely disproportionate to the size of their population.
Your larger point is true though. It is very difficult to find good Cajun food outside of Louisiana and even places close to Louisiana like Texas or the rest of the Deep South are a stretch. Cajun food often gets corrupted into simply blackened meat or fish and advertised as such and somehow that made it famous. True Cajun restaurants would probably do well in many cities around the world but it takes cooking skills equal to French cooking and most cooks don’t have the knowledge or skills for it.
It’s an amazing country, Martini—I visited Oz for the first time ever this December and January (as you know, because I tried like hell to buy you a drink) and I loved it better and better every day of the six weeks I was there. Everything was backwards, and I loved it all: cars on the wrong side of the road, light switches turning off when I thought they’d turn on, and all these little tiny houses on HUUUUUGE plots of land, among many other surprises to this provincial New Yorker, and I dug it all. I loved the swimming pools—with warm, salty water and a foot-friendly pebbly terrain, as opposed to our stupid American freezing-cold chlorinated water on poured concrete, and I loved the empty beaches (on Saturday noon at the beginning of summer, on a perfect balmy day, there were maybe six people along a mile of amazing beach just south of Cairns—blew my mind. And the lush tropical foliage—I walked through rain forests endlessly (I was mainly on the east coast—Gold Coast, Sydney, as far north as the great barrier reef.) And Christ, what great botanic gardens you have in Brisbane and in Sydney, overlooking Sydney Harbor, which is too beautiful to describe. I could have ridden the ferry from Circular Quay out to Manly every day and not gotten bored for a month. The people were just wonderful to me (I mostly stayed with a series of Anglican priests and their families—don’t ask why—who were just lovely and hospitable and charming . I visited ginger farms, and saw hundreds of extinct volcanoes, and bought my clothes for just about nothing in op-shops everywhere, and walked along the trail where my hero Charles Darwin walked on his only visit to Oz, and saw buttes and waterfalls as beautiful as any in the American Far West, I dined on salted crocodile, and kangaroo kebabs and smoked emu and had the time of my life. DON’T CHANGE A FUCKING THING ABOUT YOUR WONDERFUL COUNTRY, BUT PLEASE—STOP TELLING ALL THESE PEOPLE ABOUT IT. They’ll all come there, and then you’ll be miserable.
In much the same vein as other posters; I really enjoyed visiting Sydney (briefly) last year, and for the scant hours I wasn’t working I did the tourist things: took a harbour cruise, went shopping, took photos of the opera house and some other scenic buildings, rode the train over the bridge, enjoyed the food and wine… and if I’d had more time I would have wanted to see kangaroos and koalas – even bought a stuffed toy kangaroo for my lad.
But the biggest kick was seeing some aboriginal musicians and a dancer performing at Circular Quay.
Attracting tourists means emphasizing the “not-at-homeness” of the place. We have a harbour (perhaps not as busy as Sydney’s) and a bridge (ditto), many of the same shops, and (these days) pretty decent cuisine and wine… but we don’t have kangaroos and koalas (OK, i think Auckland Zoo has a couple of kangaroos), and we don’t have aboriginal musicians.
Ads for Aussie tourism can (and do) certainly emphasize the city / shopping / haute cuisine aspects of the place, but I’m afraid you are as stuck with “Kangaroos, people in Akubra hats, Beaches, and Aboriginal Dancers” as we are with Kiwis, farmers in gumboots, geothermal hot pools and Maori dancers.
Some good points here. I realise that “Australia: Just Like America and the UK, but with more poisonous animals” really isn’t going to encourage a Japanese salaryman from Osaka to visit here on his holidays… I’d like to think the Tourism Board have a better solution, but from what I’ve seen, it would appear that no, they don’t.
“Welcome to Brisbane; closed Sundays & Public Holidays.” 
Seriously though, there’s nothing in Brisbane besides a decent International Airport, a CBD that looks like it was built as part of a showcase for the 1974 Exposition Internationale du Concrete, and a fake beach. These are not things that make me think of vibrant, dynamic, International Cities. Well, except for the airport.
Missed the edit window…
Glad you liked it hear! Trust me, I was disappointed I couldn’t take you up on your offer of a drink, but I got transferred to a different store a week before Christmas and then ended up working 6 day weeks right through until I got married and went on honeymoon. Tell you what though, when I get to New York I’ll shout you a drink there. There’s a bar near the Statue of Liberty, right?
That sums up the South Island of NZ pretty well, actually- minus the Maori dancers. 
As the others have said, we need a unique selling point and that’s not the profusion of great ethnic restaurants in the major cities - NY and SF have that, for instance. Our flora, fauna and geography are unique and there’s nothing wrong with using them as drawcards.
What else are we going to do with Fosters? No-one here drinks it. You want us to stop sending it there? Stop buying it.
They make some nice honey out in Mudgee. You could talk about that.
Just a suggestion.