Mining tourism signifies Broken Hill in NSW, Cooper Pedy in SA, Kalgoorlie in WA and Queenstown in Tasmania. Tourism in Australia today is big business. Mining tourism generates jobs and investment.

The focus is on the heritage of the industry, landscape and the way of life, not the environmental damage caused by economic progress and the desire for prosperity in regional Australia. Heritage in this context, refers to history processed through mythology, ideology, nationalism, local pride, romantic ideas or just plain marketing, into a commodity'.

Tourism is about pleasure, travelling, holidays, strange places, desire, leisure, play, consuming goods and services and being modern. Part of the tourist experience of moving through space is gazing upon a scene, landscape or urbanscape; a gazing upon that is socially constructed in diverse ways in different historical periods---eg., 'timeless romantic Paris'; real olde England, the authentic Outback etc. Hence the tourist gaze.

On the one hand, we have the professional dynamics and changing forms of media that produce such public representations.Today this tourist gaze is constructed, and reinforced, by film, TV, literature, magazines, photography and videos, often in terms of travellers (elite) and tourists (mass), of experiencing the real life of others from tourist spaces such as platforms, sites, cafes etc. which are reconstructed for visual consumption.

On the other hand, photography also plays a central role in the creation of a tourist experience, by framing the tourist gaze and 'fixing' an ephemeral view that is then shared with others.