When people in charge of government ads know they’re up against geography itself, they show a certain kind of confidence. That’s pretty much where Western Australia has been for years, watching interstate tourists choose Sydney’s harbor views or Melbourne’s backstreets while Perth is more than 1,000 miles away from the closest capital city. The state government hasn’t been quiet about its response. Australia has spent a lot of money and time trying to persuade people that the wild, empty spaces west of the Nullarbor are worth the longer flight time.
In the past few years, campaigns like Wander Out Yonder, a $12 million marketing blitz aimed straight at Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, have been the main focus. Modern tourism marketing uses billboards, TV spots, and partnerships with airlines all with one goal in mind: to get people from eastern states to travel west for vacations. The surface of this seems like just another ad buy, but there’s more going on than meets the eye. Western Australia doesn’t just promote its beaches. It’s trying to change the whole meaning of an identity from far away and hard to reach to far away and therefore uncommon.
This new way of looking at things is important because the state’s biggest flaw has always been its selling point. Perth’s remoteness used to be seen as a problem with logistics, but now it’s sold as a plus. There are quokkas on Rottnest Island, whale sharks off the coast of Ningaloo, and camel trains posing against the sunset at Cable Beach. These pictures work because they don’t look like anything on the east coast. A sneaky truth that WA tourism officials seem to have learned is that you can’t beat Sydney, but you can beat its wild side.
That’s what money has done. Regional airfare caps, subsidized flights into towns like Broome, and partnerships with retail travel brands are just a few of the ways that prices are being manipulated to get rid of the practical reason of cost. It’s really not clear if that can work in the long term. It’s possible that subsidizing airfares will lead to long-term travel habits, but it’s not clear if it will only cause short-term visitor spikes that go away when the discounts end.
Along with the marketing spend, there is also a quieter, more personal story about shipwrecks. More than any other Australian state, Western Australia’s coastline is home to at least 1,600 sunken ships. This may not seem like a big deal until you stand on Coogee Beach near Perth and see a 1905 wreck just eighty feet from the shore. There was a mutiny and killing on the Houtman Abrolhos Islands in 1629, which makes the Batavia disaster read less like tourism copy and more like a maritime true-crime podcast. This is the kind of history that doesn’t need much work to turn heads.
That might be WA’s real advantage over the fake campaigns. The story of Batavia, the mystery of the SS Koombana, and the search for HMAS Sydney II that has been going on for decades were not made up by the marketing department. It seemed like they were waiting for someone to take a picture of them the whole time. National Geographic did just that in 2022, and ever since then, travel writers have kept coming back to WA’s coast, drawn less by the billboards and more by how strange it is to be in a place with so few people and so much unclaimed history.
At home, though, not everyone is happy with how the state markets itself. Some people are upset that ad campaigns are being sent to agencies on the east coast, which seems like an odd choice for a state that wants to market its uniqueness. While it’s not a big deal, it does say something. If Western Australia’s whole selling point is being obvious about being itself, then the story probably shouldn’t be set somewhere else.
It remains to be seen if any of this actually changes the way people travel in a way that lasts. People often say that it’s hard to compare tourism campaigns to things like regional identity because they happen so slowly. But as WA leans into shipwrecks, quokkas, and ships that were swallowed by cyclones instead of just copying what the East Coast does, it’s hard not to notice that this feels less like copying and more like a state finally realizing that being alone was the point all along.
